It is too easy to fall down rabbit holes of old festival sets on YouTube. I’ve revisited the ones I first saw on TV – PJ Harvey in a pink catsuit, singing Down by the Water at Glastonbury, broadcast on Channel 4 in 1995 into my childhood front room, changing my tastes forever – and later, the ones where I can try to see if I was in the crowd, while suspecting it’s probably best to not know.
There is something that almost every one of the shows that took place before, roughly, the mid-00s, has in common: they are strikingly un-produced. Nirvana at Reading festival in 1992 is music history, but watch it again now: it’s three blokes playing their instruments on a vast, open stage. The razzle-dazzle, arena-show-style spectacles we’ve grown used to, the big screens, light shows, costume changes, fireworks that put New Year’s Eve to shame, are relatively new.
