The festival’s return has filled a gaping hole in the British calendar. We soak up the atmosphere with the help of Jarvis Cocker, Self Esteem and Shaz from Shepton Mallet
At six o’clock on Wednesday morning, Emily Eavis is with her three children at the Glastonbury gates. Her youngest child is six, and has little knowledge of the beautiful chaos and cacophony that springs up here each June. Instead, the kids have grown accustomed to riding their bikes across the 360-hectare family dairy farm. “I think we’d got very used to the silence,” Eavis says. But now, after one fallow year and two pandemic summers, Glastonbury is back – and for its 50th year.
In the British social calendar it left a hole that represented so much more than just a wild few days away at a festival. It is the marriage of music and creativity and hedonism and politics and community. “I see Glastonbury as the annual explosion of the British soul,” says Mike Scott from the Waterboys. “Or maybe the weird side of the British soul.”
It’s why this year 200,000 people have been willing to wrestle with train strikes, fickle weather forecasts and the dread of festival toilets to head to this spot in the Vale of Avalon in Somerset. They are carried by the sweet promise of the days to come: of Paul McCartney on the Pyramid Stage, and cider at the stone circle, and late nights at NYC Downlow. After these long locked-down years, it’s time to find freedom again.
