KNOW YOUR UK FESTIVAL NUMBERS
£1: Price of a ticket to the inaugural Glastonbury festival in 1970. T Rex headlined.
£355: Price of Glastonbury ticket, 2023. ‘
More like £20 grand’: Price of a fully catered glamping package at Glastonbury’s Camp Kerala, according to one regular attendee.
22: Percentage of female and non- binary-fronted headline acts at 104 UK festivals this summer. (Sky News)
322: Nanograms per litre of MDMA found in the Whitelake River, downstream of the Glastonbury site, following the 2019 festival. This was 104 times higher than the concentration of MDMA found upstream. (Centre for Environmental Biotechnology, Bangor University)
£200,000 -£500,00: Estimated fees for Pyramid Stage headliner. Emily Eavis said in 2017 that Glastonbury typically pays ‘10 per cent less’ than other festivals.
£1.7bn : Estimated economic boost of music festivals in 2019. (UK Government)
DON’T BE THE PERSON WHO...
Finds a load of wheelchairs and decides to place random strangers in them to race them down a hill, resulting in mass breakage of limbs. (Secret Garden Party, 2007)
Has a bit too much wine in the long interval and falls asleep in the second half of ‘CosiÌ Fan Tutte’. (Glyndebourne, 2006)
Wears a T-shirt of a band who are actually playing at the festival you are attending.
Challenges the dude in the Slipknot mask to a bout of 4am ‘bin jousting’, only to realise this isn’t his first rodeo. (Bloodstock, 2018)
Sprays the Dance Tent with human excrement in an ill- thought-out scheme to suck away the mud. (Glastonbury, 1998)
Organises a festival on your dad’s estate while holding down a corporate job at Tesco, running up £355k on the company card, and ending up jailed for fraud. (Standon Calling founder Alexander Trenchard, 2011)
DECIDE WHICH FESTIVAL CLICHEÌ YOU ARE
THE BACKSTAGE WANKER
Yeah we get it, you went to school with Self Esteem, you have a special wristband, you know someone at NYC Downlow. Oh what’s that, you’re not even sleeping on site? That’s cheating.
THE SCHEDULE NERD
You worked it all out on Excel: if you leave the Black Midi set before the encore you can catch a glimpse of Thundercat en route to Angel Olsen and then back via Rina Sawayama to the main stage for Christine. But not the Queens. No time!
THE POST-HIPSTER FOODIE
You have no idea what music is cool anymore so spend much of the weekend dispensing arch opinions about sourdough pizza and ramen in the food bit. Wake up with a Malbec hangover. The worst!
THE CORPORATE DAYTRIPPER
The credit card company where you work is sponsoring the security fencing and, well, it makes a change, doesn’t it? Crazy days! You maybe didn’t need the suit jacket though.
THE DRUG BUCKET
You have no clue who is headlining. You have no clue what the powder was. You just spent an hour trying to Shazam your own tits. It’s 2.34 in the afternoon. All is well.
THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN
It’s so much madder than it is on TV! You just got chatting to a shaman from Aberystwyth and seriously, though, why can’t life be like this all the time? What’s that? You’re just going to ‘check out’ the loos... cool, cool.
THE SCHOOLBOY ERROR
You so wanted your GCSE summer to be fire, didn’t you... but you ODed on Ultra Violet Monster Energy and Miles’s CBD vape pen and spent the Imagine Dragons set quivering on the floor of the too-large tent you borrowed from your parents, wishing you were in Normandy.
THE RE-BOOMER
It’s your first festival since Isle of Wight ’71. You have your fold-up chair, your spare battery, your M&S picnic bits and you’re really quite fired up to see hip young gunslingers... *checks notes* The Kooks.
HOPE THAT IT WON’T BE LIKE:
MIDSOMMAR, 2019
Swedish folk festival. Didn’t end well. See the Florence Pugh movie.
FYRE, 2017
Massive wire-fraud, weeping influencers left stranded on an island eating plastic cheese in disaster tents. Founder Billy McFarland is reportedly planning Fyre II.
FIELD DAY, 2007
The inaugural Victoria Park event saw hour-long queues for beer, women forced to leave the site to pee and an inaudible main stage. Lessons thankfully learned!
WOODSTOCK, 1999
A old airbase; a quarter of a million ‘high-as-balls’ nu-metal fans; fierce heat; no shade. See the Netflix doc, Trainwreck.
GLASTONBURY, 1997
One stage sank in the mud. Neil Young pulled out. Worse: Kula Shaker deputised.
