So a big festival finished last weekend, and the hipsters take has been the same for 25+ years: “It’s not the same as it used to be”, “There’s too many [delete as neccessary]: middle aged accountants / mobile phones / instagram influencers / shoreditch cornflake cafe proprieters / champagne socialists”, “it’s too expensive”, “it’s too big”. There’s also a deeper and serious criticism from the artists - Glastonbury famously pays less than most events and the sheer magnetic pull of playing there means many performers will play there for substantially less than the normal fee, or for nothing at all. Greg Wilson wrote about this a few years ago and if you scan twitter you’ll find plenty of well known DJs who are asked to play sets for free, without a ticket even provided. In short the festival takes advantage of it’s reputation to short change the artists who make their living from producing and performing - which isn’t a great look, and there’s a much longer piece to be written about that, but that isn’t for today.
Right about now Glastonbury is the behemoth of music events - but it wasn’t always a fait accompli, in fact in the 1990s when the first tv coverage started it was far from the biggest and most important festival in the UK, never mind the world. In the early part of the 1990s the Reading Festival was probably the king - in 1992 when Nirvana played their only headline slot it was at Reading (with The Wonder Stuff and Public Enemy headlining the other nights) by contrast Glastonbury 1992 boasted: Carter USM, Shakespear’s Sister & The Shamen. In 1996 the Phoenix Festival had David Bowie, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Bjork and the Sex Pistols headlining the main stage and The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Goldie and Leftfield headlining the dance stage. In 1994, when TV camera’s first came to Pilton the music festival scene was very different, and not to put too fine a point on it, sparse. In fact there was only handful- Reading had no second site in Leeds, there was Womad, T In the Park (then in it’s first year), Phoenix in it’s second, Monsters Of Rock was on it’s last legs as a one day event before later transforming into Download, or the Fairport Cropedy Convention - but that was around about it. Glastonbury wasn’t the coolest festival - Phoenix was on the cutting edge adding in top tier comedians when “comedy was the new rock n roll”, Reading had recovered from it’s 80s slump to become the natural home of the biggest acts from the US. Dance music fundamentally didn’t exist at festivals - Tribal Gathering had started in 1993, but dance music outdoors was still the preserve of the free party scene.
30 years ago Glastonbury was at a cross roads, a long standing event, but not the oldest and an event that at that point was still wedded to at least two traditions - the hippy idealism of the original gatherings in the early 70s and perhaps even more significantly the long standing connections the festival had forged with the UK travelling community. Those connections were writ large in 1994 - the standard bearers for that travelling community The Levellers - were the headliners on friday night, and the perennially trotted out fact is that it was the “largest crowd ever”, and I was at the back of the crowd and there were plenty of people there, but I’m not sure the claim stands up to much scrutiny. The claim does illustrate one thing, the festival was busy, security was lax and there were thousands of people without a ticket and they were people with connections to all manner of sub cultures and traditions: hippys, ecological activists, marxists, drug dealers, white people with dreadlocks, buddhist monks (giving out literature in the car park). The travelling community was directly connected to the free party scene and those elements were a very visible part of the festival in 1994. In many ways the connections to the Free Party scene were the key to both the transformation of the festival and, as an ultimate consequence, the same community being locked out in the end. Because as well as The Levellers over on the Other stage on Saturday night Orbital were booked to play a headline set - they were very far from a household name, but they were a huge part of the Free Party scene, having named themselves after the M25 motorway they routinely travelled around to get to raves in fields in the late 80s and early 90s - and all of those travellers and free party ravers were *very* familiar with the music of the Hartnolls and thronged to the stage, (I was completely unfamiliar, you can read more about that here). That performance became legendary, but the reason it became so legendary was because it was broadcast on TV.
That gets to the key to the change in the festival - following that performance dance stages became the norm (the Criminal Justice Act 1994 passed into law in November that year, with the aim of killing the Free Party Scene, whilst it didn’t kill it completely it was never the same again). But televising the festival did transform everything - the simple act of there being a record of events made a difference - Kurt Cobain being pushed on to the stage in a wheelchair at Reading in 1992 was a mythical event, but only existed in grainy bootleg footage. Live music and festivals in particular had been steeped in unreliable accounts and folklore and the age old mantra “If you can remember it, you weren’t there”. The TV cameras meant the mythic half remembered lightning could now be caught in a bottle. Pulp stepped in as headliners in 1995, the performance of “Common People” was euphoric and overwhelming for everyone present - but, crucially, that zeitgeist defining moment was caught by Channel 4s cameras. In 1997 the BBC took over the mantle and the iconic moments broadcast to the nation have piled up ever since - Radiohead, Jay-Z, Metallica, Adele, Stormzy, the Sunday Legends teatime slot, which was and is something you can sit and watch with your granny.
It’s an obvious but, I think, pretty important point that Glastonbury has become the thing it is *because* of the TV coverage - it’s schrodingers’ festival - the act of observation has fundamentally changed it. But there’s a more important point, the televised nature of the event has changed *us*, the music fans. On friday Dua Lipa gave a speech to the crowd about how, when she was a little girl, she’d dreamed about playing on the Pyramid stage - the festival has been televised for longer than Dua has been alive - those dreams weren’t formed in a field, they were formed in front of a screen. But here’s the nub of it, I don’t think this is in any way a bad thing, the BBC coverage has turned Glastonbury into THE tentpole of the UK music scene - often characterised as a supermassive black hole that eats everything else. But that’s not really true at all, it’s a showcase event for the one area, pop music, where the UK is truly world beating. The sparse festival landscape of 30 years had reached total saturation by 2019, every weekend from May to September there’s an event, usually several, and any type of genre you might like they’ll be something to fit your taste. The pandemic and 14 years of reckless negligence from the Conservative government have done serious damage to the industry - but it’s still standing.
