Glastonbury – What is it really like? A back stage perspective.

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Words and photos By Stewart Filbey

Thursday 27th June –

Alarm goes off at 7am, I wake up with an excited feeling of anxious dread. Today is the day, all of the planning and conversations come to fruition and it’s time to leave for Glastonbury. I leave my house at 8am and I go out to my splitter van and start my journey to to East London, the complete opposite direction to Glastonbury! Here is where I make my first collection, artist and management from their overnight hotel. We leave together and hit the A406 then disaster! The turbo blows! And the Splitter breaks down. What an incredible start to the journey. After much frantic phone calls and quick thinking, we have another replacement splitter and flat bed truck on the way.

Just a little over an hour later the replacement splitter arrives and it’s head and foot down to reach the Glastonbury site red gate, 3 hours later we arrive at 16:35 5 mins after out scheduled load in time, we have finally made it! Disaster has been avoided and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

We load into the Woodies stage and begin all the prep work, Video and Stage techs alike building rolling risers and various production meetings happening, everyone buzzing with excitement for what’s to come. Once we have completed the sound checks we have a few hours to have a little roam. At the front of the Woodsises tent we the find Woodsises bar which is set to the back drop of the enchanted wood areas where the sounds of what can only be described as a soundtrack from Lord of the Rings is playing straight out of middle earth. There is a calmness in the air and many many happy faces, everyone is friendly and smiling and for most have been there many days already, the calm before the storm.

After a few hours of wondering around the site and familiarising myself. It’s time to head back to the hotel at around midnight. Management have booked hotels back in Bath 40 mins away and off we go, and arrive at the hotel and end the day, with a start that was about as stressful as it sounds.

Friday 28th June

7am alarm call and time to round up the crew and artist to head back to site for 8am to prepare for 9:30am sound check. At this point the crew has very little to do, so from then until show time the day is my own, I have the whole of Glastonbury at my disposal! I download the app and begin to plan my day via the line up schedule.

What immediately becomes clear is that there is a high volume of dance, edm and DJ acts listed, so many in fact I am struggling to find bands and rock acts to check out. It appears Glastonbury has become another extension of the BBC Big Weekender, pop and commercial acts are plenty. But very little options for rock, indie, blues acts. Which I found very surprising. Don’t get me wrong there are highlights scattered throughout the weekend but all in all a very dance heavy line up, now not to be hypocritical but I was hired by 3 dance acts to provide logistics throughout the weekend, so I am very aware of

the reason why I am there. Once I have found a general plan of my day I head off into Glasto! (On my own)

The best way I can describe my impression of Glastonbury (my first) out of lockdown and I think I recall resembling it to “is this how the world would look post apocalypse and is this how civilization will rebuild itself from?” It’s already starting to be a hot dry weekend so there is a misty haze of dust you can see in the morning sunlight and what can only be best described as a whole population of a large town/city dressed to impress and some not so much, a few people looking like they have already finished the festival and looking already worse for wear. But the air is alive! It’s an overwhelming rush on the scenes so much to take in and the scale of it all could almost give you a headache before you have even begun. 1,500 acres of wonderment!

One thing I noticed almost instantly was the lack of Jamaican Old Holborn in the air, not sure if it is just a personal preference but I was completely surprised! That whole first day I never got the whiff of anything exotic? In fact I never had any indication that this was the chemically induced free for all it used to be, everyone seemed relatively sober, admittedly this is day one. But this is the first indication that Glasto is part of a different generation now and worlds away from what it may have been before.

Pounding dance beats and multiple dance stages scattered everywhere. A guitar riff or drum kit no where to be heard. I make my way around site and the options of food and places to spend money are abundant. The senses still over loading. Everyone is friendly and smiling and the general atmosphere is electric. I spend all day going from stage to stage area to area taking it all in. Still with the feeling of anxiety of what’s to come. 9:30pm rolls around and I am back on duty for the set at Woodsies.

Jamie XX played an absolutely incredible set, the tent was packed the energy was pulsing and oozing out of the doors and around the area surrounding the tent, the sheer size and scale is breathtaking, 4,500 capacity tent and every single person absolutely dancing like their lives depended on it. It’s was an incredible coming together of people. 90 mins later, the first set is done. Time to load out and pack the van for the first run back to the hotel for 1am after a 18 hour day it’s back to the hotel for a few hours sleep before the alarm goes off again.

Saturday 29th June –

Alarm goes off and I jump out of my wonderful hotel bed and freshen up with a wonderful hotel shower and have my hotel room coffee, back we go to Woodsies to make preparations for Romy and her set on Sunday. The reason we must load in early is because Kasabian are due to arrive so we must get sound check done and VT prepared as once they arrive we no longer have access to the stage.

