Several weeks ago I became one of the lucky few to secure
myself a ticket to next summers Glastonbury Festival. With tickets selling out
in record time, 1 hour and 40 minutes to be precise, I’ve been left wondering
what it is that makes this West Country festival so damn popular? Will the hype
of Glastonbury ever die down? And will Mr Eavis ever get the chance to retire?
Here comes a musical rant.
A sucker for a soggy weekend in a Somerset field drinking
lukewarm cider and wading through knee high mud, my love for music festivals
was established back in 2009 with my first and by no means last visit to
Glastonbury Festival. Back then tickets
didn’t sell out in a matter of hours. There was no staring at a computer screen
all morning waiting for the site to load and no 85 frantic redials on your
mobile only to hear an engaged tone on the ticket hotline. I simply turned on
my computer several weeks after they went on sale and ordered myself a ticket. No stress, no fuss and no “sorry tickets for
Glastonbury Festival are now sold out.”
Unfortunately things went down hill from there. After 2009 if you weren’t logged onto your
computer at 9am on the day sales began, it was almost certain that you wouldn’t
get a ticket. And to be quite honest, if you were logged onto the site at 9am chances
are you still wouldn’t get a ticket.
In the late 1970’s Glastonbury Festival was a free event and
an opportunity for travellers from across the world to come together to provide
peace and freedom and enjoy local music. Yet today I worry that the festival is
starting to lose the friendly, happy go lucky vibes that it has always offered.
In the past three years Glastonbury has become much more of a status thing, with people no longer going for the friendly atmosphere or to enjoy the hundreds of
events that are held across the site each day. A ticket automatically enters you into the so
called ‘cool gang’. A gang where the following rules apply: you must consume as
much alcohol as possible during the weekend, you must act like an idiot and you
must pretend to like all of the same uber cool indie bands as your friends.
My views may sound controversial, but with every passing
festival year they become even more apparent. Don’t get me wrong, Glastonbury
will always be the world’s greatest music festival, but my main concern is that
many of today’s attendees aren’t there just to enjoy the music. Glastonbury=the
21st century cool persons festival. 
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ReplyDeleteOops! Comment appeared twice, so I deleted it, then of course both disappeared.... Sorry about that!
ReplyDeleteReposting: To be honest, 2009 wasn't much different from 2008 or even 1999 in terms of the number of drunken eejits - 2000 was far worse, with the fence being effectively down for most of the weekend. And while tickets took forever to sell in 2008, and sold a bit faster in 2009, in 2007 and and 2005 they sold out in a morning - before that, in 2004 and 2003 they sold out in a day (this was when far, far fewer folk had internet access, too).
But Glastonbury's always been about so much more than just the "cool" bands or main stages - or the music at all, for that matter!