on our patch APEX NEWS AND PICTURES AGENCY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


Mud, sweat and beers


Ruth Addicott gets the lowdown on creating on-site Glastonbury publications


F


lying over Glastonbury in a helicopter with the late photographer Mick Hutson, leaning out and looking for the ultimate shot, is an experience Pat Gilbert will never forget. It was 2008 and Gilbert was editor of


Q Glastonbury Review, a 72-page magazine produced and sold on site from 2003 to 2013. “It was mad,” he says. “There was a staff of 25 – seven photographers, 10 writers, picture editors, sub-editors, and so on, and we were billeted in caravans and tents backstage. I always saw it as being like Mash, the TV series about the hospital in the Korean war and we all took to wearing Hawaiian shirts and combat fatigues.” The magazine went to press on Sunday night and was bussed to the site on Monday morning. “It was very difficult keeping order because some people couldn’t help but get caught up in the festival atmosphere,” says Gilbert. One writer went to review the dance tent and was meant to come back and do the write-up the following morning. “He turned up about midday, covered in green body paint, half naked,” recalls Gilbert. “He had no recollection of the


night before, let alone be in a fit state to write about it.” The lack of sleep, alcohol, basic conditions and constant deadlines took their toll and tempers got frayed. “People got fed up and were missing their loved ones,


they’d be crying, there’d be people losing it,” he says. “It was a long five days down there at times.” Gilbert remembers one year being particularly memorable.


At 9pm on the Sunday night, the photographer who was supposed to betaking pictures of the headliner for the front cover had his camera and £2,000 equipment stolen in the pit. They had no front cover, the sub had gone to see Elvis Costello and there were two pages incomplete. After frantically writing copy and finding a new front cover, the line went down and the tech guy said: “I don’t think it is going to go to press.” “We were sitting there for about an hour, waiting,” recalls Gilbert. “Then, about midnight, he said, ‘They’re there – they can print’.”


Jon Bennett was founding editor of Q Glastonbury Review


when it was launched in 2003. His tactic was to send the older, teetotal members of the team to the later shows as they were less likely to go AWOL. “Temptation was everywhere – it was like trying to herd


cats,” he says. Bennett’s first experience of Glastonbury was 1995, after a nine-hour journey from Newcastle in his Mini. “The first thing I saw was people jumping over the fence and you could hear


Be prepared and just keep smiling


If you are asked to cover the festival for the first time, take a few tips: Entertainment journalist, Jon Bennett, says: “Glastonbury has always been about who you know.


20 | theJournalist


Try and get stuff set up before you go.” David Hutcheon, Mojo’s


world music correspondent, recalls the days when it was a CND festival and the


“battalions of police looking for a fight”. His advice is: “Don’t take a car, camp on elevated ground, visit all the fields, take earplugs, spare earplugs and, if you’re doing a


write-up, be a punter, not a backstage sage.” Music journalist Phil


Sutcliffe recalls the time he was nearly set upon in the middle of a Leonard Cohen


set: “I was being an old geezer saying, ‘Please stop talking, people here want to listen’. There was about five of them and they looked as though they were about to kill me.” His advice is to “keep smiling” and move to a better spot.


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