It’s not just about music — Glastonbury’s buzzing with political energy too

Floating their boat: Extinction Rebellion supporters get across their message about catastrophic global climate change
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The liveliest crowd at Glastonbury yesterday was not for a musician but a scientist. As people arrived at Worthy Farm and pitched tents in the afternoon sun, thousands gathered at the Park Stage to watch Gail Bradbrook, the woman behind social movement Extinction Rebellion, call for the Government to put climate change at the top of its agenda.

Murals around the festival read: “What would Greta do?” — this slogan about 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg having replaced 2017’s “What would Jeremy Corbyn do?” Even the free tote bags given out with tickets are provocative, reading: “If not you, who? If not now, when?” This year’s festival is focused on eradicating single-use plastics — everything from water bottles to face paint must be eco-friendly (biodegradable glitter is available).

Pop and politics aren’t always an easy mix but from its early days there has been a sense of purpose to Glastonbury that goes beyond raving in a field. In 1981, when Michael Eavis, the dairy farmer who created the festival, decided to make it an annual fixture, it was organised in conjunction with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. More recently there was the second coming of Jeremy Corbyn in 2017: Glastonbury has always been a window into the state of the country.

Yesterday, an EU flag waved among the Extinction Rebellion artwork at the Park Stage; Brexit rumbles on in the background, three years after the referendum result was announced to general dismay during that year’s festival. This year, there will be talks about populism and the farm has been decorated with artworks sending up politicians, including cartoons mocking Nigel Farage.

But the most urgent battle is saving the environment. Eavis’s daughter, Emily, who has taken on his mantle and was smiling and wearing a pink kaftan with her children watching Bradbrook, has asked visitors to bring reusable bottles in a bid to avoid the usual sea of plastic bottles that obscures the field by the end of the event. In 2017 visitors to the farm threw away 1.3 million plastic bottles.

Susannah Butter
Daniel Hambury

Those who joined Bradbrook in committing “to secure solutions to protect the future”, as she put it, went on to march to the stone circle, the megalithic monument at the southern end of the festival site. Interwoven with all the usual music festival spirit there was a sense that having so many people together sharing a live moment was also an opportunity to take action.

Most Glastonbury-goers are sentimental about the place — if you just want to get off your face in a field there are plenty of other festivals that are easier to go to. Glastonbury tickets are hard to get your hands on and expensive once you do (£248 plus a £5 booking fee), while getting to the farm requires time and patience (unless you’ve secured a £10,000 ride on one of the luxury helicopters going there this year), so you have to have some attachment to it. This is also why it hasn’t fallen victim to the festival fatigue that has caused a decrease in ticket sales for so many other live music events.

"From its early days there has been a sense of purpose to this festival that goes beyond raving in a field"

Admittedly, there are contradictions within Glastonbury — but the site is 1,100 acres, the size of Bath, so it would be odd if everyone there were the same. Requests for flights there have risen by a third since 2017 when the festival was last held. Once you’re there you can stay in a £15,000 luxury yurt with a spa and Moët champagne. This is far removed from the original festival, which started when Eavis and his future wife, Jean, snuck into Bath Blues Festival to watch Led Zeppelin without paying the entrance fee. They realised their land could be used for a similar, more democratic event. Entry to their first festival was £1, which included free milk.

The Eavis family are central to Glastonbury, being able to pull off both politics and performance. Michael says: “It sounds corny, but I do want to make a difference.” He’s paid for new roofs for all the town halls in the surrounding area, and donated more than £1 million to charities.

Of course, attempts by festival organisers or even performers to appear politically engaged must be backed up by genuine desire for change, otherwise audience members will eventually recognise that they are hollow. The annual Coachella festival in California, for example, bills itself as a tolerant gathering that supports charities but the chairman of the organisation that oversees it has financially supported anti-LGBT+ campaigns, climate-change deniers and Republican campaigns. By the same token, many festivals are deliberately places to escape current affairs — at Reading and Leeds most people don’t know what year it is.

Jess Phillips MP, who is speaking tomorrow at the Parlay Parlour — a new tent at the festival with a feminist bent — first came to the festival to see David Bowie and broke her ankle jumping over the fence. In this year’s Glastonbury Free Press newspaper she says: “When I last came, which wasn’t this millennium, I didn’t go and listen to people talking politics, but now people are more politically active. It’s important to see politics as part of our everyday lives.”

There are views from across the political spectrum; Michelle Willis, who helps run the backstage bar at the Park Stage, stood as a Tory candidate it the 2015 general election, and this year there have already been debates about Corbyn. But it all co-exists usually happily, in this pop-up city state where you can both listen to Billy Bragg satirise the state of Westminster then forget about it while dancing to Kylie Minogue.

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