It’s hard to talk about the magic of Glastonbury without sounding like a massive cliché. Ooh, there’s something special about the world’s most famous festival? I’d never have guessed! From the outside, it’s the music that makes Worthy Farm in June seem so exciting. But Glastonbury is so much more than what makes it onto TV. It’s a round-the-clock experience with moving parts you just won’t find at other festivals: carnival processions, celebrities in dark sunglasses letting their hair down, the odd druid. You can be freer than you are for the other 360 days of the year.
All of this contributes to a feeling at Glastonbury that what you’re experiencing now won’t, couldn’t happen anywhere else. That extends outside of the crowds: you will see some strange stuff on site (particularly if you make it to the Stone Circle at 6am…). Asking musicians and attendees to share their funniest, weirdest Glastonbury stories, many emerge that cannot be reprinted: usually involving illegal substances, often relating to distant members of the British royal family or former England footballers. The rest are here:
Ethan, London, music publicist
My first visit was back in 2017: the year of Radiohead and Jeremy Corbyn. However, I do remember myself and two of my friends skipping the lengthy queue to get into the famous and now defunct Rabbit Hole bar, as we had a friend on the door who could sneak us in. What we didn’t realise was that it was on the condition that we strip down to our pants, stash our clothes in the corner and drape ourselves in some luxury sequin dresses for the evening. Being actors, we weren’t averse to a bit of dress-up – we duly obliged and danced for hours. There is a photo of us, which would undoubtedly be the weirdest thing you’ve seen all year, but I don’t think it should see the light of day.
Sue, Bristol, nutritionist
I went to Glastonbury in 1982, 1983, 1986 and 1993. The most memorable thing for me was having my car stolen from the massive car park in 1982. It was a bit of an old banger, an ancient Mini Metro, and we parked it on the Friday in one of many huge fields thinking we’d easily remember which one. When we went back on the Sunday night to leave we couldn’t find the car and spent about four hours looking, thinking we were in the wrong place. Eventually we acknowledged it was not us being stupid but that it was gone. The Metro turned up two weeks later when it was reported as abandoned at Taunton railway station, having been broken into and jump-started. I had to go down and pick it up and take it back to London. It was never the same again!
Bob Vylan (West Holts, Saturday, 2.30pm-3.30pm)
After retrieving seven boxes of extortionately priced chips for the crew and heading back to the BBC backstage where we were due to film our TV performance of “Wicked & Bad”, I witnessed a sight that still haunts me. A group of four people that were a few places ahead of me in the line were sat on the grass, each with a box of chips, their socks off and feeding one another using their feet. I stood and watched in disbelief until they all finished, waiting to see if anybody thought it was as weird a sight as I did. But people saw it, saw me seeing it and continued on about their evening. I thought I was hallucinating!
Ollie, Cardiff, private tutor
A couple of years ago, in order to get a free ticket to Glastonbury, I had to do children’s walk-around performances. I was playing Ratty [from The Wind in the Willows] and there was Mr Toad and Badger, and we had to perform every day. It was fun the first day; by the second day, it was significantly less fun trying to entertain a big group of children all day. What was worse was that none of my friends were doing it, but my co-stars wanted to hang out a lot. One time when I was hanging out with my actual friends, we were discovered by Badger and Mr Toad, still in costume. You can imagine the level of anxiety and stress that that induced for everyone involved.
Patrick, London, editor
Watching Diana Ross on the Pyramid Stage, I was taken aback by the gentleman on my left, whose reaction to the septuagenarian star’s song “Upside Down” was to request his mates turn him, quite literally, upside down, and drop ketamine into his nose. Which duly happened, to huge cheers from those privy to this demonstration of acrobatic bacchanalia.
Izzy, Gloucestershire, writer
After missing out on tickets in 2022, my best friend and I got a highly sought-after Oxfam volunteering spot, requiring us to complete three eight-hour shifts checking tickets and wristbands over the course of the festival. On one of these (very) late-night shifts, we befriended two volunteering veterans who had brought along a selection of glove puppets to keep themselves entertained. My overwhelming memory of that night is having a full-on conversation with one of these puppets at 4am, completely sober but delirious like I’ve never known.
Jack Cullen (Wishing Well, Sunday, 2.50pm-3.20pm)
We were having a beer with a group of guys, and one of their mates was leaving the festival to go and play a cricket match. My mate and I are definitely not cricketers, and we couldn’t fathom or understand this decision. So we started taking the mick out of this guy, saying how stupid he was to be leaving the best festival in the world, Glastonbury, to go and play a village cricket match. After giving this guy a fair bit of grief he left, and his mates told us that that was Jos Buttler, the England captain, and one of the most famous cricketers in the world. So he was not going to play a village cricket match. He was on his way to captain England against South Africa, and he took it on the chin from a bunch of nobodies.
Alex Rice, frontman of Sports Team
I’d just played the Woodsies stage and managed to sneak into the park bar. Thirty degree-heat, everyone steaming, then I see Thom Yorke in a corner, he chins his lager top and goes over nervously to ask Lennon Gallagher for a selfie. Have never looked at him in the same way after that.
Darcy, London, content manager
It was 2017, the first year that I went. We were sitting halfway up the hill with the Glastonbury sign on it, looking down over the site. We got up to come back down the hill, and then as we were walking down the hill past the luxury teepee camping, and all of a sudden, above the wooden wall that is around that area, this completely naked man flies up in the air and then drops back down. We were like, ‘What the f***?’ Literally a second later, he flies up again, d*** flapping and everything, flies back down. This continues as we’re walking past, and he gives us a little wave. We realised that he must be on a trampoline, this butt-naked older guy, up and down, peeking over the fence.
