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"Lots of farmers go to the races, and go hunting and things. But for me, I prefer to do this. It doesn't involve me drinking, for a start, and also I'm at home. I can do it all from the farm." - Michael Eavis.
The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, to give it its full title, is a three day festival held most years on a 700 acre site in rural Somerset. The core of the site is Michael Eavis' dairy farm, augmented by land rented from adjoining farms. The entertainment consists of rock and pop on two stages, an acoustic stage, a jazz stage, the Avalon stage, a theatre/cabaret/comedy stage, a cinema tent, dance tent, circus, juggling and just about anything else anybody considers entertaining. This years' festival will be the 17th held across a period of 27 years.
The First Festival - 1970
"I wanted to pay off my mortgage and farm on a low-key, ecologically sensitive, green-orientated basis. Then I would have been a happy man for evermore. In fact, I lost so much money in 1970 that my overdraft got worse." - Michael Eavis.
The festival was first held on the weekend of September 19th/20th, 1970. It was known then as Pilton Festival, a name it is still sometimes referred to as locally. Michael Eavis was inspired by a visit to the Bath Blues Festival held nearby at Shepton Mallet, where he crawled through a hedge to watch, starting a great Glastonbury tradition. He decided to organise something similar on his land.
After The Kinks pulled out, T. Rex were booked as the main attraction, Marc Bolan turning up in a velvet-covered Buick. There were also appearances by Amazing Blondel, Quintessence, Sam Apple Pie, Steamhammer, Ian Anderson (no, not the one from Jethro Tull), Duster Bennett, Al Stewart, and Keith Christmas, some of whom had only turned up to watch but played anyway. About 2,000 people attended the event, enjoying an ox-roast and free milk from the farm as well as the music. Also in attendance were the local Hell's Angels, who had been inadvertently hired to do security. They set fire to a hay wagon and stole the ox from the roast, but left before causing any Altamont-sized problems.
Glastonbury Fair - 1971
"Imagine, we're going to concentrate the celestial fire and pump it into the planet to stimulate growth." - Andrew Kerr.
Andrew Kerr was what you might call an intellectual hippy. Former director of the research team which had worked on Randolph Churchill's biography of his father, Sir Winston, his interests now lay in the area of the earth's spiritual energies. This included ley lines, numerology, and the geometry used for ancient buildings such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids.
Together with Randolph's daughter Arabella, he now wanted to organise a 'fair in the medieval tradition' at the Summer Solstice, when the earth's energies are at their peak. Michael Eavis' farm was the obvious choice: it was in the Vale of Avalon, close to Glastonbury Abbey, a building and location of great power; and Eavis had shown his willingness to host an event by the previous year's festival. The centrepiece of the Fair was a pyramid, doubling as a stage, one tenth the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza, which was built over a 'blind spring', a place where the earth releases and absorbs energy.
The festival, which was free, attracted about 12,000 people. It was described at the time by Somerset's medical officer as having conditions like those in a refugee camp, and recalled recently by Michael Eavis as 'very pretty, very romantic'. The bands who played read like a Who's Who of the British hippy underground, plus some who had already gone overground: David Bowie, Traffic, Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Fairport Convention, Edgar Broughton Band, Quintessence, Brinsley Schwartz, Family, Arthur Brown. And Melanie. The Grateful Dead famously did not show up, having to satisfy themselves with playing the real Great Pyramids five years later.
The Fair attracted local and national media coverage, mostly of an incredulous nature. The Observer, calling it 'one of the weirdest events ever staged in modern Britain', was more interested in Andrew Kerr's ideas. The Sun concentrated on orgies in the mud, naked hippies dancing on stage, and beetroot-dyed junior asprin being sold as LSD. The local press was more concerned with noise and damaged fields.
Michael Eavis went back to being a dairy farmer for the next eight years, with just a few low-key events being held on the farm. Arabella Churchill is still involved with the festival, organising the theatre and circus events. If anybody knows what happened to Andrew Kerr, who will be 64 by now, I'd be fascinated to know.