Shropshire Star

Life's a Glast at giant music festival

At the start of this week, the village of Pilton in Somerset had a population of about 100 people. This weekend it will rise to well over 100,000. Yes, today marks the start of Glastonbury Festival.

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Glastonbury Festival takes place this weekend

At least the music starts today. Those who arrived earlier this week have already been treated to a screening of Ibiza, The Silent Movie followed by a silent disco with Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim.

Glasto, thought to be the largest greenfield performing arts festival in the world, is back after a two-year absence. Among this year's highlights will be an emotional debut by Kylie Minogue on Sunday, 14 years after she was forced to cancel her headline appearance after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Music fans will be able to watch acts including Stormzy, George Ezra and Lauryn Hill on the famous Pyramid Stage today, followed by The Killers, Liam Gallagher, Janet Jackson and Hozier on the Pyramid Stage tomorrow, and The Cure, Vampire Weekend and Miley Cyrus on Sunday.

Janelle Monae will be headlining the West Holts Stage, eight years after her Glasto debut in 2011, which involved something of an eventful journey.

“I remember our bus catching fire on the way there and us almost dying," she says.

"It was a ‘Get on stage as soon as you arrive’ type of situation. I also remember the crowd being one of the best I’ve ever witnessed. They were a performance themselves.”

The festival reached its peak in 2005, when it was attended by 153,000 revellers. While the audiences have tailed off slightly over the past decade, it is still a huge event in the music calendar, and a far cry from its humble beginnings 49 years ago.

And it was actually two Black Country men who inspired it. Well, kind of.

Dairy farmer Michael Eavis had watched Led Zeppelin – including Black Country lads Robert Plant and John Bonham – perform an open-air concert at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. Mesmerised by the feelgood factor of the event, he decided he could stage a similar event at his farm.

The hastily thrown together Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival was held at Worthy Farm on September 19, 1970, and was attended by 1,500 people. The original headline acts were supposed to be The Kinks and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, but these had to be replaced at short notice by Tyrannosaurus Rex, later known as T. Rex. Tickets were £1, and all festival goers were handed a free pint of milk on arrival.

The following year, Eavis was joined by Andrew Kerr, Hawkwind bass player Thomas Crimble, and Arabella Churchill, grand-daughter of wartime leader Winston Churchill for the larger, renamed Glastonbury Fair. Acts included David Bowie, Fairport Convention and Hawkwind, and the festival also featured dance, poetry, theatre, lights, and spontaneous entertainment.

A small unplanned event took place in 1978, after police directed a convoy of vehicles from the Stonehenge festival to Worthy Farm. With the help of Kerr, Crimble and Churchill, the event was revived the following year as Glastonbury Festival, and during the 1980s it became an annual event.

The festival has a long association with political activism, and in the 1980s Eavis donated all profits to CND. Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has been a regular for many years, and in 2017 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn addressed the crowds from the famous Pyramid Stage.

The Pyramid Stage, claimed to be the most instantly recognisable stage in the world, has been a fixture at Glastonbury since 1971, and is now in its third incarnation.

The original pyramid was built by theatre designer Bill Harkin from scaffolding, expanded metal and plastic sheeting. It was claimed that the apex of the pyramid projected energy upwards, while energy from the stars and sun were drawn down.

By 1981, when the festival had been established as a regular event, it was decided to replace it with a permanent structure which could also be used as a cowshed and animal foodstore during the winter. The new stage was made from telegraph poles and surplus iron sheets from the Ministry of Defence, and it lasted until 1994 when it was destroyed by fire.

The present Pyramid Stage opened in 2000, and was based on the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Built by Pilton villager Bill Burroughs, the 100ft high steel structure was four times the size of the original, used two-and-a-half miles of steel tubing, and weighs more than 40 tons. In keeping with the festival's green credentials, all materials and processes passed a Greenpeace environmental audit.

Performers who have appeared on the Pyramid over the years range from The Who to the English National Opera, with Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Oasis, Johnny Cash, Radiohead and Coldplay among the diverse range of talent.

A familiar site at the festival over the past 35 years has been the Wolves flag belonging to 'Glastowolf', 52-year-old John Holding.

Read more: Meet the Dudley man behind THAT Glastonbury Wolves flag

The tradition began in 1984 when John, from Dudley, attached his Wolves towel to a spare tent pole so he and his friends could find one another in the crowds. Over the years he gradually upgraded his flags, and on one occasion he was approached by Reef lead singer Gary Stringer who said he had always wanted to meet 'the guy who holds the Wolves flag'.

He has also been heckled by Billy Bragg, while Wolves-mad Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant waved at him when he performed in 2000.

While Glastonbury started out as a celebration of youth culture and hippy, New Age ideals, it has inevitably grown up with its audience.

Today the average festival-goer is aged 39, unmarried, and lives in the north-west of England.