If you’re going to the Glastonbury festival and you get there early, on the Wednesday or Thursday, there’s usually a smattering of entertainment dotted around the site that serves as a gentle warmup act for the main event. We Love Glastonbury is just that. It’s a preamble to the big weekend, whetting the appetites of both ticket-holders and telly-watchers with some of the most famous performances of the last couple of decades. It is interspersed with talking heads chatting about their favourite memories of the festival, whether they were there to see it or caught it from the comfort of their own living room via the BBC’s substantial and comprehensive annual coverage.
The programme is, it’s true, a bit slight, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It was always going to be impossible to condense more than 50 years of festivals into a single hour. This is mostly made up of the televised, BBC-affiliated last 25 years or so, although there is a brief clip of Oasis in 1994, when it would have been broadcast on Channel 4. The film also has to deal with the problem of other people’s memories of a really fantastic night out never being quite as interesting if you weren’t there with them. “The problem we’ve got is that there’s not much I can tell on camera,” says Self Esteem, sagely.
That means there’s not much in the way of genuine backstage gossip, hazy snapshots of hours lost at the Stone Circle or recollections of an ill-advised gong bath. Nor is there any sense of that band you discovered quite by accident because you got lost and ended up somewhere entirely unexpected – only for it to turn out to be one of the greatest sets you’d ever seen (before you went home, looked them up and realised they were terrible after all). There isn’t a lot of insight into why it is so great, because I suspect that is difficult to capture, and even more difficult to convey. I’m also not entirely sure why Joe Wicks is there, other than to tell us that he’s going for the first time this year, and that he enjoyed Adele on the live stream in 2016, but then again, he is doing a live workout at the festival, so I suppose he is earning his keep.
Other guests have more to chew on. Self Esteem remembers playing the John Peel stage last year, dressed as the Sheffield shopping centre Meadowhall. Jake Shears recalls playing the Pyramid stage with Scissor Sisters as the sun was setting, and looking out on a crowd that stretched as far as he could see. “Having that many people sing your songs back at you …” he says, unable to finish his sentence. Nish Kumar talks about being a fanboy, and there’s a clip of him with James Acaster in the crowd, nodding along to Big Thief on the Park stage last year. The comic Kerry Godliman, who recalls going without any camping gear as a teenager, makes an equally good case for watching the festival on telly; she almost chooses Dolly Parton as her favourite performance, before remembering that she actually watched it from the sofa.
Musically, this is all about the headliners doing their star turns, pleasing the big crowds and having a great time doing it. We get performances of full tracks from Pet Shop Boys and Róisín Murphy last year, Arctic Monkeys in 2007, the Killers and the Foo Fighers in 2017, Stormzy in 2019, Jay-Z in 2008, Beyoncé in 2011 and the late Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros in 1999, with the added bonus of a lovely bit of Strummer-related trivia from Sharleen Spiteri. One of the hidden treats in this documentary is in scanning the crowd, with its shifting fashions, and wondering where everybody is now, especially from that earlier footage.
Will We Love Glastonbury persuade naysayers? Not a chance, but there’s no reason why it should. If you’re watching a documentary with a title such as this and you’re still planning to walk away unimpressed, well, you couldn’t claim you weren’t warned. This is a Glastonbury greatest hits, sandwiched together with perfectly pleasant chat, from perfectly engaging people, and it is just fine as an opening act. It may even get you poring over the lineup as if it’s the Radio Times Christmas edition and you’re armed with a ballpoint pen, circling everything you’re planning to see. It made me intensely envious of everyone who is going this year, and it reminded me of many magical moments I have been lucky enough to enjoy there. Jessie Ware picks Jay-Z as one of her favourite performances, and remembers being in the crowd. “I’ve got goosebumps thinking about it,” she says, and I have to admit, at moments, I had the exact same feeling.
We Love Glastonbury aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer.
