Most of us will not be able to attend Britain’s annual Glastonbury Festival, which starts Thursday. But we can live vicariously by checking out the festival’s extensive website, and the media coverage that’s already begun. Today, The Independent has Elisa Bray’s The guide to Glastonbury. She notes that there will be 177,000 people and 300 bands, playing on 10 main stages and a dozen smaller ones. Guardian.co.uk has a page with news, blogs, videos and weather updates. The full lineup on the festival’s site is pretty amazing; there will be so many choices that it seems like it would be hard to decide which artists to see and which ones you’d have to miss. The Pyramid Stage has some of the biggest names, such as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Madness, Fleet Foxes, Lily Allen and many more. The Acoustic Stage sounds particularly appealing, with the likes of Roger McGuinn, Fairport Convention, Ray Davies and the duo of Gary Louris and Mark Olson. I particularly like the fact that there is a John Peel Stage, in honor of the late BBC DJ. It has Echo and the Bunnymen, Jarvis Cocker and many more. The official site has a history page going back to the first festival, in 1970. More media coverage: The BBC has a page on the festival and Ian Youngs’ The secrets of Glastonbury’s line-up, in which he notes that festival organizer Michael Eavis, who has run it since the beginning, “may be one of the coolest 73-year-olds around…” He was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People this year, complete with an essay about him by Chris Martin of Coldplay. Eavis’ daughter Emily now also organizes the festival. The Glastonbury coverage is a reminder about what a wonderful place Britain is for music and pop culture.
Bruce Rosenstein
Author, Editor, Speaker, Blogger