Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and Glastonbury Festival is keeping its head down. The Glastophilic chat rooms bubble with antsy longing. My house is prowled by ghosts of yesteryear. Finetime’s camera is dormant. The cows on the farm chew their cud in peace.
Instead of taking it to the wire in the fields of dreams, scribbled later with the urgency of one possessed, sleepless and obsessed, I can only offer ruminations. Snapshots and snippets. Aided by a large box of mementos from the attic, I give you my Worthy Farm saudade. To start, here are all my programmes, let loose in the sun, the top ones are the oldest.
I did not go to all these festivals. But I went to 23 of them. I reviewed 17.
Which one was best? Don’t be ridiculous.
The 1981 programme is my earliest.
There was no festival in 1980 as festival founder Michael Eavis took a huge financial hit on the ‘79 one. As far as I know, the 1979 festival was the earliest one to have a booklet-style paper programme. Before that, programmes were for "The Man" and you found out what was on by looking at paintings on Steve Hillage’s flared jeans.
I’m missing programmes for ’79, ’83, ’84 and ’05 (’82 didn’t have a programme, just a flyer with info). It’s worth taking a closer look at the 1981 programme, its front cover representing the fact the festival was the “Glastonbury CND Festival” between 1981 and 1990.
Watching on telly, most people think Glastonbury is a large concert (first broadcast by Channel 4 in 1994, then the BBC from 1997). It is. But was also never thus. The 1981 programme has theatre to the fore. In fact, all the way to 1994, the programmes don’t lead with the Main/Pyramid Stage. The real spirit of Glastonbury, even today, is the 2020s equivalent of Blowzabella (to be found on Friday on the Theatre Stage offering “country music, country dances with audience participation, stilts”), rather than Muse on the Pyramid.
I also love the way the theatre performances have no timings. Just going with the “Morning” and “Evening” flow. Then, as now, the music is eclectic, with (at the time) cutting-edge bands such as New Order (“formally Joy Division”), Aswad, The Sound and Thompson Twins alongside old hippies, inevitably Hawkwind and Gong, but also Roy Harper and “wordsmith for the Grateful Dead” Robert Hunter. Then there’s a tasty smattering of global sounds from the likes of Matumbi and Taj Mahal. Let’s hope Jazz Slutts were one festival-goers discovered, flying on 37 liberty caps, loved ‘em, and never heard of ‘em again.
Talking of drugs, I didn’t review the 1992 festival but I was there and, recently, moving house, two pencilled paper slips fell out of my hardly-used diary for the year. The first reminds what bands I saw.
The second reminds why my memory of Glastonbury 1992 fritzes in and out like a faulty cathode ray tube.
For instance, I can only recall Lou Reed playing “Sweet Jane”, though I have ecstatic memories of 808 State. Yes, indeed, look at that inventory; 808 State were on Sunday night. I was stupendously high. Those fireworks were special. As it turned out, also real. One of the reasons I did an oral history of Glastonbury 1992 (which you can find here) is that when one wrestles the brain with other people’s stories, rusty neural pathways cue memories long buried in the silt at the bottom (NB. researching the 1992 feature resulted in my discovery that it wasn’t a Spiral Tribe party I attended but one by a break-away crew from Bedlam sound system… also, while I’m here, why did I write that there was “a huge rave with ‘name’ DJs” then not actually name them!?).
I envy my younger self the ability to put it away like that. I don’t do badly now, but I’m not in that guy’s league. At least I don’t wear a beret like he did.
I first went to Glastonbury in 1990. My younger sister persuaded me. I didn’t want to go. I thought it would be full of smelly hippies. It was. I loved it.
The last time I clambered over the fence was ’95. It was also the first time I was paid to review the festival for a magazine. It was in this edition of DJ.
There were timing clashes. I saw The Prodigy instead of Oasis (a winning decision – Keith Flint in his hamster ball prime), but The Shamen instead of Pulp (a now-legendary stand-in set when The Stone Roses couldn’t play) wasn’t such a good call. On Thursday, Prime Minister John Major resigned as Head of the Conservative Party, sending thrills across the site (unfortunately his party voted him back in soon after). Dreadzone, the totemic band of the UK festival season, then and now, played clips of his resignation speech during a ballistic version of anti-Poll Tax anthem “Fight the Power”.
