we’ve got this huge pirate ship – I think we might put
Michael on it and sail it across the site.”
“
I just created something that I really enjoy doing,”
says Michael – still sprightly and jovial at 77 – as I hop
into his muddy red truck to accompany him on his
daily tour of the site. Ricocheting over ditch and dale, he
ponders Glastonbury’s cult-like success, and the loyalty
of its attendees and workers (some 25,000 volunteers are
responsible for actually building it all). “It just goes from
strength to strength and people want to be involved.
People trust me that I won’t rip them off, make a fortune,
and go and live in Barbados [most of the festival’s profits
are donated to charity]. The fact that this is our home and
it’s a homespun sort of idea…They knowwhere they are
with me and so they feel safe, I think. There are so many
people who see it as a labour of love. They’re not really
paid proper wages, but they really feel it’s a privilege to
be working here. You don’t get that anywhere else.”
Having spent a weekend on Worthy Farm virtually
every summer since 1992, and knowing the festival like
the back of my (often blurry) hand, it’s disorientating
without the usual landmarks of ostrich-burger stalls,
cider buses and gigantic flame-spewing spider stages.
Similarly, it must be dizzying for Michael to consider the
changes to the place since he quit the Merchant Navy to
tend the farm after his Methodist preacher father died in
1958.
In 1970, inspired by seeing Led Zeppelin at the Bath
Festival of Blues, he held the Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk
Festival on the farm, charging 1,500 punters £1 per ticket
and offering free milk. It almost didn’t happen, though,
when headliners The Kinks pulled out at the last minute.
“
I got The Kinks for 500 quid,” Michael remembers,
“
but
Melody Maker
put in this story, saying, ‘Kinks
For Mini-Festival’. They were number one all across the
world with ‘Lola’, so why were they doing mini-festivals?
They didn’t like that, so they pulled out and I got five
medical certificates fromThe Kinks to say they all had
laryngitis.” Luckily, the far more hip Marc Bolan’s
DOWN ON THE FARM
01
Michael Eavis and
daughter Emily
02
Hippies at the second
Glastonbury Festival
in 1971: a “lovey-dovey,
druggy affair”
03
The biblical weather
is legendary – 1998
being its worst year
for trench foot
SINCE 1970, HE HAS
HOSTED AN EVENT
THAT IS QUITE RIGHTLY
REGARDED AS
BRITAIN’S GREATEST,
MOST MAGICAL
CULTURAL
PHENOMENON
03
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