Idealistic city Glastonbury is a microcosm of British life

Arguments over whether Glastonbury has sold its soul have no doubt raged since its birth in September 1970, when Michael Eavis invited 1,500 people onto his dairy farm in Somerset to see Tyrannosaurus Rex (later known as T Rex), and gave attendees free milk. Sat in the healing fields at my first Glastonbury in 1997, I endured a plum-voiced crusty pontificating about how the main festival had lost its way: “It’s like Babylon down there,” he whinged.

While Glastonbury might have brand partners, including Vodafone and Land Rover’s electric vehicles, it tends to manage them more discreetly than other events. Take London’s All Points East: in 2018 Patti Smith declared “You are free! Free from corporations!” at a festival run by multinational AEG Live, the right-wing owner of which, Philip Anschutz, has given millions to anti-abortion causes. Smith’s words were nearly drowned out by the PA system of a nearby stage covered in branding for Firestone tyres.

Such scenes are now typical of our hypercommercial live entertainment landscape. The merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010 marked the beginning of the corporatisation of gigs and festivals, with sharp rises in ticket prices, exorbitant VIP packages and cordoned-off “priority” areas for the exclusive use of certain credit card holders. The front row is no longer reserved for the biggest fans, but those with the fattest wallets.

The other big musical event of the summer is Oasis’s stadium tour, with nearly 1.4m tickets sold through the euphemistically named practice of “dynamic pricing”, which pushed some fans to pay as much as three times the original price due to “demand”. Given the popularity of the reunion, this felt rather more like price gouging.

By contrast, Glastonbury’s £378.50 ticket price (only slightly more than that paid by the worst-exploited Oasis fans) includes a £5 booking fee that’s far lower than that charged by commercial ticketing companies such as Ticketmaster, and the festival has a payment plan allowing tickets to be paid for in instalments. The Glastonbury experience might cost more than a package holiday – and double what my first ticket did back in the 90s, even after adjustment for inflation – but you do get a lot for the price of entry compared to back in the day.

In this context, Glastonbury, which prides itself on remaining true to its countercultural roots by resisting overbearing corporate presence and remaining as accessible as possible, might seem like the last redoubt of a more authentic type of live music experience.

Glastonbury is a national event like no other: a rite of passage for teenagers, and a familiar place of return for generations of families. For the days of the festival’s duration, it becomes one of the most densely populated places on Earth. It is a temporary, idealistic city that, away from the razzmatazz of the big stages, earnestly champions peace, sustainability and equality, and has no real restrictions on hedonism. For those not there, Glastonbury’s annual domination of the cultural conversation can be wearisome, but it occupies a unique place in the British psyche.

Its status shows no sign of diminishing – well over 2 million people tried to buy tickets for this year’s event. This sustained success is down to the festival’s knack for evolving by following cultural trends. Investment in site infrastructure over the years allowed capacity to expand, with a perhaps inevitable result that the music has shifted to the centre ground. It began as an event for folk and psychedelic rock headlined by Marc Bolan, moved with the countercultural 1980s to encompass post-punk, jumped on the explosion in dance music, and astutely rode the wave of Britpop. (As a 17-year-old in 1995, I sat glued to my telly raging with FOMO as Pulp played their career-cementing performance replacing the Stone Roses.)

In more recent years, it has adapted to the cultural dominance of pop, booking more mainstream acts. It’s true that metal, grime, UK hip hop and more experimental sounds have long been under-represented at the festival, but other sub-genres are well represented: the bookings of the Block9 area, and especially its LGBT+ club NYC Downlow, are widely regarded as inclusive highlights of the UK’s electronic and club music calendar.

Perhaps those sniping from their sofas about pop acts now dominating the BBC’s exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) coverage are unaware that it’s perfectly possible to go to Glastonbury and entirely avoid all this, instead wandering around absorbing the circus and cabaret entertainment, visiting stages and tents devoted to science, literature, film and art. These tend not to feel awkwardly bolted on, as they do at other more corporate events.

Glastonbury is a far cry from the sort of contemporary high-end boutique festivals at which a few bands of faded glory appear to have been booked as musical wallpaper for yoga classes and lessons in how to use Le Creuset. It can still generate political debate, as Keir Starmer’s clumsy intervention earlier this month that the controversial Irish rap group Kneecap’s appearance was “not appropriate” demonstrates. Hopefully this noise doesn’t overshadow the talks and panels on anything from countering the rise of the far right to the crisis in social care – discussions that have been an integral part of Glastonbury for decades.

This is where the status of Glastonbury – a culture-straddling behemoth trying to retain its left-field roots – gets fraught. There’s an irony in hosting talks on environmental activism when a rich minority are being flown into the site in fuel-guzzling helicopters. A panel called Saving the Planet but Leaving the Workers Behind sits oddly alongside reports that Scissors, a stage devoted to femme queer acts, was not only not offering a fee, but demanding artists work eight-hour bar shifts in order to play the festival. Glastonbury insists it’s not responsible for this particular stage, and justifies the low fees paid to artists elsewhere by pointing out that profits are ploughed back into the festival, alongside donations to charities including Oxfam, WaterAid and Greenpeace.

Even if they’re the result of good intentions, the decidedly ungenerous fees mean Glastonbury can feel like part of the problem in a live music industry in crisis. Two grassroots venues in the UK are closing every month, and most artists lose money on tour. Our musical ecosystem would be far healthier if the fortune spent on tickets, travel, booze and food for Glastonbury or stadium gigs by Oasis, Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift, were spread out over the country, in small venues, across the year. These, after all, are the places you’ll now find the countercultural energies that once fuelled Glastonbury.

The festival, like the country that can often seem obsessed with it, has changed beyond recognition since the 1970s, or even the mid-90s when TV broadcasts made it the household name it is today. If it has become more corporate, it is not alone: the same applies to football since the founding of the Premier League in 1992, or how we drink, eat and socialise today in increasingly identikit city centres dominated by chain restaurants and bars. The market will always dictate that some can buy a superior service to the rest of us. And, as the festival approaches a fallow year, invests in more land and is passed down from father to daughter – with the 89-year-old Michael Eavis handing over to Emily – more change is certain to come.

Look again at those aerial photographs, that collage of tents, dust, shops, restaurants, bars, places of communion and community, of intoxication and education, awkward compromise and contradiction. Glastonbury is a place of increasing disparities between those working zero-hours contracts and a gated-community elite, with divisive issues and political tensions bubbling under the surface. In other words, apart from the absence of Nigel Farage, it’s a familiar picture: a microcosm of Britain in 2025.

Photographs by PA/Alamy, Jim Dyson/Redferns, Robert Blomfield Photography/Getty, Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty