Glastonbury gives you more than a hangover…

Article added: 10/07/2009

The idea that all you can gain from a music festival is a hangover is ridiculous, as I discovered at this year’s Glastonbury Festival.

But before I go into that, a little bit about myself. My name is Joe and I am a student, I love music, and I love writing, I often try to fuse the two and write reviews. I have been going to gigs regularly for the last four years of my life, and I try to listen to an album for the first time every week (this week’s was the beautiful Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – how I let that slip through the net so long I’ll never know). Anyway, I have been to Reading Festival three times now, and I have had a great time. I have seen bands perform in the Britain’s biggest shed, Wembley Stadium, and in London’s destroyed live Mecca, The Astoria. I have seen some of my favourite bands, from Radiohead to Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine to Patrick Wolf, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to Arcade Fire. But none of these experiences can come remotely close to the beauty of Glastonbury. And that is not an exaggeration; the whole experience really is beautiful.

For me, music has always been about channelling emotions into an outlet, a release, in which some joy and some purity can enter the world. That’s music’s job; its responsibility. And nowhere in my life so far have I come across such a diverse and magnificent collection of bands and artists, all offering their perspectives on the world – providing their releases.

The first beauty of Glastonbury, as opposed to its rivals, is the size of the place. It’s simply phenomenal how vast it is, and not just in surface area, but in depth and breadth of culture. There are over 100 stages, from the mammoth Pyramid Stage (boasting a line-up of true heavyweights, Bruce Springsteen, Blur, The Specials, Dizzee Rascal to name but a few) to the teeniest stages with in-built shisha bars, and warm milk being sold. One minute I was with 80,000 others watching Lily Allen singing about crack whores in London, the next I was in a 20 man tipi watching a man billed as Undercover Hippy improvise a folk rock medley around the subject of festival toilets – something which I found to be the truest representation of the infamous lavvies I’ve yet heard! This huge choice of acts from all walks of life means that the festival does not have a sense of selectiveness. People last year complained about Jay-Z headlining as he wasn’t Glasto’s “type”, but the truth is, there is no Glasto type, because Glasto is all about acceptance and enrichment. It’s about diversity and culture. To say that a performer isn’t Glastonbury’s type is to say that a performer isn’t a performer. There’s no such thing as exclusion here, and that’s what makes it oh so – here comes that word again – beautiful.

The second beauty, of course, lies in the progressive politics of the place. In a place where the biggest bands in the world play on a stage dwarfed by a giant Greenpeace banner, the ethos comes before the music (well, almost). Built from humble hippy beginnings, Glastonbury is one of the last bastions of hippy culture, and this shows in the best possible way. There is no sense of discrimination or judgement at Glastonbury, simply several hundred thousand people wanting to have a good time. Everything there is done with a green conscience, from the recycling facilities throughout the site, to the WaterAid secret charity gigs. The green issue is one that the mass media often tries to talk down, but at Glasto, it’s the talk of the town.

The third, final, and most important beauty of Glastonbury is the people. The people I met there are simply some of the greatest people I’ve ever met, and chances are I’ll never see them again, which makes them even more special. You can walk around the festival and meet a new person every five minutes, with a new story to tell, and they are more than willing to tell it. There is no self-consciousness, no judgement, no sense of entitlement. Everyone wants to enjoy themselves, and they want others to have a good time with them. It’s a collective experience that only works when shared with thousands of complete strangers. And most importantly, it’s a model for how life could work on the outside world. Rather than living in a world of prejudice and fear, as we currently do, we could learn from Glastonbury that there is power in people, and not just the power to change political policy, but the power to enjoy one another’s company, to have fun together, and not to worry about what others think.

So, I went to Glastonbury thinking music could channel emotions, but I came out understanding it can do so much more: it can unite people, it can excite people, and it can change people. And people here are the key. The people make Glastonbury what it is, and it’s the lessons learnt from these people that I took from the festival, along with a whopping hangover!