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    Police Warn Music Fans Over Forged Glastonbury Tickets

    Police are warning music fans to watch out for forged Glastonbury tickets after touts were arrested for allegedly selling them near the site of the music festival.

    Avon and Somerset Police said two people were arrested in Pilton village on Wednesday, the day camping opened at the site.

     

    Many of the 100,000-strong crowd of music fans are pitching their tents for the UK's biggest music festival - which has sold out - with the main event starting on Friday.

     

    Coldplay, The Charlatans and Rod Stewart are among a host of acts performing.Police said the forged tickets lacked the security features - a sandwich of bright red paper in the middle if torn, and the word "Glastafari" showing under ultraviolet light.

     

    Organiser Michael Eavis has already said his campaign to persuade ticketless fans to stay at home has worked because there were only six outside the fence on Wednesday morning.

     

    About 2,000 would have already broken in by the same stage in previous years, he said. He has erected a new £1m "super-fence" after up to 100,000 gatecrashers at the last event, in 2000, put the festival's future at risk.

     

    "It's working perfectly. The campaign [to urge people] to stay away has worked perfectly well," Mr Eavis said. Another security cordon is letting only those with tickets get within five miles of the site. One group of travellers did break through the outer cordon on Tuesday and gain access to one of the car parks, but left peacefully.

     

    Police also broke up an attempted illegal party four miles away from the festival site. Officers dispersed a gathering of more than 100 people who had camped on a field, in Cinnamon Lane, just outside Pilton. They left peacefully after having the sound equipment seized, with two arrested for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

     

    Mr Eavis said he did not expect the new security measures to ruin the festival's atmosphere. "It will be safer, there will be less crime, it will be more fun. That's what we hope," he said. A total of 140,000 people will legitimately be on Mr Eavis' 800 acres of farmland by the end of Friday. Some 100,000 tickets, which cost £100 each, have been sold, and the remaining 40,000 places were reserved for artists, crew, traders, media and locals.

     

    Mud is likely to be absent from this year's festival, with forecasters predicting a dry weekend, except for the chance of showers on Sunday. The line-up includes rock and soul veterans and contemporary pop acts - as well as children's entertainer Rolf Harris.

     

    Friday's line-up will feature Coldplay, Faithless, Ash, Nelly Furtado, Doves, the Dandy Warhols, Bush, Alabama 3, Spiritualized, Garbage, and Mercury Rev.

    On Saturday festival-goers will see mystery headliners, rumoured to be the Stereophonics, as well as The Charlatans, the White Stripes, Starsailor, Ian Brown, No Doubt, Jools Holland, Orbital, Mis-Teeq, and Kosheen.

     

    And the last day of the festival will include Rod Stewart, Roger Waters, Isaac Hayes, Badly Drawn Boy, Rolf Harris, Air, Groove Armada, and Belle and Sebastian.

     

    This year's event almost did not go ahead after concerns over safety with such huge numbers. The deaths of nine rock fans in a crush at a Danish festival, Roskilde, in 2000 has also focused attention on safety. But Mr Eavis enlisted live music promoters Mean Fiddler - who stage the Reading and Leeds festivals - to look after security.

     

    He said he deliberately avoided booking raucous rock groups like The Offspring and Green Day, whose fans jump around violently in "mosh-pits" and go "crowd-surfing" over the heads of the audience.




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