On April 1 tickets go on sale for the Glastonbury Festival, the legendary granddaddy of all music festivals and one of the few large-scale events left that truly embodies the spirit of the ’60s. If the grind and grunt of student life in grey, productivity-driven Toronto has sapped you of the will to live, if you plan on following the well-trodden trail of Canadian travelers with flags on their backpacks to Europe this summer, make this English festival one of your stops.
For Glastonbury is more than just a music festival. The lineup of bands is impressive, for sure. Last year featured a whopping 246 bands on eight stages, including REM, Radiohead, The Roots, Blackalicious, Razhel, The Darkness, The Flaming Lips, Beth Orton, The Damned, The Doves, Grandaddy, Lamb, Moby, The Polyphonic Spree, Love, Primal Scream, The Buena Vista Social Club, The Rapture, The Streets, Super Furry Animals, Sigur Ros, Supergrass, Yo La Tengo, Tricky, John Cale, The Chemical Brothers, Pete Yorn, Squarepusher, The Manic Street Preachers and Aphex Twin, just to name a few.
But there’s also a movie theatre, a circus, a cabaret, a craft field (full of blacksmiths, carpenters and artists), a healing field (reiki therapists, meditation workshops and the like), several dance zones, a communal vegetable garden, and the Left Field, an arena for information campaigns, solar powered showers, and political debate. And if all that dirty hippy crap doesn’t suit you, there’s also endless lanes of stalls, cafés, activities, and booze tents to amuse yourself with.
The festival takes place on sacred pagan grounds, and is probably the only festival in the world where you can find an authentic stone circle. And being of pagan origin, the circle naturally becomes the official drug market for the festival. Anything you want, you’ll find at the stone circle. In the laidback, free-spirited vibe of the festival, people abandon all reserve. Sit for five minutes near the circle and the shouts of, “Hash truffles for sale, one pound each or seven for a fiver!” “Acid, I’ve got acid, two pounds a drop!” and “Has anyone got any free-base speed?” will fill your ears.
Ever had that experience when you overhear a fragment of a conversation, and that fragment sticks in your brain like a shard of glass forever? Try this on for size: “Have you been doing K all night?” asked one reveller. “I hope so!” was the reply. The festival can at times just seem like one gigantic drug fest, so if you’re uncomfortable being around that kind of depravity, stay near the more mainstream parts of the festival.
Despite Glastonbury’s reputation for debauchery, however, the festival is overrun with children. Kids under 12 get in for free, and an entire area of the grounds is set aside for them, filled with music, arts, crafts and games to expand their imaginations. Having dreadlocked infants all over the place actually makes the festival a whole lot better as people are more mindful of their behaviour.
You couldn’t possibly go to this festival and not have fun. There is truly no other celebration like this one-the Burning Man festival compares in spirit, but pales in size and scale. But the most remarkable thing about Glastonbury is not the number of bands, the location, or the diversity of things to do-it’s the spirit.
It sounds like bogus hippy drivel, but the vibe of the festival really is unlike any other. People are filthy, showers are scarce, the portable toilets are absolutely terrifying, and sleep is impossible as music plays almost nonstop. But no matter where you go, people are almost unnaturally nice to each other. Complete strangers will lend/give you anything you need: water, food, blankets, tent space, toilet paper, toothbrushes. If living in a city has made you crusty, Glastonbury will remind you that at their core, people want to be nice, and people enjoy being nice. Fuck Woodstock II, and especially fuck Woodstock 2001-nobody gets raped, and no towers get torn down in cockrock-fueled destruction at Glastonbury.
If you’re going to make your way to England for the festival, make sure you buy a ticket. The longstanding tradition was for 100,000 people to buy tickets, and for the same number to cut holes in the fence and break in. But with a new 8.5 mile perimeter steel fence, complete with watchtowers, nobody breaks into the festival anymore. Enclosing the epicenter of free love and hippydom in a barrier that could safely guard a prison may seem harsh, but imagine the following scenario: the lineup for a stand of 50 toilets is 100 metres long. After waiting for 20 minutes you finally reach a stall, only to find that the pile of hippy shit inside reaches above the rim. Now, imagine that there’s twice as many people in the park. You get the idea.
So spring the £120 for a ticket-it gets you five days of nonstop hijinx in a grownup playground seven square miles in size. You won’t be bombarded with advertisements, water is free, and security generally leaves you alone, even with a bag of mushrooms bulging out of your pocket. And if the spirit of the festival takes you over and you can’t bear to leave, you don’t have to-festival organizer Michael Eavis, who owns the farm on which the festival has taken place since 1970, will let you stay another month if you help clean up all the litter. And after 125,000 drug-addled, sunshine-intoxicated weekend hippies have spent five days sprawling on the grass, you could easily make back the money you spent on your ticket by picking up the cash and bags of weed festival goers leave behind in their forgetful summer bliss.