By the time Monday morning arrived, my head felt like fried plantain repeatedly stamped on. I discovered that my partner-in-crime, in a speed-fuelled mania, had “hidden the car keys somewhere safe”. Where, we never found out.
Instead, we stood in the car park, dry heaving, until the AA turned up, hours later. My review was due next day. I used a “literary device” where I headlined the piece “Glastonbury Flashbacks”, presenting a series of written snapshots without a linking narrative or timeline. Clever? No. My brain was putty. A sample: “Is it really wise to eat so much flapjack?” DJ Magazine’s avid techno readership must have been gagging to find out.
Anyway, apropos of nothing, here’s a flash-forward to the bloke’s bogs in the “Oooh, Jeremy Corbin Year” (2017, and to the tune of The White Stripes' “Seven Nation Army).
Speaking of timing clashes, as we were a moment ago, they’re impossible avoid at Glastonbury. As recently as 2024 I chose Dua Lipa headlining over IDLES, a decision I came to regret when I watched the latter’s gob-smackingly visceral performance on telly afterwards. Back in 1998 my younger self gave preference to junglist DJs Kenny Ken and DJ Rap over Bob Dylan, arriving to see his last few songs, described in my review as “rather dull and incomprehensible, apart from a moving and crowd-swaying ‘Blowing in the Wind’ as his encore”. 1998 was a muddy one, as you can see from this pic of my DJ Mag piece.
For years, a media obsession with mud was what put the lame-oh’s and amateurs off (these days the fear’s more likely to be scorching-to-charcoal under Trump-endorsed, non-Climate Change, 40° sun). Proper muddy ones I’ve attended would include ’97, ’98 and ’16, but my only truly abominable weather experience was ’07, when I’m surprised nothing worse happened in the off-site Monday bus queues, relentlessly pelted by sleet and chill gales.
Before we leave ’98, and since 2026 is a World Cup year too, a snippet from my review for Friday 26th June – picture me “now that all my waterproofs are drenched” in a “Jean-Paul Gaultier-style skirt, top and scarf made out of binbags and string”…
“Afternoon wanderings take in Paul Merton improv, and then it’s time, suitably rattled on a combination of weed, speed, and ferocious farmhouse scrumpy, for the football [which was shown on a giant screen]. Anyone who watched England vs Columbia at Glastonbury will never forget it – the rain sheeting down like a monsoon while [Darren] Anderton and Beckham make it all worthwhile. With the final whistle [2-0 to England], sodden to the bone, the biggest single audience in Britain howls with joy and for five minutes the ridiculous [Fat Les song] “Vindaloo” makes as much sense as Joe Smooth’s “Promised Land” on yer first eccy.”
But, back to the even more sodden 2007. I was reviewing for Q Magazine that year. They produced The Glastonbury Times, put together on site, as well as a special edition which was in the shops by Wednesday after the festival (which, in 2007, was the day Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister – I’m noticing a theme). Photographer Mick Hutson, a mischievous gent and a rock’n’roll character, who died in 2023, would go up each year in a helicopter and take a shot of the site, the poster of which became an annual collectable as people tried to spot their tents.
I wasn’t a good fit, really, for Q's London-wits-abroad backstage snarkarium but the bossman, Andy Fyfe, was a good egg and gave me The Stooges on the Other Stage to review, which turned out to be one of the gigs of my life, Iggy in a sheeting rainstorm, mass stage invasion for “Real Cool Time”, demented “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” encore. It pops up occasionally on BBC iPlayer and remains a gem.
Many others have created Glastonbury mags. For a while in the 1990s the local Western Daily Press published Glastonbury specials before and after the event. And there have been various on-site newspapers. The original was a stencil-print broadsheet, The Firelighter, first handed out at the Information Station in the Green Field in 1986, but the first with any consistency was now long-defunct magazine Select’s Glastonbury Daily, as below (from 1998).
