The first Glastonbury I’ve missed for decades!
This week should have been the 50th anniversary of the iconic summer festival. Super-fan MARY ANN SIEGHART laments...
USUALLY by this stage in June I’m obsessively checking the ten-day forecast for Glastonbury. Will it be another ghastly mudfest or will we all be smiling seraphically in the sunshine?
This week, hundreds of thousands of us were meant to be heading off to the 50th anniversary of the festival. For me, a proud Glasto veteran, it would have been at least my 30th time (there have been some fallow years and the odd birth, so I’ve lost count). But thanks to the coronavirus, we’ll be going no further than our sofas.
We’ll have to console ourselves by watching iconic Glastonbury performances from acts such as Beyonce (2011), David Bowie (2000) and Adele (2016). BBC Two and BBC Four will be airing classic performances over the weekend.
It won’t be the same, of course. Nothing can capture the magic of Glastonbury, even if the festival has changed hugely over the past five decades.
I was an early adopter when I packed a sleeping bag and went there with friends age 21. I’d been a grown-up for nearly a year, but I didn’t feel grown-up at all.
It was the summer of 1983, a year after I’d left university, and I had been doing what felt like a terrifyingly serious job at the Financial Times since the previous September. Outwardly, I was holding it together. Inwardly, I just wanted to cut loose and be an irresponsible student again.
Glastonbury was my chance. The previous year, some friends and I had dropped into the festival after our finals on the recommendation of my brother, Alister, but only for a day as we didn’t have any camping gear. Flushed with the excitement of that encounter, we were determined to do Glasto properly the following year.
And so we did. Twelve of us clubbed together and hired a red-and-white striped, circular tent, the sort you might see hosting cream teas at a village fete. The owner delivered it to the site, took one look at the event and promptly doubled his fee to cover the extra risk.
WE SLEPT in a clock face formation, feet to the centre. And we were wonderfully well-equipped. In those days, you could drive all the way into the festival with a carful of gear and park right next to your tent, within viewing distance of the main pyramid stage. I say ‘main’ stage, but I don’t recall there being any others. (Now there are dozens.)
It was bliss. We were cocooned in a world of laughter, music, fun, friendliness, eccentricity and hedonism.
This was long before mobile phones, so the outside world couldn’t chisel its way in.
It felt like a parallel universe, one in which time, appearance, planning and obligations no longer mattered. Dishevelled was the prevailing look and we loved wandering around at random, like leaves blown in the wind.
For the first time in my life as a young woman, I didn’t feel remotely unsafe. I could walk around after dark without fear of attack. Nobody wolf-whistled or groped me. Because there was such a sense of community, the other festivalgoers were extraordinarily friendly. You could join any bunch of strangers sitting round a fire and be included in the conversation. It was as if Glastonbury was its own little utopia and we had created a different and better way of living.
I don’t have much recollection of the music, though I vaguely remember a storming set from UB40. But I came away with a determination to return every year, for as long as I could.
Now 58, that’s exactly what I’ve done, despite my colleagues at the newspaper where I worked for nearly 20 years as a senior editor treating it as a standing joke.
In fact, I believe I was the first arts editor of a newspaper to send a critic to review the festival. That, according to the festival’s founder Michael Eavis, was what set Glastonbury on the path to becoming a national cultural event.
The first and worst of the mudfests was in 1985. It started raining on Thursday and didn’t let up for a moment until Sunday. Some festivalgoers gave up on trying to minimise the mess and simply covered themselves in liquid mud. I wasn’t brave enough.
When the rain finally stopped — as my musical hero, the great South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, came on to the stage on Sunday afternoon — we roared with delight. Gradually the skies started to brighten and, as the jubilant, high-energy strains of his trumpet brought us all to a state of dancing euphoria, the sun burned its way through the clouds and a couple of magpies circled the twinkling light at the top of the pyramid. Two for joy, indeed.
We took our two daughters (now aged 27 and 28) from babyhood onwards, and they still camp with us every year, even though they are older than I was in 1983.
My brother Alister runs the Glasto Latino stage, and all my nieces and nephews come too, so we have a huge extended family encampment of at least 20 siblings, cousins and even, now, great-nieces and nephews. It’s like Christmas in the summer, but without any of the obligations.
One of our festival rituals is to climb to the highest point of the site and watch the sun set over this pop-up city the size of Derby, teepees in the foreground, the huge stages reduced to pimples in the distance. No camera lens is wide-angled enough to take in the vastness of it all.
The magic has somewhat dissipated: Glasto is far, far bigger and no longer a communal utopia. The crowds can be oppressive, and the beery atmosphere at the main stage can feel more like a football match than my first gentle gathering of 40 years ago.
We often choose not to watch the main acts, but to head off to the smaller stages, where we can have much more space and fun.
BUT we’ve made exceptions for acts such as Adele — we were in awe of how one woman could take possession of a huge stage and a 100,000-strong audience while also making each of us feel as if we were her best friend.
The Rolling Stones were, of course, epic. Patti Smith was a legend. The Who were just going through the motions. Paul McCartney was . . . meh.
But Glastonbury is still better than any other festival. It’s still the highlight of our summer, especially now that we’ve finally succumbed to camping in a shabby old caravan rather than a tent. (Electricity! Hot water! A kettle!)
If the caravan sees us out, I fully expect us to be back every year — and maybe even celebrate Glasto’s 60th and 70th birthdays.