Pop: Glastonbury Rules

“I don’t understand the thing about this bloody commercialism,” says Michael Eavis, founder of the Glastonbury festival, as cows moo in the background.

“We’re charging £130 for something we could charge £400 for and it would still sell out.” He’s talking about the self-appointed guardians of the Glastonbury gate, for ever warding off real or imaginary snake-oil salesmen, and crying foul.

“The old hippie argument was that it wasn’t free any more. But water alone is half a million, electric’s half a million, the fence is a million, the police are a million. There’s £3m gone straightaway. You can’t tell me that we don’t have to do those things in order to cover the costs and to give about £1.25m away to all the charity stuff we do. It’s absurd talk. It really is ridiculous.”The release next month of Music from Glastonbury the Film, a CD of choice live cuts to complement Julien Temple’s recent documentary, looks likely to pour further fat on the flames. The fact that it’s being put out on the festival’s own label, and that a chunk of the profits will, as usual, go to charity, will presumably be ignored.

There was no Glastonbury this year, of course. If there had been, we’d all still be discussing it now. Memories — many of them hazy at best, and horribly vivid at worst — would be swapped and sifted. The hole that Glastonbury leaves in the summer music schedules with its one “fallow” year in every five is a talking point in itself.

The last year that the festival took off was 2001, when the local council refused to renew its licence after the gate-crashing debacle of th previous year. Then, as now, talk revolved around which festival would use Glastonbury’s absence to stake its own claim as the summer’s defining musical happening. The release of Temple’s film was seen as a bid to quash such talk. Was this Eavis’s attempt to mind the gap (year)? Eavis had, in fact, commissioned Temple back in 2002. He was worried that the steel fences he had been forced to erect that year would mean the free-spirited festival could not survive in any acceptable form. It did, as it turned out (though some view the arrival of cash machines, CCTV and Ben & Jerry’s Glastonberry ice cream as marking the death of the original ethos). And, try as they may, rival attractions just cannot compete.

In part, that is because there are so many stories surrounding Glastonbury that it has developed a psychological, symbolic and commercial resonance. The value attached to the live CD must, in that case, be high, mustn’t it? Well, yes and no. Yes, because, for those who watched, say, Coldplay at last year’s festival and heard Chris Martin change the words to the second verse of Politik (“Give me mud up to my knees/The best festival in history”), the CD will zap them back to that moment. No, because the festival experience is about so much more than the bands that appear, the songs they perform and how they play them. A collective yearning in the crowd — for better weather, for a warmer vibe, for something to banish the memory of the previous act — can play a greater part. The way a sudden shaft of sunlight through the clouds strikes the ride cymbal, just as the alcohol you’ve imbibed is kicking in and the person you’ve been clocking turns to you and smiles, can be as, if not more, crucial.

So, is the CD a must-have? Probably not in the way a ticket for 2007 is. But it’s a faithful and suitably eccentric document. “I’ve never slept in a tent,” Eavis muses at one point. “Oh dear, what an admission. I suppose I’ve got a house in the right place.”

Any hints about next year’s line-up? “One of the best bands in the whole world, who haven’t played for 35 years. I’m not saying another word.” And will Kylie close the Sunday night, as was the plan before she fell ill? Eavis is hopeful. Which he isn’t about Glasto’s annual no-shows, U2. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They get upset whenever I mention them, you see,” he says, mentioning them. Then, as if with those keepers of the festival’s flame in mind, he adds provocatively: “We’re too big for U2.” Bloody commercialism? Sounds like the simple truth to me.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk