Glastonbury Festival located on Worthy Farm, Pilton, Somerset is the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world. The archive shows how the Festival has developed exponentially over the past 50 years to become the global cultural phenomenon it is today.
The Festival is a witness to decades of creative, social and political change in the UK and the archive reveals how Glastonbury has paved the way for the development of festival culture in the UK and overseas.
But now I have to pinch myself every morning when I wake up to the excitement of another day heading up a team of the most creative artists anywhere in the world. This eclectic and growing archive includes a range of material from across the Festival's diverse and creative performances.
It includes posters, programmes, designs, interviews, film, photographs, correspondence, t-shirts, tickets and other memorabilia. Personal accounts, maps and documents trace the origins of the Festival, and document how it has grown from an audience of 1, in to over , in , with millions of others watching live on the BBC or streaming performances online.
Press cuttings reveal the relationship of the Festival with the local community and backstage documents such as set lists, backstage passes and films provide information on the workings of the Festival, and its evolution. Supporting political action is at the heart of the Festival and this is documented through pamphlets and imagery.
It was attended by 1, people. Audiences enjoyed performances by Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex who played in place of the Kinks who were due to headline. By the festival had been renamed The Glastonbury Fayre and the date was changed to coincide with summer solstice, an anniversary celebrated at nearby Stonehenge, home to the world-famous Neolithic monument.
Key organisers now included Andrew Kerr and Arabella Churchill. The team drew up a manifesto which set out the environmental and spiritual focuses at the heart of the Festival's ethos.
The Festival founders saw the event as a place for the "expression of free-thinking people". In the same year, the first Pyramid Stage, a replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, was designed and built by Bill Harkin and crew out of scaffolding, expanded metal and plastic sheeting. The location of this now iconic stage was determined by the Glastonbury Abbey and Stonehenge ley line, an invisible line that runs through the Vale of Avalon and is commonly believed by esoteric traditions to demarcate 'earth energies'.
Pure magic. This year was a standout moment in the history of the festival as it saw the first appearance of the world-famous Pyramid Stage. The festival was hosted sporadically between and , where after it has been hosted annually. In , Michael Eavis took control of the festival once again after a few years of smaller unplanned events taking place on the site previously.
This year also saw the name changed to Glastonbury Festival and the fabrication of a new Pyramid Stage which became a permanent structure on the farm — providing shelter to the Worthy Farm cow herd and becoming a food store in the harsh winter months. The event was organised in conjunction with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament CND , in order to help push the peace movement at the time. Glastonbury Festival continued to grow throughout the 80s with headline sets from acts including The Smiths, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Madness, and many, many more.
In the festival grew too big for Worthy Farm and the neighbouring Cockmill Farm was purchased to expand the site, enabling Glastonbury to grow ever closer to the capacity we see today. What a crowd! Are you in there somewhere? This year was also the first year the festival was broadcast on TV with Channel 4 providing coverage of the two main stages. However, within the review, Eavis mentions that he made a loss. Although I don't know exactly what my loss will be of yet, I can say it will not be too great.
When Glastonbury turned 40 in , artists who played the first festival were invited back. Some, like DJ Mad Mick, hadn't returned in the intervening years. They all have fond memories, no doubt assisted by the fact that, as a member of Quintessence who played again in says, "Everybody was high. We were all high, man! Here's a reminder Glastonbury Main content.
In there was nobody flogging garish pop-up tents or bedazzled wellies, and there was nobody wheeling tinnies through mud-clogged gates on specially modified off-road trollies. In fact, as Lynne recalls, there were barely any tents. Mutter has similar memories of low-key camping arrangements. Stackridge disbanded six years after that first Glastonbury, but reformed in the late 90s and returned to play Glastonbury in There was too much on offer for my simple needs.
To this day, the majority of profits are donated to charities such as Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, and despite how big the festival has become, its biggest influences — environmental sustainability, anti-establishment counterculture — remain the same.
The green generators — which supply the entire festival with electricity — pack enough punch to power the city of Bath, and run off waste vegetable oil. In plastic will be banned at the festival for the first time. By , Glastonbury had transformed into a city-sized festival.
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