Glastonbury Festival

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts (commonly referred to as simply Glastonbury Festival, known colloquially as Glasto) is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts held near Pilton, Somerset, England, in most summers.

In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums have been recorded at the festival, and it receives extensive television and newspaper coverage.

Glastonbury takes place on 1,500 acres of farmland and is attended by around 200,000 people, requiring extensive security, transport, water, and electricity-supply infrastructure. While the number of attendees is sometimes swollen by gatecrashers, a record of 300,000 people was set at the 1994 festival, headlined by the Levellers, who performed on the Pyramid Stage. Most festival staff are unpaid volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for charity organisations.

Regarded as a major event in contemporary British culture, the festival is inspired by the ethos of the hippie, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the free festival movement. Vestiges of these traditions are retained in the Green Fields area, which includes sections known as the Green Futures, the Stone Circle and Healing Field. Michael Eavis hosted the first festival, then called the Pilton Festival, after seeing an open-air Led Zeppelin concert in 1970 at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.

History

1970

The first festival at Worthy Farm was the Pop, Blues & Folk Festival, hosted by Michael Eavis on Saturday 19 September 1970, and attended by 1,500 people. There had been a commercial UK festival tradition which included the National Jazz and Blues Festival and the Isle of Wight Festival. Eavis decided to host the first festival after seeing an open-air concert headlined by Led Zeppelin at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music at the nearby Bath and West Showground in 1970.

The original headline acts were The Kinks and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders but these acts were replaced at short notice by Tyrannosaurus Rex, later known as T. Rex. Tickets were £1 (equivalent to £19.77 in 2025). Other billed acts of note were Steamhammer, Quintessence, Stackridge, Al Stewart, Pink Fairies and Keith Christmas.

1971

The "Glastonbury Fair" of 1971 was instigated by Andrew Kerr after being found and introduced to Michael Eavis by David Trippas, and organised with the help of Arabella Churchill, Jean Bradbery, Kikan Eriksdotter, John Massara, Jeff Dexter, Thomas Crimble, Bill Harkin, Gilberto Gil, Mark Irons, John Coleman, and Jytte Klamer. The 1971 festival featured the first incarnation of the "Pyramid Stage". Conceived by Bill Harkin the stage was a one-tenth replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza built from scaffolding and metal sheeting and positioned over a "blind spring", a term used to describe an underground body of water in the practice of dowsing.

Performers included Family, David Bowie, Mighty Baby, Traffic, Fairport Convention, Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, Skin Alley, The Worthy Farm Windfuckers and Melanie. It was paid for by its supporters and advocates of its ideal, and embraced a medieval tradition of music, dance, poetry, theatre, lights, and spontaneous entertainment. The 1971 festival was filmed by Nicolas Roeg and David Puttnam with Eavis and Kerr's Glastonbury Fair changed to Glastonbury Fayre, and a triple album of the same name was released (no connection with the film).

1979

There was a small unplanned event in 1978, when the convoy of vehicles from the Stonehenge festival was directed by police to Worthy Farm; the festival was then revived the following year (1979) by Churchill, Crimble, Kerr and Eavis, in an event for the Year of the Child, which lost money.

1980s

The 1980s saw the festival become an annual fixture, barring periodic fallow years. In 1981, Michael Eavis took back sole control of the festival, and it was organised in conjunction with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). That year a new Pyramid Stage was constructed from telegraph poles and metal sheeting (repurposed from materials of the Ministry of Defence), a permanent structure which doubled as a hay barn and cowshed during the winter.

In the 1980s, the children's area of the festival (which had been organised by Arabella Churchill and others) became the starting point for a new children's charity called Children's World. 1981 was the first year that the festival made profits, and Eavis donated £20,000 of them to CND . In the following years, donations were made to a number of organisations, and since the end of the Cold War the main beneficiaries have been Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, who all contribute towards the festival by providing features and volunteers, who work at the festival in exchange for free entry.

It also saw the first TV coverage, with ITV broadcasting recorded highlights in the weeks after the festival.

Since 1983, large festivals have required licences from local authorities. This led to certain restrictions being placed on the festival, including a crowd limit and specified times during which the stages could operate. The crowd limit was initially set at 30,000 but has grown every year to over 100,000. 1984 saw the stage invaded by fans during The Smiths' set. Weather Report played the main stage, and Elvis Costello headlined the last night for almost three hours. In 1985, the festival grew too large for Worthy Farm, but neighbouring Cockmill Farm was purchased. That year saw a wet festival with considerable rain; Worthy Farm is a dairy farm and what washed down into the low areas was a mixture of mud and liquefied cow dung. This did not prevent festival goers from enjoying the knee-deep slurry in front of the Pyramid Stage.

1989 was the first year that impromptu, unofficial sound systems sprang up around the festival site – a portent of things to come. These sound systems would play loud, electronic acid house music around the clock, with the largest, the Hypnosis sound system, rivalling the volume of some of the official stages and running non-stop throughout the festival.

1990s

Following the 1990 festival, violence flared between security guards and new age travellers in what became known as "The Battle of Yeoman's Bridge". Eavis was also facing increasing battles from locals over the festival, with no festival taking place in 1991. Both pressures are captured in the 1992 Channel 4 documentary Showdown at Glastonbury.

An expanded festival returned in 1992, and this proved a great success. 1992 was the first year that the new age travellers were not initially allowed onto the site free, and a sturdier fence was designed. This success was carried through to 1993 which, like 1992, was hot and dry.

