t BRIAN RASIC/GETTY IMAGES
drug dealers offering Es and wizz constantly, it was pretty lawless,” he recalls. “That changed after ’99.” After the ‘super fence’ was built in 2002, the event became more mainstream, professional and profitable. The other change was access. In the early days, artists shared
the backstage bar with journalists. Now, Bennett says, there are ‘worlds within worlds’ and, unless you’ve got the clout and contacts or work for the BBC, it is much more difficult. “We used to have a section called ‘How was it for you?’ asking celebs about their weekend,” he recalls. “In 2004, when Oasis played a show that was uniformly
regarded as disappointing, I walked up to Liam Gallagher and went ‘What did you think of last night?’ He went ‘I didn’t like it’. I said ‘Why?’ and he went ‘I don’t like Glastonbury full stop. It’s full of students.’ There was no PR with him, no shepherding.” Bennett says the shot in 1995 of Robbie Williams in a red
tracksuit with Liam Gallagher would be harder to get today. “It’s like when you get on a plane and you turn left or turn
right,” he says. “Even though you’re in the supposed hospitality area, there is another cordoned-off area which is where Kate Moss is, who is spending 20 grand for three days on a Winnebago.” Matt George, news editor at PA, has also seen a transformation. He first went as a reporter for the Western Daily Press to cover the drug dealing and stabbings in the early 1990s. In 1995, the paper started working with Michael Eavis and launched a magazine that was produced and sold on site. “That was quite a difficult undertaking in those days as there was no mobile communication at all,” he says. They sent the photos back to Bristol with friends on motorbikes and they had to write all the reviews by hand and take them to the Oxfam tent, which was the only place on site they could find a fax machine. “You couldn’t head there until after midnight when the bands had finished, so it turned almost into a 24-hour day,” says George. He also recalls “the mud” of 1997. “We were driving down in
the van and there were police warnings for people not to show up because conditions were so bad. It felt like we were
driving towards a hurricane or something.” Aside from trying to keep sheets of A4
“I love Glastonbury, but it is the toughest working weekend of the year for me and getting harder with every passing year.” Neil McCormick, chief music critic, The Telegraph
“It’s not like being a foreign correspondent but it’s as close as a bunch of music journos get.” Phil Sutcliffe, music journalist
“We vowed we’d never ever do it again and, by next year, we were absolutely chomping at the bit.” Pat Gilbert, editor Mojo special editions, and former editor, Q Glastonbury Review
“Glastonbury used to be a niche interest, now it’s like the Grand National – it’s like Glyndebourne.” Jon Bennett, journalist and launch editor, Q Glastonbury Review
paper dry, the physical effort trudging back and forth to the Oxfam tent still haunts him to this day. One of his favourite memories was flying over the festival with the photographer in a hot air balloon. His worst was in 1998, when a sewage truck went past and, instead of siphoning up all the sewage, blew it back out. “The stage sinking was fairly strange as well,” he recalls. BBC culture reporter Ian Youngs recalls sleeping in his car boot as it was the only dry place he could find. He has covered the festival 10 times, first for the Western
Daily Press, then the BBC. He remembers the floods of 2005 when more than 400 tents were submerged and local fire crews were drafted in to pump water off the site. “That was eventful because I left my wellies in the car,” he
says. He was wading to his car (barefoot so he did not ruin his trainers) when flash floods caused havoc. “I could see the tops of tents poking out of the water and this guy literally swimming back to his tent,” he says. He got a quote and a picture using his phone (a relatively new concept then).
Neil McCormick has been going to Glastonbury since the 1980s. He’s covered it for The Telegraph since 2011, when he says the gig was effectively “to sober up long enough to scramble together 500 words on a Sunday afternoon”. “Now we are feeding the voracious mouth of rolling blogs, shooting video segments for social media, taking instructions from distant editors who are themselves following the non-stop action and picking up threads from the endless BBC TV coverage, with the result that you wind up writing mini reviews and catch-up reports all day and night long,” he says. He wore a Fitbit one year and clocked up over 60 miles. “Glastonbury wrecks me,” he says. But, like others, he is lured back for more. “The impact of hundreds of thousands of revellers singing
along at the Pyramid stage beneath huge skies and a silvery moon is something that stirs me deep inside,” he says.
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