‘Are you going to Glasto?’ Just the name – in that smug, shortened form – is enough to set my left eyelid twitching, the way it does when I read emails from people who still include pronouns in their signature. ‘Glasto’, trailing the self-satisfied whiff of BBC executives high-tailing it from Hampstead on a taxpayer-funded jolly, of hedgies glamping in a five-grand-a-night yurt and the sort of inherited wealth that means you crash in a mate’s eight-bedroom Old Rectory within the free ticket zone, rather than camping cheek-by-unwashed-jowl with the masses.
No, I am not going to Glastonbury. The last time I went – and I can tell you the exact year, because I found the programme while going through some boxes in the attic – was 2004. I think it was the first year the Great Wall went up to stop people scaling the fence and, getting there late on the Wednesday, we had to pitch our tents hard against it – which was like camping in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, though less convivial.
That was the year I swore I’d never go again: the crowds were insane (150,000) and just moving between stages took at least two hours. The five days were an exhausting feat of endurance with the odd highlight (James Brown on the Pyramid stage, Orbital headlining the Other Stage on the Sunday night) but it was such a crush to move around the site, you were doing well if you managed to see even a couple of bands a day.
Glastonbury also has the worst sanitation of any festival I’ve ever been to, either as a punter or when I was working for the news teams of Radio 1 and, later, 6 Music. (See Julian Temple-Morris’s 2006 documentary for a taster.) It was only bearable back in 2004 because my cousin’s band were playing the New Bands stage and I had a backstage pass so could use their loos. (Shamefully, I didn’t even watch their set as they clashed with P.J. Harvey.) Apparently there are showers at Glastonbury, but I’ve never had one – or met anyone who has.
This year a whopping 210,000 tickets have been sold. A built-up area of over 200,000 is classed as a city by the Office for National Statistics. From today, Worthy Farm in Somerset will have a temporary population somewhere between that of Reading and Wolverhampton.
Even before you look at the line-up, which is lacklustre (my only must-see would be Neil Young, but I have tickets for his Hyde Park concert next month; these days I only go to gigs where I can sleep in my own bed), just the logistics of getting around the site are about as appealing as the SAS selection march over the Brecon Beacons. You can, of course, smoke weed and take shrooms to mitigate the privation – only one of your mates will invariably do a Syd Barrett and require looking after for the rest of the weekend. And depending on the weather, there will be sunburn or trench-foot – or both – to contend with.
You should also forget any Alexa Chung-style outfits you had planned; England in June can be extraordinarily cold and unsettled (remember, D-Day had to be postponed). I vaguely recall watching Paul McCartney while I was wrapped in a damp blanket from the Oxfam stall that smelt of the old person who’d died in it.
Of course, moaning that Glastonbury isn’t what it used to be is all part of the ageing process – I get that. ‘What do you mean, you need money, darling?’ asked my mother when I wanted her to sub me for my ticket sometime in the late 1990s. ‘I didn’t pay anything when I went.’ She went to the first Glastonbury (then the Pilton Pop Festival, but that moniker was swiftly dropped, presumably being less marketable to Trustafarian twats). They watched Marc Bolan and drank free milk from the dairy. This year a pint of festival cider will cost you around £7, which isn’t outrageous – but remember to make it last because the queues for both bars and bogs will be apocalyptic. And good luck finding your friends ever again if you need to head off on your own during the 1975’s set for a pee.
Apparently there are showers at Glastonbury, but I’ve never had one – or met anyone who has
Even if you can get close enough to the stage – rather than watching on the giant screens – your vision will be obscured by the serried ranks of Palestine flags. One of the most wilful misconceptions about Glastonbury is that it’s a lovely crowd of chilled old hippies. Try sticking your head under a standpipe meant for drinking water because you just can’t go another day without washing your hair and hear the queue of knit-your-own-Guardian readers erupt with language that would make a paratrooper blush.
There’s vast cognitive dissonance between the festival giving millions to charities like Greenpeace and the grotesque amounts of rubbish and single-use plastic (mostly in the form of abandoned tents, wellies and ponchos) left behind. This year there’s added spice – in addition to the usual ‘festival flu’ and STDs – with warning of a measles outbreak from the UK Health Security Agency, due to all the unvaccinated Gen Z-ers, born in the wake of the MMR scare. There have also been thousands of cases of Covid reported by people who went to Download earlier this month.
But there’s no need to spank nearly £400 on a Glastonbury ticket (you can’t, in any case – they sold out in 35 minutes). To recreate the experience at home, just do the following: stop washing and use baby wipes instead. Retch every time you open the bathroom door and give yourself a UTI by going for as long as you can without peeing. Throw your phone in a bush. Eat a burrata and butternut squash flatbread wrap and then bin £20. Fail to find your bed and have a couple of hours of fitful sleep outside while playing industrial techno through a tinny speaker. Oh – and, crucially, watch it all on TV. That’s really what all those Glasto-goers will be doing anyway.
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