In 1994, the Pyramid Stage burned down just over a week before the festival; a temporary main stage was erected in time for the festival. The 1994 festival also introduced a 150 kW wind turbine which provided some of the festival power. Headliners Levellers set another record when they played to a crowd of as many as 300,000 people on their Friday performance, Glastonbury's biggest ever crowd .

Channel 4 televised the festival that same year; the coverage concentrated on the main two music stages and providing a glimpse of the festival for those who knew little of it. Channel 4's 4 Goes to Glastonbury brought widely expanded televised coverage of the festival for the first time in 1994 and also the following year.

The TV broadcast in 1994 was a crucial factor in ensuring that Orbital's performance at the festival achieved legendary status. As a result, living rooms across the country were able to experience what a rave might look like, and suddenly dance music, which had been ignored by the establishment and mainstream press for years, did not seem so dangerous and which would be a turning point for the music at Glastonbury. Speaking to The Guardian in 2013 about the Orbital gig, Michael Eavis noted that it marked dance music's appearance on the mainstream agenda. "What was previously underground made it on to one of the big stages, and there was no going back from there. As the police and the council made me very well aware, the buzz had been around the raves and the market sound systems and in the travellers' fields for years. But it needed a showcase to make it legal." The gig opened the way for others such as the Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and Underworld, who all played high-profile stages in the following years – developments that led to the launch of the festival's Dance Village in 1997.

1995 saw the attendance rise drastically due to the security fence being breached on the Friday of the festival. Estimates suggest there may have been enough fence-jumpers to double the size of the festival. This aside, 1995 proved to be a highly successful year with memorable performances from Oasis, Elastica, Pulp, PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, Jamiroquai and The Cure. This was also the first year of the festival having a dance tent to cater for the rising popularity of dance music, following the success of Orbital's headline appearance the previous year. The dance acts of 1995 were led by Massive Attack on the Friday and Carl Cox on the Saturday. The festival took a year off in 1996 to allow the land to recover and give the organisers a break. 1996 also saw the release of Glastonbury the Movie which was filmed at the 1993 and 1994 festivals.

The festival returned in 1997. This time there was major sponsorship from The Guardian and the BBC, who had taken over televising the event from Channel 4. This was also the year of the mud, with the site suffering severe rainfalls which turned the entire site into a muddy bog. However, those who stayed for the festival were treated to many memorable performances, including Radiohead's headlining Pyramid Stage set on the Saturday which is said to be one of the greatest ever Glastonbury performances. The live recording of "Paranoid Android" from this performance, as well as others such as "The Day Before Yesterday's Man" by The Supernaturals, were released on a BBC CD entitled Mud For It.

In 1998, the festival was once again struck with severe floods and storms, and again some festival goers departed early – but those who stayed were treated to performances from acts such as Pulp, Robbie Williams and Blur. Tony Bennett, however, overcame the messy environment in an immaculate, blue lounge suit and tie. 1998 was also the first year that attendance officially broke the 100,000 mark.

Another hot dry year was recorded in 1999, much to the relief of organisers and festival goers. The festival was again overcrowded due to fence-jumpers, but this would not prove to be a major problem until the following year, when an additional 100,000 people gatecrashed the site, increasing the attendance to an estimated 250,000 people total. The 1999 festival is also remembered for the Manic Street Preachers requesting and being given their own backstage toilets; however, it was revealed by the band that this was a joke – the "reserved" sign on the toilet was not at the authorisation of the management.

Speaking to the BBC in 2024, Michael Eavis' daughter Emily explained that her parents always planned to close the festival when they reached retirement age, with many of the festivals in the 1990s being "the last one". The death of Michael Eavis' wife Jean in 1999 persuaded him to continue organising the festival.

2000s

A new Pyramid Stage was introduced in 2000. Other new areas included The Glade and The Left Field. The festival was headlined by Chemical Brothers, Travis and David Bowie, who played thirty years after his first appearance. The Pyramid Stage also hosted an unusual event on the Saturday morning, with the wedding of two festivalgoers, who had written to the organisers asking for permission to get married there, taking place and conducted by actor Keith Allen in front of a small group of friends and any other festivalgoers who still happened to be awake. This year also saw an estimated 250,000 people attend the festival (only 100,000 tickets were sold) due to gatecrashers. This led to public safety concerns and the local District Council refused any further licences until the problem was solved.

The organisers used the scheduled fallow year 2001 to devise anti-gatecrashing measures and secure the future of the festival, after the Roskilde Festival 2000 accident. It was at this point that the Mean Fiddler Organisation was invited to help.

In 2002 the festival returned, with the controversial Mean Fiddler now handling the logistics and security – especially installing a substantial surrounding fence (dubbed the "superfence") that reduced numbers to the levels of a decade earlier. 2002 also saw Coldplay headline the Pyramid Stage for the first time while the show was closed by a set from Rod Stewart on the Sunday night.

There were some criticisms of the 2002 festival that it lacked atmosphere, because of the reduced number of people, which reflected the smaller numbers jumping the fence. The number of tickets was increased to 150,000 for 2003 which sold out within one day of going on sale, in marked contrast to the two months it took to sell 140,000 in 2002. It was also the first year that tickets sold out before the full line-up was announced. This was also the year Radiohead returned to headline the Pyramid Stage. Revenue raised for good causes from ticket and commercial licence sales topped £1 million, half of which went to Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid.

Source and attribution

Adapted from “Glastonbury Festival” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.