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Now in its 36th year, Glastonbury festival is the longest running greenfield festival in the UK. It was created in 1970 in the wake of the declining hippy movement, the European student protests of 1969, and the success of two festivals the previous summer: the legendary Woodstock and Isle of Wight Festivals. But the main inspiration was a performance by Led Zeppelin at the Bath Blues Festival, where local dairy farmer Michael Eavis and wife Jean (Emily’s mother) were famously mesmerised by an overwhelmingly positive atmosphere.

Emily has said elsewhere: “Dad was like: ‘Wow! Everyone is happy, they’re all on one side.’ After all the politics and criticism they’d been going through, it was such an escape. They genuinely wanted to take their own version of that to the farm.”

The subsequent festivals in 1970 and 1971 were centered around the now legendary Pyramid Stage, which was built over the leyline between Glastonbury Abbey and Stonehenge, and which was dedicated to folk music and pagan theatre. 1,000 people turned up, paid £1 at the gate and drank free milk from Eavis’s cows for the weekend. The Pyramid stage was remade in 1981, burnt down and rebuilt in 1994, and restored in 2000. Throughout these chapters, the festival has retained vestiges of ancient folk traditions, especially in the Green Futures and Healing Fields, and has clung to its reputation for alternative culture.

But it wasn’t until 1979 - the year that Margaret Thatcher came to power; the year Emily was born - that the Glastonbury Festival became an annual fixture with a political agenda, supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament over the next decade. The festival has since been held in five year cycles, with a fallow year in between, and involves a massive system of stakeholders, contractors and volunteers with over 385 performances over twenty or so stages last year.

At 26, Emily has now been involved with the organisation and running of the festival since 1999, following the loss to cancer of Jean a few weeks before the festival of that year (and to whose memory REM dedicated their song ‘Sweetness Will Follow’ during their headline set). Her unplanned involvement at 19, coupled with the knowledge that she would likely inherit the whole show, must have been daunting. But it was a tradition that she had been involved with from an early age, factoring the festival between school life and the rural routine, arguing about headliners over the dinner table.

“For me the festival was just normal life,” says Emily. “It was almost like another school term over the summer. The festival would take place at the end of the summer term, and then there would be the business of re-applying for next year’s licence and organising the headliners over the summer, then I’d be back to school in September. It was part of the annual cycle, and there is always that feeling of an annual cycle on a farm anyway. The office was in the house, the festival was in our back garden, and as a kid I’d forever be running to the kitchen phone to take calls from agents or artists, or scaffolders who were stuck outside the gates.

“But my official involvement came about when my mother became ill, and I moved back to the farm to help look after her, and it was at that point when I took over some duties of festival organisation. It was very daunting, and not an inevitable inheritance - I was training to be a primary school teacher, and it was a case of being taken where the wind blows you.”

Deeply involved in the evolution of the festival, year on year, Emily has organised the press office, built ties with large acts and scanned the grassroots for likely newcomers to play at the New Bands Tent. She also comes up with new ways to improve links between site and community, whilst working from her base in London. Her invitation to the Private Dance Parties collective to hold their 6am Silent Disco at the 2005 dance tent indicated an eye for innovative ways to get along with the neighbours.
With this year off, Emily has had space to take stock of Glastonbury festival for the first time in five years, touring the other festivals to see how they compare.

Interestingly, Emily is resistant to comparisons between Glastonbury festival and the other big greenfield events. “The other headline festivals are brilliant concepts, but I don’t think they are the same as Glastonbury. They are more like massive concerts, but that’s not the same, is it?”

For Emily, the closest thing to Glastonbury is the Notting Hill Carnival, the three day multicultural event that is dominated by Carribean influences, and which also was formed in reaction to a political context: the heavy race rioting of the 1950s.

