Worthy Farm

Glastonbury Festival (formally Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts and known colloquially as Glasto) is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place in Pilton, Somerset, England. In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums have been recorded at the festival, and it receives extensive television and newspaper coverage.

Glastonbury is attended by around 200,000 people, thus requiring extensive security, transport, water, and electricity-supply infrastructure. While the number of attendees is sometimes swollen by gatecrashers, a record of 300,000 people was set at the 1994 festival, headlined by the Levellers who performed on The Pyramid Stage. Most festival staff are volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for charity organisations.

Regarded as a major event in British culture, the festival is inspired by the ethos of the hippie, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the free-festival movement. Vestiges of these traditions are retained in the Green Fields area, which includes sections known as the Green Futures, the Stone Circle and Healing Field. Michael Eavis hosted the first festival, then called Pilton Festival, after seeing an open-air Led Zeppelin concert in 1970 at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.

The festival was held intermittently from 1970 until 1981 and has been held most years since, except for "fallow years" taken mostly at five-year intervals, intended to give the land, local population, and organisers a break. 2018 was a "fallow year”, and the 2019 festival took place from 26 to 30 June. There have been two consecutive "fallow years” since then due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The festival returned for 22–26 June 2022 with the headliners Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lamar. The next festival is scheduled to take place between 21 and 25 June 2023.

History

1970

The first festival at Worthy Farm was the ''Pop, Blues & Folk Festival'', hosted by Michael Eavis on Saturday 19 September 1970, and attended by 1,500 people. There had been a commercial UK festival tradition which included the National Jazz and Blues Festival and the Isle of Wight Festival. Organiser Michael Eavis decided to host the first festival after seeing an open-air concert headlined by Led Zeppelin at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music at the nearby Bath and West Showground in 1970.

The original headline acts were The Kinks and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders but these acts were replaced at short notice by Tyrannosaurus Rex, later known as T. Rex. Tickets were £1. Other billed acts of note were Steamhammer, Quintessence, Stackridge, Al Stewart, Pink Fairies and Keith Christmas.

1971

The "Glastonbury Fair" of 1971 was instigated by Andrew Kerr after being found and introduced to Michael Eavis by David Trippas and organised with help from Arabella Churchill, Jean Bradbery, Kikan Eriksdotter, John Massara, Jeff Dexter, Thomas Crimble, Bill Harkin, Gilberto Gil, Mark Irons, John Coleman, and Jytte Klamer. The 1971 festival featured the first incarnation of the "Pyramid Stage". Conceived by Bill Harkin the stage was a one-tenth replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza built from scaffolding and metal sheeting and positioned over a "blind spring", a term used to describe a hypothetical underground body of water in the pseudoscientific practice of dowsing.

Performers included David Bowie, Mighty Baby, Traffic, Fairport Convention, Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, Skin Alley, The Worthy Farm Windfuckers and Melanie and David Puttnam and was released as a film called simply '' Glastonbury Fayre'', and a triple album of the same name was released (no connection with the film).

1979

There was a small unplanned event in 1978, when the convoy of vehicles from the Stonehenge festival was directed by police to Worthy Farm; the festival was then revived the following year (1979) by Churchill, Crimble, Kerr and Eavis, in an event for the Year of the Child, which lost money.

1980s

The 1980s saw the festival become an annual fixture, barring periodic fallow years. In 1981, Michael Eavis took back solo control of the festival, and it was organised in conjunction with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). That year a new Pyramid Stage was constructed from telegraph poles and metal sheeting (repurposed from materials of the Ministry of Defence), a permanent structure which doubled as a hay-barn and cow-shed during the winter.

In the 1980s, the children's area of the festival (which had been organised by Arabella Churchill and others) became the starting point for a new children's charity called Children's World. 1981 was the first year that the festival made profits, and Eavis donated £20,000 of them to CND. In the following years, donations were made to a number of organisations, and since the end of the Cold War the main beneficiaries have been Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, who all contribute towards the festival by providing features and volunteers, who work at the festival in exchange for free entry.

