Close of play!
Given that – of course – nothing much actually happens on Wednesdays during the festival (and certainly by mid-afternoon, no arrests and no crime had been reported, either), that’s all for today. Organisers reckon 90 per cent of ticket holders will be on site by this evening. Whether you’re there or reading this from afar, do join us again from tomorrow morning when the action picks up.
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Weather latest
Here, courtesy of the BBC, is the latest weather outlook. Pretty nice tomorrow. Things might, I guess, change by Friday ...
Then again, it’s clearly going to be nothing like those years that trip off the tongue like a sommelier recalling a particularly fine vintage: 2007, 2005, 1998, 1997 .... I remember watching England beat, I think, Colombia in the World Cup in ‘98, with a paltry crowd soaked to the skin in a field near the farmhouse, half distracted by the sight of unmoored tents floating past.
The “late night” corner
Meanwhile, Tshepo Mokoena has been off to talk to some of the creative types responsible for the fabulous late-night action that takes place in the south-east corner of the site at the Unfairground, Block9 and Shangri-La.
Here’s Kaye Dunnings, artistic director of Shangri-La:
We’ve got some really exciting performances lined up: a group of people playing MPs, a dance troupe, loads of brilliant artwork and a 107-hour performance piece called the slumber party, by my friend Harry Clayton Wright – playing a teenage girl called Rebecca.
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Still they come
Our photographer David Leven is also on site, and he’s been snapping the steady stream of new arrivals.
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"I'm a Glastonbury virgin. What should I do there?"
![Ben has a friend attend to his new haircut. [Not that this is actually Ben or has actually happened yet.]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/6/24/1435159975080/9cd4f91b-1da1-466e-89e0-a954ff6cb92f-460x276.jpeg)
Our own intrepid reporter Ben Beaumont-Thomas is heading to Glastonbury for the first time ever this year. As he writes:
Coachella: yes. Benicassim: yes. Various events in Butlin’s holiday camps wandering around the amusement arcades in a fugue state: emphatically, yes. But the world’s greatest music festival has always eluded me, until now …
So far, my concept of the event is hazy: it’s hard to disassociate it from crane shots of flag-waving punters and Jo Whiley’s analysis. All I’m really expecting is the skyrocketing probability of contracting a waterborne disease.
With this in mind, I’m putting myself in your hands. In the comments below, post your suggestions of essential rites of passage for this Glastonbury virgin – or send them via my Twitter, @ben_bt. They can be anything from food choices, to little-known tents, or nocturnal adventures – we’ll pick out the best suggestions, and I’ll be dispatched to tick them off during the weekend, complete with photographic evidence posted in our liveblog. Stagediving naked during Kanye’s set might not make the cut but, other than that, I’m more or less game.
Helpful suggestions so far include:
And ...
Just don't wear your normal clothes. Get some cool festival clothes from Topshop. If your friends have been in the last few years they will be able to tell you what to wear. You want to fit in after all.
Also remember your IPhone charger. You need to be able to take pictures of your friends and you interacting with all the other like minded people and show them to people at the office next week. It'll be a life changing experience.
LOL!
Of course, you can also add any suggestions in the thread for this blog …
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The sound of silence …
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“Glastonbury operates according to a principle that many politicians – especially Conservative ones – hold dear”
Just to reinforce that point about the lack of a big corporate presence at the festival, one member of the intelligentsia writes:
Glastonbury is one of the few places you can go where the tide of corporate homogenisation is held back. There’s no one yelling at you about the unexplained item in the bagging area, because the businesses are small, independent, often local. Glastonbury is a carnival of entrepreneurship.
Mind you, those are the words of Steve Hilton, former adviser to David Cameron, writing in the Spectator this week. He makes the claim that …
… far from being a left-wing utopia, operates according to a principle that many politicians – especially Conservative ones – hold dear: ‘trust the people’. The festival is a temporary town of around 150,000 people. Largely, they are left to their own devices. There are no rules. No officious busybodies popping up every five minutes to tell you that you can’t walk here or sit there. No well-meaning government ‘initiatives’ to ‘help’ and ‘protect’ you. The few police officers you see are smiling and kind.