Select did a Glastonbury paper ‘til 2000, when the mag folded, with Q taking over from 2003 to 2010, then the Festival launched its own Glastonbury Free Press in 2013, which runs to the present. Below is a copy from 2019.
When in the fields, sprawled on grass, scanning rumours, gossip and food suggestions between doses of mayhem, these publications add to a sense of living in a micro-state, away from the banal money-as-religion shite of daily life (emphasised by South East Corner nightworld billboards such as below, from 2017).
Talking of money, the modern festival is sometimes referred to as “commercialised” but, while it linked up with corporate branding in the Nineties, throughout the 21st century, it’s chopped it away. Unlike most festivals, which are pebble-dashed with grim advertising schlock, Glastonbury’s free of it, and still mustered £4.2 million in 2025 for charities such as Oxfam, WaterAid and Greenpeace.
I certainly spend a ton of money at Glastonbury, most of it at the Burrow Hill Cider Bus, which haunts my dreams. I also buy hats. Weirdly, the most reliable place to buy a straw cowboy hat perfect for the current weather, is at festivals. I’ve also bought a couple of giant felted psychedelic gnome hats but, perhaps, the less said of these, the better. Up in the Craft Field there are always purchases to be made from wiry, weathered-looking folk who may have been at Glastonbury 1971 (such as the below, hanging outside my bedding cupboard).
Those who read my annual Glastonbury extravaganzas may recall how in 2022 my photographer pal Finetime suffered a minor meltdown as a result of guzzling mushroom powder with his lunch. He then found comfort, as he watched Sleaford Mods play the West Holts Stage, in holding onto a seven-foot-long squared wooden stick I found. It became his support stick and we began to attribute to it magic properties. I took it home. When I moved house last year, it was unwieldy to transport, but I wished to retain its powers. I sent a section of it to my friend Tom the Whittler who created the carving below from its wood. Its Avalon energies ley-line my living room.
My other regular Glastonbury compadre is Don Carlton, with whom I’ve attended the festival 11 times. I even created a flag in his honour in 2023, as below.
His first mention was in 2008, when we came across one’n’other at a festival band having their moment in a far-flung marquee: “The Amigos major in gritty funk grooves, interspersed with ska and hedonic attitude: imagine a frenetic gumbo of The Clash, Alabama 3 and the Blockheads and you’re a fifth of the way there. As they begin, a friend from home, Don Carlton, suddenly appears looking faraway-eyed. Turns out he’s drunk a litre of vodka and as soon as the band launch into a cover of ‘White Lines (Don’t Do It)’ he begins a frantic dance wherein his backpack bashes into everyone.” It would not be the last time…
I could go on. And on. But I won’t. I know friends dread when Glastonbury rears up in pub chat. My eyes change. My tone starts to sing. Glastonbury has provided some of my life’s greatest memories. They’re lined in jars in my psychic parlour. They are treasure beyond all the dollars we’re encouraged to horde.
These memories are not all ones you’d expect, “biggies” such as balmy sunset Leonard Cohen (2008) or Plastikman destroying the universe in the first ever Dance Tent (1995). Some of them are bands you’d never expect, like the unbridled euphoria that possessed me when popsters Years & Years played Sunday 30th June 2019 (“When they have a drag-fest and rainbow ticker tape explosion for the final “King”, I’m yelling the chorus at the top of my voice, tears only just staying inside my eye sockets”). I can feel it still.
Or simply lying there, eyes closed, shattered on the dusty daytime ground, listening to the burble of excited humanity revelling in excited humanity. I’ve tried to write novels – I may yet - and have earned my living covering music, but writing about Glastonbury may be my destiny.
Every year, the festival has to end, of course. Life, as Prince observed, is a party, and parties aren’t meant to last. We must wander off, as per the image below, a couple of souls returning to their tents from the Stone Circle at 5.30 AM, Monday 26th June 2017.
But, really, the only suitable image to end with is the one below, a badge found at the festival. It looks old. It looks hippy. It looks like Joseph of Arimathea brought the grail and the vibes, man. Cosmic. Seeya next year.
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