intro | information | bands | travel | last year | history | links
I don't plan to bore you with a blow-by-blow account of my festival last year (mainly for legal reasons),
rather point you in the direction of interesting stuff on the web. Suffice to say I had a great time
despite the mud, along with the vast majority of other people there. I don't think it was a classic year
for music, but Radiohead were very impressive on the main stage, the Blue Nile were a Sunday lunchtime
treat, Beth Orton charmed the Acoustic Tent (if you could get in), The Chemical Brothers took the Other
Stage by the scruff of the neck and pounded it into submission, and there was lots of fine stuff in the
Dance Tent, The Orb and System 7 come immediately to mind.
There was no official web site last year, indeed there never has been one, but since it was the first festival since the explosion in web use, lots of other people were willing to fill the gap. The two main fan sites were Jo Miller's and my own humble offering. Abraxas, who ran the Vibe Bar at the festival featuring music, 'net access and other interactive goodies, put up a very nice site. Oxfam, one of the main beneficiaries of the festival, had a site which, amongst other good stuff, explained how they planned to use the festival to test field toilet technology since it was the nearest simulation they could get to refugee and disaster situations. And that was before they knew about the weather. The NME, always a good source of information, had a few preview pages including a "humorous" A-Z of the festival. Oh, and Radio 1 had a few pages, which lived down to the BBC's usual poor standard.
After the festival, the HTML editors and scanners were working overtime. Select, who achieved the incredible feat of publishing and distributing a daily newspaper at the festival (after reading it most people seemed to use it to sit on to save their bum getting wet), put up an impressive review, as did Thomas Betts at his Indie World site. NME had the best music coverage of the festival but they seem to have taken it off their site. You can find other music reviews at Addicted To Noise and dotmusic. The oddest review has to be the one from the Grinstead Gazette, or is it just me finds East Grinstead inherently funny?
The Guardian have recently put an article about the 1997 festival on their site dedicated to this year's festival.
Kevin Shewan, the man responsible for the picture of the old Pyramid Stage scattered about these parts, has recently put up a review of his festival last year with a selection of very good accompanying photos. Definitely worth a visit.
The funniest page about last year has to be the Curious Yellow one. A mix of mud, debauchery, missed bands and beardy people.
Two pages about the American band Live provide a fascinating contrast in perceptions. One is a fan's review of their performance, the other is the relevant day from one of the band's tour diary. A guy called Jizzy reviewed (and marked out of 10!) the bands he saw. Lots of people reviewed their favourite band at the festival; so far I've found Placebo, the Prodigy and Radiohead, the Blue Nile, Radiohead, Salty Dogs, and a festival diary by the band Baby On Board. And don't forget to say hi to Claire, who wishes she could live at Glastonbury but reckons she took most of it back to Cork with her last year anyway.
Be warned that some of these pages contain a lot of full size photos and hence will take a long time to load. First off, ZDNet had a Glastonbury page which was part preview, part review; there are links to some good photos from the review bit. Bristol dance organisers Shimmy have a page of photos of DJ Simmer in action in the Dance Tent. Various people have put their personal photos on the web as well, the best ones are this set. Others worth visiting are Marcus from umr, a terminally sad person (his description, not mine), and somebody at PanEris. Also worth mentioning is Stone, whose pictures are mostly from previous years, but gets in here because a picture of him was in the 1997 programme, and it's a nice looking site.
A few odds and ends left over which don't fit any particular category. If you're impressed with the entertainment tents, then here's a snippet from a design bod who's equally impressed, specifically with the Kayam theatre tents. If you like to mosh at the front of the music stages, the pit security chaps from Specialized are looking after your welfare. And here's a picture of the special Glastonbury phone card, available only at the festival.
If you find any other good stuff about last year, let me know about it.