Glastonbury has abandoned its roots, and it desperately needs them back

Somewhere along the line, the festival traded lawless anarchy for stockbrokers speed-dialling their dealers from luxury yurts. But Glastonbury veteran Mark Beaumont thinks the event doesn’t need to sacrifice its counter-cultural history to embrace relevance and modernity

The spiritual core of Glastonbury – as seen in this picture from the 1971 festival – has become truly archaic (Getty)

Any true Glastonbury veteran has a definitive era they pine for. The activist Eighties. The invasion of Britpop. The year a sewage truck operator accidentally pressed “blow” rather than “suck” and turned the dance tent into a premonition of any British beach in 2023.

Having served 30 years of active Pilton duty, through years redolent of both El Alamein and Somme, I tend to get misty-eyed over the early Nineties’ pre-superfence, wild west period. The days before the festival’s hedonist underbelly got ring-fenced into Lost Vagueness, then wristbanded, crowd-barriered and kettled into the Naughty Corner. When every bridge and hedgerow echoed to the traditional folk culture whispers of “E’s-speed-hash”, and some of my closest Glastonbury friendships were made when fence-jumping drug dealers checked fake tenners by the torchlight from my tent.

That, to me, will always be the real Glastonbury; the sight of shady geezers in the corner of the Beat Hotel trying to hide a three-foot nitrous oxide canister while surreptitiously blowing up huge yellow balloons for twitchy rave kids will always feel like a clownish parody.