Does that ring true? Personally, I think it rather undersells the enormous logistical exercise involved, never mind the specious politics, but – as with everything – let us know your own view in the comments thread …
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Some numbers
This is the 33rd Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, which takes place in south west England at Worthy Farm between the villages of Pilton and Pylle in Somerset, with a view out over to Glastonbury Tor. The first festival to be staged here by resident farmer Michael Eavis was the Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival in 1970, headlined by Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Read a lovely interview with Michael here).
Next year came the first “Glastonbury Fair”, including the first incarnation of the famous Pyramid stage and sets by the likes of David Bowie, Traffic and the Worthy Farm Windfuckers. The event was captured on film by fledgling director Nicolas Roeg and someone called David Puttnam.
It is now the largest greenfield festival in the world, and this weekend there will be upwards of 175,000 people on site, of whom 135,000 will be ticket holders. This year, those tickets sold out in October in a record 26 minutes. Of the remaining festival goers, many will be volunteers working for the three chief charities that Michael Eavis and his daughter Emily choose to support to the tune of up to £2m each year, Oxfam, WaterAid and Greenpeace. “We give as close to [that sum] to charity as we can every year. That is our upmost priority,” Emily Eavis said this week.
Nay-sayers be doomed: the festival remains resolutely un-corporate! It has three core partners: the BBC, which covers the action extensively; mobile firm EE, which provides data coverage for festival goers; and, as media partners, the Guardian. We get to give festival goers the mini-guides they use on site.
“A lot has changed for him,” Eavis added of her 79-year old dad, explaining that she and her husband Nick Dewey now take full responsibility for most aspects of the festival. “He didn’t have these constant corporate approaches to deal with 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, where we have media and corporate brands trying to cling on. He just doesn’t understand it.”
One thing we know, though. Michael still takes a passionate interest in the festival and he is also inordinately proud of his cows. In fact, earlier this year, Worthy Farm was voted Britain’s best dairy farm by the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers!
For anyone wanting more facts, it’s been calculated that:
- the total official attendance at all festivals to date (including 2015) is 2.8m. This is the equivalent in size to the entire population of north-east England, or the total population of Mongolia
- the money made from ticket sales over the lifetime of the festival to date is £325m. This is the equivalent (in today’s prices) of the third highest-grossing rock tour of all time, the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour of 1994-5
- the site has grown in size to 900 acres, or around 1.4 square miles. The perimeter now runs a distance of 8.5 miles - around a third of the distance from Dover to Calais
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“Maybe we should hire a tent, right? Or maybe buy one.”
Further encounters with festival goers ...
Jihun Im, 23, and Jongsu Lee, 23, from South Korea
Jihun: “I’ve flown 13 hours from Los Angeles straight to Glastonbury. It feels great to be here, amazing. It took another four hours by bus. We missed the ticket booth so we had to go all the way around again. But now we’re finally here.
“People are so kind here. Very big smiles. I think people change here just for five days. They are more accepting.
“I had to come this year for the Who. I want to see the Who so much. We’re going to run into the crowd and get to the front.”
Jongsu: “But of course we are lazy. I don’t think we’ll make it. We’d rather sit down, drink beer and listen to music, everything but Kanye West.
“In my country, I visit more than three festivals a year. I think you should just drink and listen to music, calm down. We are lazy people. We have brought drink and money, some clothes, that’s it. Maybe we should hire a tent, right? Or maybe buy one. We don’t know how much they are. Do you know?”
Elize Clark, 24, from Reading and Amanda Siaw, 34, from London
Elize: “It feels like a nightmare at the moment. Our bags are killing us, it’s painful! We woke up at 5am thinking it would be early, but everyone’s already here and pitched up. Things didn’t go to plan, but hopefully it’ll go ok.”
Amanda: “Camping is great, though. If you’re in London, people just want to get from a to b, but here you can meet new people and experience things you haven’t experienced before. I’m really looking forward to that. I’ve heard amazing things about Glastonbury. I’m here for everything.
“I was quite disappointed the Foo Fighters aren’t coming, but Florence will kick it out of the park. Let’s hope the sun will keep shining.”
Kate, 29, and Mike, 29, from London
Mike: “This is our second-ever Glasto together. I’m celebrating my birthday, the last in my 20s. We’ve been together for two-and-a-half years. We met online - not Guardian Soulmates, but close. We survived camping together but we’ve bought a bigger tent to throw our junk into ... or it’s two separate bedrooms. I can slam the door using the zip.”