But once we are every member of the crew and management gets the day off to enjoy as they please! For me that meant Bloc Party!! So that is where I headed to, The Other Stage was my destination. En route I meet with the Radio X Flag bearers and we convoy together. The whole Radio X breakfast team are there and we spend all afternoon together, it’s a glorious sunny day and we are all there watching a ROCK BAND!!! and it is everything I could imagine, the emotion of being at The Other Stage with such an enormous

crowd and being with her group I was just felt so incredibly special. It was an almost euphoric moment. I made friends and had one of the happiest times of my life.

The feeling of pride of being part of it all and the hard work that has gone into it is now resonating and the initial anxietes have disappeared, this is what Glastonbury is about! This moment, this love and this amount of joy from so many thousands of people is infectious. I party and explore until my feet and bank account hurt. I stay until I cannot walk anymore and head back to my hotel in Bath absolutely buzzing about the day I have been privileged to of had.

Sunday 30th June –

Due to preparations the day before and already being close to site I have a lay in! Today we just need to get everyone to stage on time and today is Romy (formally The XX with Jamie) its her time to shine. I arrive today around lunch time to a very relaxed hospitality area, I can wander free and stop and chat and today was the big one, NOTHING BUT THIEVES!! I meet up with the Radio X crew again and we spend all afternoon at The Other Stage. Nothing But Thieves were electric!! If Bloc Party were good NBT were spectacular! I sang until I had tears in my eyes and my throat hurt. Again we lucked out with another hot clear perfect day. Me and the Radio X crew all got together and also watched Avril Lavigne and she also smashed it out the park.

Nostalgia seemed to be the most popular drug of the day! And this leads me back to the point I made earlier. We are in a new generation now, chemicals and excessive drinking are no longer the priority. Yes of course there are areas of the site that are more catered for such behaviour, but on the whole Avril, Coldplay, Bloc Party, Kasabian and many other acts are nostalgic…they’re memberberries. They are acts they have been there done that and tap into that nerve of familiarity and comfort. Maybe it is time for the organisers to give more support and opportunities to emerging talent.

The best thing about festivals is discovering new acts and giving upcoming bands a chance and platform to gain more exposure, grass roots if you like (quite literally) Glastonbury historically has made bands from nothing into something and I feel the lack of opportunities for new talent and new bands is over shadowed by the huge global talents strutting on the Pyramid Stage. Imagine giving the opportunity to a band that has been touring the country several years playing to 500-1000 capacity venues to play on a stage like that and not be in the shadow of a band who has done it 5 times before or a pop act singing to track. What that opportunity would do for a band on their way up for the music industry in itself. I know that they have the smaller stages BBC introducing (BBC controlling proceedings again) and Avalon etc but imagine if it was just more fair and equal.

Glastonbury to me now feels like an extension of BBC Radio 1 big weekend, everything is organised and televised to give the best possible viewing figures and the best possible content for BBC iPlayer or BBC Sounds when really the essence of Glastonbury is the music the live performances and feeling. Glastonbury is a Rock festival and should be supporting new emerging rock talent, bands and independent music, upcoming talent and the opportunity to perform to crowds of such scale. Not about the viewing figures or being familiar. At Glastonbury

you should be able to expand you mind, Body and soul. Not sure if Yellow being played on the Pyramid Stage is as satisfying as an unknown band blowing people’s minds. But maybe that’s just me with my Tour Manager for new bands head on and I am just bitter and bias.

The day ends and the hotel runs begin in the early hours of Monday morning and we load up the kit to be delivered back to various production companies and do our airport drop offs for artists and management alike. At 2am Monday morning the option to stay overnight is there in a hotel but the overwhelming feeling is getting home. Everything aches, everything is dusty, my ears hurt and I have spent all weekend at Glasto completely sober!! 18 hours days, tonnes of flight cases lifted and 100s of miles covered.

To know what myself and the 2 additional drivers I have recruited to help me were responsible for 3 acts getting to stage on time as well as a 30 person entourage of management, crew and artists and being able to say I was part of making it all happen and it all happened flawlessly fills me with an enormous amount of pride and achievement.

Glastonbury will always be a special place for so many reasons to so many people and is literally a place that some dreams are made of! Whether its a trip down memory lane or just a trip! Or a place to lose yourself and become someone else for a weekend or it’s a weekend of discovery of music or yourself. Glastonbury has it all. As long as you’re prepared to walk to find it, pay an excessive amount to attend it or to sleep rough in field for the cost of a months rent in a London flat! You too can dine on memberberries until your belly is full!

For me I would say, support new acts, get emerging new talent, go back to Rock, Indie and Blues, get back the the roots of Glastonbury and reduce costs. Make Glastonbury be what it was don’t try to bend it into something it is not or eventually it will break and the bubble will burst and like with Taylor Swift concerts they will only be accessible to the rich and privileged and eventually there will be no new acts, no-one to replace the legends that have fallen and we will be left with just another commercial BBC event that is required to tick all the correct boxes and empty our bank accounts with only memberberries to dine on.

To quote Hunter S Thompson – “ if you look really hard, you can see the high water mark where the wave finally broke” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Lets not let that happen to our beloved Glastonbury.

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