Nectar Woode (BBC Introducing, Friday, 2.30pm-3pm; Greenpeace, Sunday, 1.30pm-2.15pm; Crow’s Nest, Sunday, 5.30pm-6pm)
I remember one day at 2pm, I saw a kid walking around on stilts. He must have been 10, and it was like 2pm at Greenpeace (obviously, it's at Greenpeace). He was just being a bit creepy, and I was like, “You’re a kid and you’re on stilts. This is crazy!”
Hannah, London, journalist
I randomly ended up tagging along with a group of about eight strangers who were following this one odd but very charismatic man who claimed to be a magician. I decided that I wanted to go back to the VIP bit, which I had a pass for and they all followed me, the magician promising he could get them all in too. Sure, I thought. But as we were going through, the magician started talking to a pair of VIP security guards waving his arms melodramatically, and I’m not 100 per cent sure what happened but they all ended up walking through, about a minute behind me.
Lynks (Greenpeace: Thursday, midnight-01.30am)
I was so desperate to go to Glasto my first year that I agreed to play the Cheshire Cat at the Rabbit Hole. Basically, improv comedy with strangers for eight hours a night. I am not an improv comedian, so this was hell. I tried method acting and, me being a cat, curled up into a ball and had “naps” around the place. This passed the time well for a while, until a bunch of teenage boys started trying to wake me up. I ignored them but then they began throwing lime wedges from their drinks at me. I hissed at them, feebly. But this didn’t help much. I slinked away. Four years later, I have vowed I will never try to do improv comedy again.
Anya, Birmingham, journalist
It was my first year at Glastonbury in 2015 and the festival felt like a maze. I walked into The Temple at about 4pm really not knowing what to expect and it was packed with people throwing tomatoes at each other. It was absolute chaos – surprisingly, getting a tomato chucked at your face can be quite painful, and really quite disgusting! We were completely soaked with tomato juice; it took a long time post-festival to get the smell out of my clothes, but that’s Glastonbury! Where else could you stumble across something like that?
Billie, London, audio drama producer
Last year was my first Glasto and I was with a big group of people I didn’t know very well. My friend and I met the rest of the group quite late at the Greenpeace stage, and there was a group called Sue Veneers already playing. I couldn’t quite hear them, and when I got close I hated it initially. But after about 40 minutes, I changed my mind and decided that I was totally obsessed with what was happening on stage: lyrics like “you know you want to dance when you feel it in your pants” and “you know you’re having fun when you do it up the bum”. It was the funniest thing that I’d seen in ages, and I will be there for them again this year!
Kate Price from Jools (The Hive, Saturday, midnight-1am)
Last year we were queuing to get into [queer venue] NYC Downlow. It's always really difficult to get in there, and we were like, there’s no chance we're ever, ever going to go in. There’s a security guard, quite scary-looking, who mans the queue, and he’s just staring at me and my group. I was like, have I done something wrong? All of a sudden, this gorgeous person in drag, who was about 6ft 7in with heels, tapped me on the shoulder and said: “I’ve just spoken to the security guard, and he said there's no way you’re queuing in an outfit like that.’ I had on vintage leopard print fluffy hot pants, but it wasn’t that crazy of an outfit! The drag queen lifted me over the fence, put me over her shoulder, and then opened the barrier for my friends and marched all 15 or so of us to the front of the queue. Which was crazy enough in itself – none of my friends could believe it – but we went to the dance floor and then we turned around and Dua Lipa was standing right next to us, sunglasses on, obviously trying to not be noticed. So yeah, we spent the rest of the night dancing with Dua Lipa.
Gabby, copywriter, Wales
One year I remember seeing Pete Doherty walking around the festival wearing a big black poncho. He’s a tall guy so it looked a little strange. By the end of the day, rumours of the poncho had spread and eventually everywhere you went people were running around talking about Pete Doherty’s black magician’s cape. One guy near the main stage even screamed: “He opened it up and welcomed me into it!” It was an innocent and hilarious minor case of mass hysteria; it’s those weird things about Glastonbury that stick in your mind years later.
Lagoon (Nomad, Saturday 2am-3am and Sunday 10pm-12am)
The most legendary thing that happened at Glastonbury last year was the secret performance by Cyndi Lauper at NYC Downlow that happened in the middle of the day. Word had kind of travelled; the gay mafia who low-key run that part of the festival just kind of disseminated information. It was interesting. She was a little... raw, in the vocal, let’s go for raw. But I think that was what added to the whole kind of iconic nature of the performance. A sea of gay men gathered at whatever time it was in the afternoon to go and see Cyndi Lauper sing for however long it was, 10, 15 minutes. It was kind of giving raw, unplugged, Radio 1 Live Lounge Cyndi Lauper. Which, listen, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Glastonbury weather: A day-by-day guide to the Worthy Farm forecast
An expert’s guide to having a sober Glastonbury Festival
Rod Stewart reveals only two items on Glastonbury rider and surprise pre-show ritual
How to survive a music festival with your family
Jensen McRae: ‘Justin Bieber is like a big brother to me’
Will Smith’s seedy new single ‘Pretty Girls’ sounds like a cry for help