The last weekend in June 220,000 people make there way to Somerset having paid a handsome price for the privilege, but across the UK millions watch it at home for free. There are different grades, from casuals to hardcore heads, some might watch a clip or a song, some might just watch one of the big headliners, some might catch a bit of the Sunday legends set. Others, (by which I mean me), make a weekend of it, and spend at least one day watching it all on the streams, in the garden if possible with festival style food, booze and snacks . But people run endless different permutations - Marguerita parties, camp outs, BBQs, firepits, fancy dress - the BBC acknowledged that with the trailer for the coverage. But crucially a weekend of live music broadcast for free is something collective, the world has become atomised; experience of the wider world is curated through whatever the apps and the algorithims care to serve up - shared experiences are rare. The current football tournament is certainly something collective, everyone in the nation is aware of it, but a *lot* of people couldn’t care less. By contrast pop music is something pretty much *everyone* enjoys, and the festival on TV really does offer up something for every taste, as a result most people have an opinion, though many are negative - but even the most hard hearted curmudgeon might sneak a glance at Paul Heaton & Norman Cook reuniting to play “Happy Hour”.
The coverage really is spectularly good, 5 stages streamed for 7 hours for 3 days, north of 100 hours on the streams - sitting on a sofa at home the viewer can curate a better and more diverse festival than could ever be managed in the flesh, (even back in the 90s the trek between the Other Stage and the Pyramid stage could easily take an hour). But just as importantly as the volume of the coverage is the quality - the directors, camera operators and sound techs really do a great job of capturing the essence of the performers and the atmosphere of each show, (the rumour is there is plenty of friendly rivalry between the production teams for each of the stages). Other music events are streamed, but nothing, anywhere in the world, gets near the quantity and quality of the BBC coverage from Worthy farm, and that’s before you add in the radio coverage and all the extra reportage and performances.
Useless rags like the Daily Mail often complain that all of this is “a waste of licence payers money” (and they did a particulary weak hit job this year including the “controversy” of “being in the same camera shot as a Palenstinian flag”, and a startlingly baseless accusation of miming, based as it was on a single tweet by a neckbearded man). This sort of stuff is of course self interested bollocks - showcasing 100 of hours of music at a home grown event showcasing performers from all across the musical spectrum is self evidently precisely what the licence fee should be used for. Is providing free access to performers that would cost a small fortune to attend in person is a “waste of licence payers money”? The feeble argument that often goes with that complaint is that the TV coverage somehow squashes the competition. Again this really makes no sense and gets to heart of why it really is a vital piece of public service; because as well as providing the best piece of music broadcasting of the year, it also puts one of the greatest assets this country has - it’s incredible music scene - on a pedestal for three full days. It doesn’t have a choking effect, quite the opposite. Since the invention of the TV festival 30 years ago the volume of other music events has expanded exponentially, it takes no great intellectual leap to connect that massive increase in the festival marketplace to the popularity of the Glastonbury on the telly. I have absolutely zero doubt that other festivals see a massive spike in ticket sales in the immediate aftermath, thousands looking at the TV and thinking, “I fancy a bit of that”, i’ve done it myself plenty of times.
It’s not just other festivals that feel the benefit, the local gig economy feels it too - international bands coming to the UK will tag on other dates, (like the Avalanches in 2017), but, and I can only speak for myself, watching the TV festival makes it more likely that i’ll go to a local gig, and I always do, and gigs and events are always well attended around glasto time, people want to join in the fun wherever they can. The, occasionally propogated, boneheaded idea that televising music once a year discourages people from watching music is completely contrary to the evidence - as ludicrous as suggesting Euro 2024 being free to air kills grass roots football [you can insert your own joke here about the stultifying dullness of the England team doing a better job of that].
This years festival may have been slightly short of high grade star power at the top of the bill, but as ever there was *lot* to enjoy: Little Simz sure footed ascent to greatness, LCD Soundsystem’s steadily building set to a truly transcendental version of “All My Friends”, the power of Squid and Fontaines DC, Nia Archives rinsing out amen breaks and Orbital returning 30 years after their first appearance and springing quite a surprise. For those who like to watch gigs the aim is always to be transported to another place, even if it’s only for a few minutes, and the festival on TV lets millions do that at the same time. So there are a lot of complaints to be had about the BBC and the festival itself. There is no doubt that Glastonbury is now a gargantuan commercial juggernaut that is a long way away from it’s roots, and complaints about the choice of artists and headliners abound, (my own personal gripe is that jungle / drum & bass has never been given a prime time slot - a truly world changing home grown genre with great live bands), but those complaints are scarcely the point. All of these things are features not bugs because, simply put, what Glastonbury has become isn’t a festival, but the greatest annual piece of public service broadcasting, a genuine national treasure.
A fabulous read as ever, well penned. The lady wife and I did 2008-2011 together and it holds a fond memory in my heart but personally I have no burning desire to return... site too big to even consider programme clash/workarounds. Viva la iPlayer (which ain't free) ~£170 per year (which is what the tickets used to cost)... double that now, but allowed me to watch IDLES, Fontaines & Jamie XX clashes for starters. IDLES show BTW under the radar for many outlet but possibly one of the most important and charged performances by a band, top of their game half way through a world tour. Check it. I know you probably have.
Neckbeards and useless rags might argue that the BBC license fee is far from free for TV and iPlayer, but if you take into account the radio coverage alone, it's still a hell of a thing.
If anything, there's too many clashes to experience everything you want over the weekend.
Most of this week, I've been catching up on the things I'd never realistically be able to see in situ, because of geography, logistics, and early bedtimes.