Hello from Glastonbury! This week’s newsletter is being written from the Guardian’s cabin at Worthy Farm, where we’ll be covering the festival in exhaustive detail (more on that in a bit). After an enforced pandemic-era break, Glastonbury feels particularly wild and antic this year, everyone hopped up on the prospect of a mass gathering after two years of the rule of six, Zoom pub quizzes, substantial Scotch egg meals and the like. Festival-goers of every stripe are here – ravers, metalheads, poptimists, jazz aficionados, glamorous hospitality hangers-on, lads in SuperDry T-shirts throwing each other in the air for some reason – all drawn together by the promise of revelry, community and some pretty spectacular music. There genuinely is no place like it.
Obviously, if you aren’t at Glastonbury, you may well find all this talk of the “magic of the festival” envy and or rage-inducing. But the good thing about Glastonbury is that it’s pretty easy to vicariously enjoy the festival from wherever you are. The BBC’s coverage alone will see to that: this year they have live streams from the festival’s “big five” stages – Pyramid, Other, John Peel, Park and West Holts – as well as TV coverage of the Pyramid’s huge headlining acts: the planet conquering Billie Eilish on Friday, some bloke called Paul McCartney on Saturday and Kendrick Lamar, performing live for the first time since the release of his new album, on Sunday. There’s a load of other stuff too, including a plethora of other sets to stream and the usual extensive radio coverage – check here for full info of the Beeb’s offering.
