Glastonbury 2019....

tone1

I hope Mark Radcliffe is well enough to cover it on TV. If he isn’t I’ve always got the thought of Jo Whilley in Wellies to console me....

Johnnyseven

lewism said:

merlin said:

Heartfeltdawn said:

Watching Glasto change over the years has been quite sad. 

Sad you think? Watching Glastonbury change over the years has been a sure-fire barometer of the state of our culture. 

I first went in 1983 when it was a CND (anyone else remember who they were?) Festival. Tickets were 12.00 and there were 30,000 people. The only structures I remember were tents and stages. No roadways. It was like being in a field ALL THE TIME. 

I then worked there in 1990, tickets were £38 and there were 70,000 people. Still felt OK though, despite house and acid music becoming popular and beats becoming predominant.....All night....

I was working there again last year. I'm not sure of the figures nor how much tickets were. The structures, the depiction of negative visuals, the fact that there was such a dominance of beats and that so much of what I witnessed was just mass culture, churned out to please the masses, nothing radical (except some of the theatre stuff) and generally really dumbing down everything that I stood for when I first went, and still stand for. I felt it was like walking down any major shopping street in the UK. For me, it missed the point entirely. 

Bland shittery. Sorry to be a troll to all you Glasto freaks out there, but it's become terribly and awfully normal. 

It’s the commodification of the alternative. You don’t have to actually like or care about something anymore, just look like you do. Buy the t-shirt, go to the festival, post it all on Instagram. Warhol was a very prescient guy, he wrote about this stuff back in the Sixties, people just presenting a version of what they’d like to be perceived as.

I love Glastonbury and go as often as I can but I do agree with what you say here. It's very different now to how it was when I first went in the 90's. A large number of punters these days seem to great lengths to look as festival as possible and spend their time rushing around ticking things off their must see bucket list rather actually being into what they see and do. I still love going though.

pintspiller

Do they still have cnuts spaced out on stuff banging on oil drums 24 hours a fcuking day?

Johnnyseven

I've never seen that or heard of it in the 20 years since I started going.