Building a Glasto: Part 1
A formerly 'hippy' music festival transforms into a venue of brazen consensus, illustrating the grip of the approved narrative.
THE FIRST GLASTONBURY festival, or Glasto, was held in 1970, attracting less than 2000 people. By 1994, that number had swollen to 300,000, which remains its record. Over last weekend the festival, now in its 53rd year, attracted around 200,000 people.
The owner/farmer of the land where Glasto is held, Michael Eavis, is explicitly ‘left wing’: in 2017, he appeared alongside Jeremy Corbyn when the latter addressed Glasto’s crowds and the crowds responded by chanting his name back. These days, however, Jeremy is persona non grata, and a documentary featuring him was pulled at the last minute.
The 2023 lineup included the son sun going down on Elton John’s live performance career, Guns n Roses (‘Lockdowns n Mandates’), Yusuf Islam (the artist formerly known as the snitch who said he’ll call Ayatollah Khomeini himself and grass up Salman Rushdie’s whereabouts) and the vast American Lizzo, who the black American comedian Aries Spears claimed reminded him of the ‘shit emoji’. For bland tastes, the Artic Monkeys, Lightning Seeds and Manic Street Preachers were present; for nostalgic ones, there was Fatboy Slim, Lana del Rey, Hot Chip and The War on Drugs, who sadly looked a little festival-ed out.
Glasto is an established cultural nerve centre, and because culture is upstream of everything, including politics, I anticipated that this would be the year when the monumental shifts were revealed with zero ambiguity or doubt. A friend, once a regular attendee, explained Glasto’s allure: ‘you had 2 conservatives sharing a spliff with 2 labour voters. You could have a long conversation with someone like Paris Lees, a transgender woman. You’d never speak to these people again, but you exchanged details anyway. For the weekend we’d all love each other - we didn’t see how we could get along outside, and we didn’t see how we couldn’t get along inside.’ But things have changed, and evidence of the shift, why it’s there and what it means, was everywhere.
The singer from Young Fathers (‘Graham’) shouted about refugees being welcome - obviously not to his postal code, or near his children’s school - no, that would be disgusting, but welcome none-the-less, from the stage of an event protected by a West Bank-style, bolt-less wall with lookouts. With Jeremy Corbyn axed, a bunch of angry Iranian women - who loathe England as much as they do Iran, and Israel as much as Corbyn - were interviewed in an area called ‘left field’. A new monument to the NHS was unveiled - with a heart comprising the colours of transgender PRIDE and, this being June, transgender PRIDE flags were everywhere else, along with Ukrainian ones - some even took to incorporating the Ukrainian flag into the PRIDE one. The Oxfam logo was on the ticket too which was splendid, really, because it’s less laborious than having to keep announcing on the PA all day: ‘PROVIDING SECURITY AT NIGHTS FOR ALL OUR YOUNG, LAUGHING-GAS WASTED TENTED CAMPERS WILL BE DARRYL FROM OXFAM’S BAMAKO OFFICE, WHOSE HOBBIES INCLUDE FRENCH WORDLE. DARRYL SAYS HE’S GOING TO USE THIS YEAR’S FESTIVAL TO EXPRESS HIMSELF AND FIND YOUNG PEOPLE TO MENTOR’.
Out of sight, there were some impressive, busy helicopter patterns - helicopters being to Glasto what Gulf Streams are to any climate conference. All local 4-star hotels had been reportedly block-booked by the Home Office to house migrants, which left only 5-star hotels - but they were swooped up by the BBC, who sent 500 of its staff to the event, led by its butch fact-checker Marianna Spring - herself the subject of a complaint accusing her of, yes, circulating fake news (the junket occurred in the same week my wife and I were officially declared ‘under continued investigation’ from the licence fee office).
I don’t want to bore you with the normie ‘hypocrisy’ reflex; emphasising this makes no difference - not in South Africa, not in the US and not here. It is also just one of other parts - including conformity, intolerance and hyper-competition. Glasto wasn’t a festival in 2023. It was an expression. It was all that above, and then something else: power.
You might call all those things in the same place counter-intuitive, or absurd - but it is 200,000-strong-absurd, moneyed-absurd, organised-absurd and momentum-absurd. Why has the ‘conservative’ party drifted so far from its point of accepted purpose? Glasto gives you the answer. When will the West finally exorcise the demon of affirmative action? Ditto and spoiler: not soon. What will London look like in 10 years? Glasto tells you that it will be Hamtramck, Michigan in 2023, where white liberals voted in an all-Muslim city council, then squealed ‘betrayal’ when the people they voted in voted themselves - as was their newly afforded privilege - to ban the PRIDE flag.
What was once a ‘hippy’ event has mutated into something extending way past music, politics and nationhood. For one weekend, the forces that support society’s most lethal pathologies are together, in the same place, creating a hum of logic that vibrates east across the rolling hills of Somerset, into Westminster and further.
Opponents of lockdowns, the permanent emergency culture, global health, 15-minute cities, intrusive CCTV, ‘hate crimes’, central banking, climate hysteria, mandates, gender and queer ideology are powerless and cursed with internal divisions. If you do not believe the Glasto expression, or if you’ve seen things in the last three years that you feel cannot be unseen, then there is no comparative collective for you to attend: you’re restricted to single-day, village-hall-type events, where you might get to meet Right Said Fred, or Bob Moran, or listen to a local busker singing Van Morrison’s hits. You’ll hear stories from the vaccination injured, or parents whose child, starved of critical socialisation, committed suicide in 2020. A former state department official gone rogue will nervously detail Victoria Nuland’s ‘democracy’ efforts in Eastern Europe; you’ll cheer when speakers condemn the names Sadiq Khan, or Matt WHancock, or Neil Ferguson. But then you leave, and you’re alone again.
This is not a numbers issue: if you examine the rise of sceptic-ish materials and their users, there are more than enough people who do not agree with the narrative. Neither is it a financial one. Instead, I think it’s one of confidence and content - how do you build sustainable logic that, like Glasto, has the power to pressure and influence beyond the scope of its perceived existence? That isn’t milquetoast, or fraught with internal jostling and rivalry? That won’t be immediately jeered or dismissed as controlled opposition, and can withstand inevitable assaults from regime media?
There are examples of where this is happening, and where it could start. Part 2 next week will explore.