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The Glastonbury Festivals
This page is provided only for information, it does not apply to the 2002 festival.
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By Michael Eavis
Recent archaeological digs have suggested that there were regular midsummer festivals in the Lake Villages near Glastonbury as early as 500BC. Beads and other artefacts have been found at sites only free of Flood water at the height of summer. Glastonbury, traditionally the site of the Isle of Avalon (Celtic for Place of Blessed Souls), attracted the earliest Christians to build their first church there. This no doubt led King Arthur and his queen to be buried there - though some say this is an invention by medieval monks hoping to add to their power and wealth through the pilgrimage trade.
In later years, some of the country's leading artists, including George Bernard Shaw and Rutland Boughton, were involved in a radical annual arts festival, which ran for twelve years between 1914-26. Whether or not there is any real link - other than a romantic one - between our festival and the ones that have preceded it, will have to be left for historians to decide. It was, however, on one sunny autumn day in September 1970 that I experienced putting on my own show for the first time, with a handful of pop and folk stars, including Marc Bolan and Quintessence - and a lorry-load of makeshift scaffolding for a stage. Little did we realise that we had begun something that has stayed with us for a quarter of a century so far. Admission to this first festival was only £1 for the weekend - and this included free milk!
I was smitten with the idea after visiting the Bath Blues Festival earlier that summer, where Jean and I walked through one of the numerous holes in the fence, to discover hundreds of thousands of strange and interesting people, the like of whom I had never seen before. This awesome sight inspired me to reach for the telephone the very next day, with the idea that we could do the same kind of thing, but better, by combining the pop festival culture with the more traditional fairs and harvest festivals. We also had an ideal site, with a beautiful valley that extends towards the Tor at Glastonbury.
Although the first event was autumnal, we soon settled on the Summer Solstice as an appropriate time for our festival. This has now become our regular date, when people of all ages can look forward to a time when they can come to meet friends, enjoy the wealth of entertainment, and , above all, to celebrate life and joy. We believe the event helps to bring out the better side of human nature in the thousands of people who gather every year.
In 1970, 1,500 people turned up. 1971 was free (but paid for by rich hippies) with an audience of about 7,000. '78 featured another small free event, and '79 was the first serious attempt to attract more people and to charge a 'realistic' ticket price - £7! Although we attracted 12,000 people, the event still lost money. 1981 was our breakthrough: 24,000 people turned up, delivering a £20,000 profit, which contributed to the million pounds raised for CND through the eighties. During this time it also grew towards its present size of over 100,000 - numbers are now limited by the size of the site. Its popularity is such that would not be difficult to sell many thousands more tickets.
This year the festival will give Greenpeace £200,000, and in addition a large proportion of the labour force is employed on a fund-raising basis: they are rewarded by large donations to Oxfam (£79,000), Water Aid (£10,000), CND and other national and local charities. Worthy Farm is run as a dairy farm, and makes sufficient profit, so that the fee that I take out of the company is £40,000, to run the show and compensate for the time that would otherwise be spent running the farm.
Our local MP spearheaded tile Miscellaneous Provisions Act through Parliament in 1981, with the intention of controlling or even stopping most festivals, and which became law the next year. This made life a lot more difficult for us, as festival licensing was now in the hands of the local authority. Glastonbury has played a key role in the development of the principles involved in the licensing of festivals - the local licensing officer in fact received an MBE from the Queen for his involvement with the festival. Ironically, he actually spent most of his time trying to find legal ways to get the festival stopped.
The new rules also put the event firmly in the politicul arena. For me, fund-raising for CND in a Tory shire heartland was like raising a red ray to a bull! Inevitably, the courts had to decide on the merits of the council's refusal to grant a licence, which was quite clearly politically motivated. With good supporting evidence for my case from the police and fire authorities, we always managed to convince the magistrates to rule in our favour, showing them to be more reasonable and fair-minded than the politicians. Now that the political nature of our council has changed (partly, I like to think, due to the effect that the festival has on the local economy), the licence goes through without too many problems: the main debate centres on the council's conditions, especially the control of numbers.
We are now firmly established as one of the major European outside events and we hope to be able to continue to be a significant date in the cultural calendar.
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