Europe’s biggest musical festival is now just a massive authoritarian pigpen, says Brendan O’Neill. No wonder the young are staying away
Most people, when they hear the word Glastonbury, think of mud, drugs, drunkenness, moshing, free love, the lighting up of spliffs, and generally harmless experimentation in a field. Well, they’re right about the mud. Yet far from being a site of hippyish self-exploration, the Glastonbury music festival has become a tightly regimented gathering of middle-class masochists who don’t mind being bossed around by nosey cops and kill-joy greens for three long days.
Glastonbury now resembles a countercultural concentration camp, complete with CCTV cameras and ‘watchtowers’ (their word, not mine), rather than a Woodstock-style attempt to escape ‘The Man’.
This month Glastonbury turns 40. Like all 40-year-olds, it’s having an identity crisis. Run by hippy-cum-businessman Michael Eavis, on his aptly named Worthy Farm, the first Glastonbury festival took place in 1970 and attracted 1,500 hippies.
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