Glastonbury's Back
This year's Glastonbury is going ahead after all with organiser Michael Eavis' promise to spend £1.5m on improving security, but will this be enough to ensure the safety and the enjoyability of this years event?
Two years ago the festival, licensed for 105,000 people, actually attracted over 200,000 because of woefully insufficient security measures and because everyone knew how easy it was to breach the perimeter fence. But this all changed when, at the 2000 Roskilde festival in Denmark, 9 people tragically died, shocking festival goers and organisers alike the world over.
But what happened at Roskilde only really highlighted the worst case scenario of what can happen at an over crowded festival, and in fact could happen again even without gatecrashers - you put 100,000 people in a big field with a band and accidents will sometimes happen. But everyone seems to have focussed on these deaths in the licensing of this year's Glastonbury. My concerns, meanwhile, are far more general. They concern how much fun is had by the honest, paying music fans.
Glastonbury 2001 should not have happened because the festival was not fun in 2000 and that's all that really matters. Glastonbury seems to have lost its roots as a gathering of hippies, or even as a music festival. Instead the people who surrounded me were drunks, stoners, louts, people who didn't actually go and see bands, but went there to get high. Now I certainly don't have a problem with a bit of substance abuse at a festival, but when it becomes the only reason that people are there, the festival can only suffer. The field I was in did not experience a feeling of community and love under a happy fog of smoke - it was aggressive and sometimes violent and I didn't like it one bit.
The music itself was ok. In fact, some of the bands present can only be described as fucking fantastic. But again, over crowding with non-music fans became a problem as despite the huge audiences (getting into the correct field, let alone near the actual stage was a real battle), the atmosphere, described by many as what makes Glastonbury so special in the first place, was practically non existent in many cases. This really spoilt what otherwise could have been some fantastic sets.
Michael Eavis is spending £1.5m to appease the authorities and reduce overcrowding, but I have to ask, is this enough? For a start £1m is going on a new, metal security fence. So now we'll have the best part of 100,000 people turning up and finding themselves stuck on the wrong side of this thing. At 12 feet it isn't actually significantly bigger than the old one. Are the organisers sure that no one is going to be able to breach its defences? Ok, so security patrols will pick up people trying to make it over, but there's only so many people you can actually arrest like that. Even if the fence does prove impenetrable, we'll still have all those people with nowhere to go, so what will they do? I've already argued that half of them aren't there to see the music anyway, all they really want to do is take drugs in a field, and there's certainly no shortage of fields in Somerset... Perhaps we'll even see the birth of a Glastonbury fringe, almost as big as Edinburgh's but somewhat less creative.
A further £500K is going on other unspecified security features, but I would suggest that simply issuing some form of wrist band and occasionally checking on them would be a fairly good idea.
OK, so all these nice new security features will significantly reduce the crowds, right? Well, yes, but not by quite as much as you'd think as
Eavis has successfully applied for a license for 140,000 people this year. This is an increase of 35,000 people and frankly I don't think the festival can possibly accommodate that many properly, even if it does stay dry. The crowds will still be too large to enjoy the music, the toilets will still be hellish after one day, let alone 3, and it will still take forever to move between stages.
In my book, Glastonbury could learn a lot from other big commercial festivals like Reading, with better access, properly enclosed music arenas with arm band entry, containing toilets which get cleaned each night. Basically without ever remotely infringing upon the enjoyment of the experience or hindering the paying public, these things make for a far superior festival.
And that was before Rod Stewart confirmed he'll be coming to Somerset this year.
31st Jan 2002