Stop taking Glastonbury so seriously

New Statesman​

2 days ago

Illustration by André Carrilho
Worthy Farm in Somerset, where Glastonbury Festival has been held 39 times, is 25 miles away from the sea. But once a year it is thronged by seagulls: this is an annual chips-in-styrofoam mecca for the scavenger birds – an event as unmissable for them as it is for the ageing-millennial liberals who populate the site, squatting on the fun that was once the preserve of the young.
Parsing the 210,000-strong crowd at the festival is a process of subtle distinction, such as: who is 35 and who is 38? And, does this person live in Stoke Newington or Finsbury Park? Do they work at Deloitte or at a respectable grade in the civil service? Glastonbury in 2025 is where the professional class come to listen to Busta Rhymes (doyen of the 1990s) perform 'Break Ya Neck', with right-hand man, Spliff Star, and pretend the culture hasn't left them behind. Even though of course it has.
It is not totally homogenous: there are the elites literally at the peripheries, their clean and catered camps looming from on-high over the grounds (metaphor alert!); and there are attendees on the more feral end of the spectrum (who would think, may I ask, to pitch their tent one metre downstream of the busiest bathrooms on the grounds?). But in its total average, the Glastonbury crowd leans towards the staid, stable and rote. When Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, turned down a chance to debate a Green Party leadership hopeful he said his team feared that Glastonbury would not be safe for him. This is fair – if he is afraid of seagulls or management consultants.
I was surprised, nonetheless, by the level of political noise the festival generated this year, from this most un-radical of crowds: a man with a straw boater and a collapsible camping chair – a friend for Tice, perhaps? – sat politely in front of me as Kneecap exploded on to the West Holts Stage on the Saturday afternoon.
One member of the Belfast rap trio, Mo Chara, was charged with a terror offence in May, accused of brandishing a Hezbollah flag at a 2024 gig. There were questions about whether the festival should cancel the set entirely; the BBC did not air it live for fear the group would say something on stage that contravened its guidelines and standards ('kill David Attenborough', perhaps). Before the festival had even started, Kneecap – with its anti-British posture and radical Irish republicanism – became the story.
And then the trio were overtaken when the previously irrelevant rap duo Bob Vylan led the crowd in chants of 'death, death to the IDF'. Everyone – Wes Streeting, Glastonbury itself – was 'appalled', the BBC terribly sorry for broadcasting it; the world rather worried that these rappers had finally been the ones to radicalise the farmer's-market liberals around the festival.
But as I watched Kneecap in the baking heat and saw exactly what I was expecting to (Palestine flags and Irish tricolours everywhere) and heard exactly what I was expecting to (Deloitte account managers joining in with 'Free Palestine' and 'Fuck Keir Starmer' chants) I was struck by the powerlessness of it all.
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This is transient, ephemeral politics. In 2017 Jeremy Corbyn was the main character of Glastonbury, and when his electoral platform totally fell apart, all of a sudden no one at the festival was singing 'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn' anymore. Brexit was the great affront to the Glasto-class at the festival in 2016, and I spotted not one EU flag over the entire week in 2025; the very lonely Ukraine flag I saw looked almost out of date. There is no idée fixe of Glastonbury, but instead the politic du jour.
It is hard to blame the millennial consultants and civil servants for rifling through a Rolodex of causes at such a clip. They came of age in the financial crisis and have been politically impotent since; things they don't like (the 2011 Liberal Democrat betrayal, Osborne austerity, Brexit, 'Boris Johnson') keep happening to them. In a country where politics itself is no longer very political and culture feels stuck – Rod Stewart (80) shared a stage on the Sunday with Ronnie Wood (78) and Lulu (76) – all that's left is these end-of-June howls of outrage from staffers at the Big 5.
There was a time when liberal Britain could group together to stop the things it did not like, such as the slave trade or Mary Whitehouse. Or redirect the national trajectory: abolishing the death penalty and legalising abortion. They can't anymore. And so here they are with me in Somerset, eating cheese toasties, worrying about seagulls and raging against a non-specified, shapeshifting machine.
The ambient Remainer-ism of the past decade of Glastonbury has been traded for this slightly edgier cause, with spikier standard bearers (Kneecap, Bob Vylan). But the sense of a non-committal, window-dressing politik is the same. To fly a Palestine flag in front of the Other Stage during Franz Ferdinand's set is to say: yes, I am a Glastonbury Goer. Just as was the case with open borders in 2018 (prime-time bullshit, by the way, in a camp that has border walls resembling Trump's). But to interrogate the hard politics or even the logic of it all is to misunderstand the project. There are too many drugs to do for that.
The worst place to have an ear infection is 41,000 feet over the Atlantic in Delta economy class. The second worst place to have an ear infection is during country/hip-hop crossover event Shaboozey's performance of 'Bar Song (Tipsy)' on Sunday afternoon. It was – like the set by rock band Terrorvision, the crowd at the Information Stage when the independent MP Zarah Sultana appeared, and the 'sound bath' I suffered through at the, er, Healing Fields – extraordinarily loud.
But not merely content with the audial invasion, Glastonbury Festival endeavours to assault you with wall of visual noise too: 'PASTA,' a sign screams at me; 'REDUCE, REUSE [and, plot twist], RESPECT' rolls across a TV screen; a posh woman with a hat like I have never seen before (steampunk meets pheasant massacre) walks past; the firework budget alone for the five days I suspect could feed a medium-sized Cambodian town for a year; the lights at the Levels Stage, designed for the ecstasy brain, are too frenetic for the sober one. I understand why these 'Sensory Calm' tents have cropped up everywhere: the one next door to the Kneecap performance got more use than usual.
By Sunday the drugs had nearly run out; the politics – already predictable – were exhausting; the atmosphere was increasingly antsy. Deloitte awaited the revellers, they had just remembered. The site smelled like pickled sewage and everyone was taking the last of their ketamine. But, after a three-week cleanup job, the only evidence left of this, all the noise and all the mess, will be the famous Pyramid Stage. The rest – the pheasant-graveyard hat, the man in the boater, the PASTA vendors, the pair camping one metre downstream of the toilets, the elites at the top of the hill – will be gone from Worthy Farm for another year, almost as though nothing happened. And the seagulls will flee, like the ravens leaving the tower of London, to declare a new political lodestar for the Glastonbury class. All of it fair weather, all of it temporary.
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