Glastonbury Festival

 Glastonbury Festival 

Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Eavis in 2017
Description	English music festival held annually with a fallow year every 5 years

Glastonbury Festival is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place near Pilton, Somerset, England.

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 recorded at Glastonbury have been released, and the festival receives extensive television and newspaper coverage. Glastonbury is the largest greenfield festival in the world, and is now attended by around 175,000 people, requiring extensive infrastructure in terms of security, transport, water, and electricity supply. The majority of staff are volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for charity organisations.

Cultural event

Regarded as a major event in British culture, the festival is inspired by the ethos of the hippie, counterculture, and free festival movements. It retains vestiges of these traditions, such as the Green Fields area, which includes sections known as the Green Futures and Healing Fields. After the 1970s, the festival took place almost every year and grew in size, with the number of attendees sometimes being swollen by gatecrashers. Michael Eavis hosted the first festival, then called Pilton Festival, after seeing an open-air Led Zeppelin concert at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.

Glastonbury Festival was held intermittently from 1970 until 1981; since then, it has been held every year, except for "fallow years" taken mostly at five year intervals, intended to give the land, local population, and organisers a break.

Fatboy Slim called the festival "increasingly middle class. It is considered a part of middle class society in Britain.

June 2025 festival

On 17 November 2024, tickets for the 2025 festival sold out in 35 minutes. Tickets cost £373.50, plus a £5 booking fee, an increase of £18.50 on 2024. In January 2025 it was reported that the festival had doubled its profit to the year March 2024, bringing in £5.9 million pre-tax, donating £5.2 million to charitable organisations in the same period. On 3 January 2025, Neil Young was confirmed as the first headliner for the Glastonbury Festival 2025.

The June 2025 festival generated controversy with the inclusion of several pro-Palestinian artists, including Irish band Kneecap and rap duo Bob Vylan, both of which faced legal challenges after calling on-stage for "Death to the IDF", complaining about previously working for a "Zionist", and claiming that some people only understood violence. Bob Vylan also faced a potential revocation of their United States visas.

In June 2025, during Glastonbury 2025, the Eavis family announced that the festival would not be organised in 2026, to allow the natural environment to recover.

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Glastonbury is not the story here. Genocide is the story	Article	1 July 2025	Mike Small	“The British Establishment is having a nervous breakdown—banning Palestine Action for red paint and histrionics over Glastonbury and Kneecap. This is a pathological reaction: guilt, fear, and dread that they’ll never escape their complicity in over 20,000 dead children. When we look back and ask how this happened, we will remember their role in excusing, deflecting, and denying siege famine, the destruction of hospitals, and the targeting of aid workers and journalists.”

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References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 20 November 2017.
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