PHOTO
GETTY, RETNA
Since then, Glastonbury has remained on the cutting
edge, repeatedly breaking its own boundaries by giving
headline slots to Muse, Arctic Monkeys, Beyoncé and,
notoriously in 2008, Jay-Z – a booking that riled Noel
Gallagher so much that he sparked a war of words over
the true meaning of the festival. In the end, Jay-Z won
by striding on stage with a guitar, warbling through an
insipid verse of Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’, stopping the track
and then launching into a skull-pounding ‘99 Problems’.
Suddenly, Glastonbury wasn’t just moving with the
times, it was defining them.
“
The Jay-Z thing turned everything ’round, didn’t it?”
Michael says. “It was Emily – she said, ‘Why don’t we do
Jay-Z?’ I’d never heard of him – I didn’t even know how
you pronounce it – and she wanted me to ring the agent.”
Off-stage too, the festival has had its fair share
of controversies. A fewweeks before the 1994 event,
following arson threats from protestors against a new
150
kwwind turbine set to help power the stage, the
Pyramid Stage burnt down in mysterious circumstances.
Then came the installation of the impenetrable
‘
superfence’ in 2002, after a raft of incidents – including
a 1994 shooting in the marketplace – meant security
needed to be upped. This discouraged the fence jumpers
and what Michael calls “the real old stoners and heroin
people who couldn’t get it together to get in”, but also
blunted Glasto’s anarchic, lawless edge. Michael’s
solution, against all advice, was to create an apocalyptic
late-night zone featuring a flame-spewing New York
ghetto made of derelict cars called Trash City, a ruined
23
rd-century Japanese slum complete with catchable
‘
virus’ and Block 9, a full-scale tower block with a
wrecked train carriage crashed into its third floor.
“
That’s what went missing with the fence,” says Michael,
“
because that crowd always offered something unusual,
something wild, so that was our chance to bring them
inside the fence, to do something that we paid for. It
fitted into the history.”
It’s testament to Glastonbury’s constant urge to
evolve, to stay ahead of a game for which it set the
rules. “It has to,” Michael muses. “If we churned out the
same thing year in, year out, it would just die a death,
wouldn’t it? We’re breaking new ground every day.”
“
Especially when there are a lot of festivals, it’s really
important for us to be moving on all the time,” adds
Emily. She notes the influence Glastonbury has had
across the UK festival scene, inspiring events full of
spectacle and imagination, such as the psychedelic
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DEFININGMOMENTS
04
The Smiths play
Glastonbury, 1984
05
Jay-Z on the Pyramid
stage, 2008
06
Green Fields is one
of the remaining
‘
hippie zones’ that
promote equitable
ways of living
06
0 6 9
F E S T I V A L S P E C I A L
G L A S T O N B U R Y