Kate: “We try to spend as little time as we can out of the tent. We get up to fun stuff. The outside Circus stage saved our lives last year but we also saw Metronomy play a tiny tiny secret set. It was a tiny tent with a few hundred people: amazing.
“We’re going to have a birthday drinking party tonight up on the hill. I can’t wait.”
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Algorithmic programming (the headline you longed to see)
What you perhaps didn’t know about this year’s festival is that if the running order had been decided by popularity on Spotify, you’d be in for a whole lot of headliners clutching acoustic guitars …
The new lineup is how Glastonbury would have looked if it had been programmed according to the number of listens each act has had on Spotify during 2015, from information supplied by the streaming firm. Poor Super Furry Animals, who thought they were headlining the Park stage on Sunday, find themselves tumbling down to a mid-afternoon slot; James Bay replaces Florence + the Machine as a Pyramid Stage headliner, while Kanye gets bumped from his spot, too – for another young Englishman with an acoustic guitar. In fact, across three days and three stages, only 10 acts remain in their allotted slots …
You can see the rejigged lineups for the Pyramid, Park and Other stages here.
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Other delights on site
Here are some further images that festival goers on site have been sharing on Instagram.
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What to expect part 2: the fashion!
While our fashion editor, Jess Cartner-Morley, has cast her eye over what to wear and what to look out for in the fashion stakes at the festival:
Before you roll your eyes at the cut-off denim short, bear in mind that, as Emily Eavis points out, “My dad [festival founder Michael] has always worn them. They are easy to navigate in a portaloo, they don’t drag in the mud, they’ve got lots of useful pockets. They’re perfect.”
The full, very funny thing is here.
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What to expect part 1: the music
Our chief critic Alexis Petridis has written about what to expect at the festival music-wise, noting the appeal of the likes of Kanye West, but also offering some tips:
Should you be inclined to complain that the music is insufficiently wide-ranging, then perhaps the Gully stage, variously home to artists dealing in Korean grunge, Chinese ska, Jordanian dabke and choubie and a Taiwanese duo who “sound like Throbbing Gristle doing hip-hop ...
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‘All four of us were conceived at Glastonbury’
Here’s what some of those happy new campers have to say for themselves.
The Williams clan from Pembrokeshire camped overnight to be first in the queue.
Sandra: “We’ve been coming for 22 years. This is our family holiday. There’s 20 to 30 of us. All our children were conceived at Glastonbury.”
Rosie: “It’s a tradition to be first in the queue. We’ve been here since 7.30pm last night. We camp in front of the main stage every year – if you want to, you’ve got to come here early.”
Julian: “We’ve been drinking, sleeping, eating all night. Annoying the security. Having a good time. Making new friends. I tried to sell a leaf in the queue last night. It’s still there, no one bought it. I’ve made a hat – there’s a thousand sequins – I put them on myself.
“I felt a bit like a sheep going through the turntables, but we had to get here early because we want to get the pitch up at the main stage with our big Welsh flag. It’s changed for the good over the years: much less crowd crushing. I’m mainly looking forward to the people, not the music. Imagine all this happening without the people.
Rosie: “All four of us were conceived at Glastonbury, so we always come together. One year mum and dad went without us. We had to unplug the phone and turn off the TV.”
Harriet: “I’m just part of the tribe, we’re all very close. I want to pitch up in a good place and be at Glastochat. It’s an amazing Facebook group of 13,000 people, and on Thursday at 1pm, we’ll all meet at the tree in the main field with couple of hundred people with pink umbrellas. It’s going to be amazing.
Chris Clarke and his friend Mick Rees first met at the festival.
Chris: “We’ve been queuing since 9pm. We feel knackered. You’ve got to do it because you get a pick of the camping ground. I always camp in the same area – the disabled area. When you want to sleep you can sleep. Around Arcadia you won’t sleep.
“We’re mates: we met at Glastonbury six years ago. We live close but we met on a Twitter group. We meet at the West Holts stage on Thursday. It started as 30 of us and now it’s maybe 350 people.
