Glastonbury is for middle-aged masochists

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. The headline act was Marc Bolan and there was free milk for all. Men with beards and women without bras swayed to and fro in the open air in a desperate bid to preserve the spirit of the Sixties into the 1970s.

This year, starting on 23 June, ‘Glasto’, as some people annoyingly call it, will attract 175,000 people and nothing will be free, not even the milk. The headline acts are Gorillaz, Muse and Stevie Wonder. This represents an ageing Mojo editor’s view of what Good Music is. The line-up is designed to satisfy the thirtysomething, fortysomething, and even geriatric attendees. (As of 2007, Saga Insurance, the insurance firm for older people, has been offering over-50s who have Saga Motorhome Insurance a refund on the money they pay for a motorhome pitch at ‘Glasto’.)