Joe Strummer: I've been playing festivals since Stonehenge in 1974, but these days I just want to scream

Internal links

Corporate logos welcome fans to the world of Glastonbury, plc

Joe Strummer: I've been playing festivals since Stonehenge in 1974, but these days I just want to scream

I've played festivals beyond number, all over Europe. My first was the Stonehenge Festival in 1974. It was a very free atmosphere.

We played for nothing, and it was kind of fun. I remember getting on stage finally at 7am with our hot brand of rock 'n' roll and being confronted with 1,000 people all in sleeping bags. We damn well did our best to wake them up.

My favourite festival was Metz in France. Everything went wrong. They had hired bikers to be the security and they attacked the crowd, and the crowd attacked them, and the promoters ran away and we just kept on playing. To have stopped playing would have been death.

The last time I played Glastonbury was in 1999. It was traumatic. I tried to forcibly remove some of the cameramen from the stage. Luckily no one was injured and I tried to apologise afterwards.

But you're standing on the stage and you're doing it for the crowd and suddenly someone swoops in and blocks the field of vision between the crowd and you. When I'm in the crowd and that happens I just want to scream. When I played Womad in Las Palmas we agreed a compromise – that there would be cameras, but not those swooping cameras.

That's the thing that has gone wrong with festivals. It should be something intimate between the audience and the performers.

I dislike playing them since they have been televised. It's unfair on the crowd. They tend to put the audience back about 50 yards now, so that they can manoeuvre all the hydraulics.

I want there to be only the smallest gap between crowd and performers.

There should be a standard measure for how far away the audience is. I've played festivals in Germany and the audience is very near to the stage. We ought to be able to do that over here.