“We’re into rock, folk and psychedelic music – but without the drugs. I don’t want to see any of the headliners. You buy the ticket before you know who’s playing. We come here for the music but also everything that goes with it. The atmosphere, the weird stuff on the other side … I can’t explain it. You need to witness it for yourself.”
Daniela Rodrigues and Josi Santos have arrived at Worthy Farm from Portugal.
Daniela: “We’ve traveled all the way from Portugal to be here. We arrived at 7pm yesterday. We were supposed to sleep in Bristol but we ran out of money so it was cheaper to stay here. We got two or three hours of sleep, but now it’s way too difficult to sleep because of the sun.”
Josi: “There was some partying last night. But generally everybody’s embracing the spirituality of Glastonbury. I’m embracing it.
“We’ve been a couple for six or seven years. This festival is different from the others. You can sleep in front of the Pyramid stage – it’s great! We’re definitely not here to see Kanye. We’re here for Hot Chip and Chet Faker.”
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Weather latest
If you’re thinking: “Looks very sunny on site at the moment, I’m sure it will last”, then … sorry. There’s a little more detail here, but this is the latest on the weather:
Perhaps it’s time to face up to reality: you will definitely need wellies and most certainly waterproofs. Of course, there will be intermittent moments of dryness – mostly on Saturday – and the next two days are clear in Worthy Farm, meaning you won’t be pitching tents in the rain. So you might need a hammer. A tin of beans will do. Or a heavy shoe.
Here’s what a range of different weather sites predict:
Friday
A high of 18C, with light rain from 6am, moderate rain from 4pm, and sunny spells from 7pm (BBC Weather/Met Office).
Showers from 12pm to 4pm, some sun, with a high of 19C (AccuWeather.com).
20C high, 12C low. 40% chance of rain (uk.weather.com).
Saturday
Light rain shower at 7am, but cloudy for most of the day. An early afternoon high of 19C (BBC Weather/Met Office).
With a 20C high, there will be some sun during the day, and it’s cloudy and breezy with some showers at night. (AccuWeather.com).
Partly cloudy, 21C high, 13C low, 20% chance of rain (uk.weather.com).
Sunday
Showers from 7am until 10am, cloudy afternoon, more showers from 7pm. Highs of 19C (BBC Weather/Met Office).
Cloudy and breezy with a high of 19C and rain showers in spots. (AccuWeather.com).
18C high, 13C low, 50% chance of rain (uk.weather.com).
I’m indebted to the Gloucestershire Echo for the claim/hard fact that there have only been eight completely dry years since the festival began. Whether that’s a comfort, I’m not sure.
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Packing tips
If you’re heading to the festival yourself and have yet to finalise your packing, fear not, because we asked readers of the Guardian music site for tips on what to bring. So here’s some handy advice …
A small bowl(or get a collapsable bucket) and a flannel to wash in. Nice to have a proper wash rather then using wet wipes.
If you in a car, about 25 cans of beer a person, walk back to the car one morning, have a beer and carry a load back, your save a fortune. And while your there have a change of clothing, save you carrying so much when you first get there. Plus a bootle of vodka decanted in plastic!
A small cooker and kettle to make tea, it's 1.50 a cup! (You get milk there easy)Your be popular.
A bag of carrots. They don't go off and are perfect for munchies when the nearest food truck is a 30min walk away, or if you cant afford a 10 quid pad thai. And always carry a carrot with you, they're a godsend at 4am!
Most of all, don't forget to bring love for yourself and everyone else!
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Our photographer Alicia Canter was on site yesterday when final preparations were being made.
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Which has now indeed happened …
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Today is the day that the gates to the festival open ...
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So it begins
Welcome one and all to the Guardian’s Glastonbury liveblog, which once more will run through until the close of the event late on Sunday night, with barely time to get your head down for a quick kip. This is the 16th year of our media partnership with the festival, so please hang on in there with us if any of the running jokes that will follow seem in any way familiar, and rest assured that we promise you much that is new.
The 1,500 festival goers at the first-ever Glastonbury in 1970 paid £1 for the privilege, and were handed a free pint of milk on entry. Now it’ll cost you £225, and milk’s about 44p a pint. But surely that still represents great value? Or, if you’re not going … well, follow it all with us, for free!
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Train a raven to sit on your shoulder and wander around the festival site asking people "Where did it all go wrong?"