It also saw the first TV coverage, with ITV broadcasting recorded highlights in the weeks after the festival.

Since 1983, large festivals have required licences from local authorities. This led to certain restrictions being placed on the festival, including a crowd limit and specified times during which the stages could operate. The crowd limit was initially set at 30,000 but has grown every year to over 100,000. 1984 saw the stage invaded by children during The Smiths set. Weather Report played the main stage, and Elvis Costello headlined the last night for almost three hours. In 1985, the festival grew too large for Worthy Farm, but neighbouring Cockmill Farm was purchased. That year saw a wet festival with considerable rain; Worthy Farm is a dairy farm and what washed down into the low areas was a mixture of mud and liquefied cow dung. This did not prevent festival-goers from enjoying the knee-deep slurry in front of the pyramid stage.

1989 was the first year that impromptu, unofficial sound systems sprung up around the festival site – a portent of things to come. These sound systems would play loud, electronic acid house music 'round the clock, with the largest, the Hypnosis sound system, rivalling the volume of some of the official stages and running non-stop throughout the festival.

1990s

Following the 1990 festival, violence flared between security guards and new age travellers in what became known as "The Battle of Yeoman's Bridge". Eavis was also facing increasing battles from locals over the festival, leading to taking 1991 off. Both pressures are captured in the 1992 Channel 4 documentary ''Showdown at Glastonbury''.

An expanded festival returned in 1992, and this proved a great success. 1992 was the first year that the new age travellers were not initially allowed onto the site free, and a sturdier fence was designed. This success was carried through to 1993 which, like 1992, was hot and dry.

In 1994, the Pyramid Stage burned down just over a week before the festival; a temporary main stage was erected in time for the festival. The 1994 festival also introduced a 150 kW wind turbine which provided some of the festival power. Headliners Levellers set another record when they played to a crowd of as many as 300,000 people on their Friday performance, and is still Glastonbury's biggest ever crowd.

This was the year the festival was first televised live by Channel 4; concentrating on the main two music stages and providing a glimpse of the festival for those who knew little of it. Channel 4's ''4 Goes to Glastonbury'' brought widely expanded televised coverage of the festival for the first time in 1994 and also the following year.

The TV broadcast in 1994 was a crucial factor in ensuring that Orbital's performance at the festival achieved legendary status. As a result, living rooms across the country were able to experience what a rave might look like, and suddenly dance music – which had been ignored by the establishment and mainstream press for years – did not seem so dangerous and which would be a turning point for the music at Glastonbury. Speaking to ''The Guardian'' in 2013 about the Orbital gig, Michael Eavis noted that it marked dance music's appearance on the mainstream agenda. "What was previously underground made it on to one of the big stages, and there was no going back from there. As the police and the council made me very well aware, the buzz had been around the raves and the market sound systems and in the travellers' fields for years. But it needed a showcase to make it legal." The gig opened the way for others such as the Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and Underworld, who all played high-profile stages in the following years – developments that led to the launch of the festival's Dance Village in 1997.

1995 saw the attendance rise drastically due to the security fence being breached on the Friday of the festival. Estimates suggest there may have been enough fence-jumpers to double the size of the festival. This aside, 1995 proved to be a highly successful year with memorable performances from Oasis, Elastica, Pulp, PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, Jamiroquai and The Cure. This was also the first year of the festival having a dance tent to cater for the rise in popularity of dance music, following the success of Orbital's headline appearance the previous year. The dance acts of 1995 were led by Massive Attack on the Friday and Carl Cox on the Saturday. The festival took a year off in 1996 to allow the land to recover and give the organisers a break. 1996 also saw the release of ''Glastonbury the Movie'' which was filmed at the 1993 and 1994 festivals.

The festival returned in 1997 bigger than ever. This time there was major sponsorship from ''The Guardian'' and the BBC
...