“There’s a sense of life going on at the Notting Hill festival and a real vibrancy there. It’s very optimistic and really exciting to be at. I saw so much stuff - a lot of random sound systems, massive groups of drummers, incredible food and craft stalls. It had all this spontaneity and individualism. Just walking around, being amongst all the diversity and soaking up the atmosphere stimulated me for next year. It reminded me that at Glastonbury the tradition has always been less about the bands and more about the entire experience. We always sell out before the line up is announced, and I like to think that shows that we resonate with people, as well as put on the best bands.”

This year’s hiatus has provided perspective, then, and Emily and Michael now face the pressure of restarting the next five year cycle with a classic line up for 2007. It will also be the year when Glastonbury is expected to renew its contract with Mean Fiddler, who were bought on board in 2001 with a 40% stake to deal with mounting logistical requirements and troubles that beset the 2000 festival. 100,000 tickets were sold, but uncontrollable fence jumping saw crowds swell to an estimated 250,000, leading to concerns that the festival would not be re-licensed by the district council. Emily recalls that Mean Fiddler’s new security fence was met with accusations that Glastonbury had been sanitised at the expense of its traditional ‘ethos’, but dismisses these claims as unrealistic.

“I remember it being the same weekend that nine people were crushed to death at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark during a Pearl Jam concert. We couldn’t risk that. People come to live here for five days, and you need to feel like you’re safe. There was this perception that Glastonbury was a place where if you could afford it you’d pay, and if you couldn’t, it was okay to sneak in and it’d be okay. But when the fence came down in 2000, it was clear that something had changed, and we were faced with trouble that we hadn’t encountered before. It wasn’t just that we’d become a victim of our success - there was actually a lot of crime, which there never had been before.”

Shocked by what happened at Roskilde, the Eavises decided “to put our cards on the table and hire some help, or lose the festival altogether,” says Emily. “My dad designed the fence with Mean Fiddler, and it’s a big part of the festival’s history. It made the site a nicer, gentler place to be. It’s cleaner, more inviting, and has recovered that sense of a safe place where you could bring your family.”

The festival is now run by a company that is created each year by Mean Fiddler and Glastonbury Festivals Ltd, with the majority of the latter’s profits going to charity. The presence of a corporate stakeholder has not put off the ‘old school’ festival-goers who return each year to the Healing Fields. Nor has sponsorship (Budweiser) overrun the festival with branding. “We don’t want too much branding’” says Emily. “It would ruin the sense of escape. People come here to leave that kind of stuff behind.”

But as the festival’s alternative roots have shifted over the years to the outfields, the festival’s commitment to influencing global policy has increasingly occupied the centre stage. And it is in the figure of Emily - the bright and purposeful heir-apparent to the most popular music festival in Europe - that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Water Aid, Oxfam et al have found a powerful future ally. While she hopes her father will run the festival forever (“He’s got to, hasn’t he?” she says plaintively), Emily is content in the mean time to push the festival into a wider network of global fundraising initiatives. In 2002 Emily and Coldplay’s Chris Martin were taken to Haiti by Oxfam to observe the coffee production. Since then she has been a tireless Oxfam campaigner, promoting the Make Trade Fair and Make Poverty History campaigns and organising the 2002 Make Trade Fair benefit gig.

“Oxfam asked me to come and see where the Glastonbury money goes, and we went to farmland in Haiti to see some of the work that was being done out there. We spent a lot of time in the coffee plantations, helping farmers grind out an existence under tough conditions. The money was being spent on water and improved machinery, and little things like ear guards to make life easier on the picking machines. It sounds a bit worthy, but being from a farming community myself, watching them achieve sustainable development was really moving.”

The body of charities at Glastonbury, joined recently by Future Forests and the Piers Simon Appeal, supply volunteer organisers in exchange for donations and screen space for their banners, petitions and appeals. They had a huge and sympathetic audience at Glastonbury 2005 with an attendance of 112,500 and a television audience of millions. But with so many new festivals opening on an already crowded scene, how long before the ratings bubble bursts? Emily is optimistic.

“There are so many festivals now that there is an inevitable danger of reaching a saturation point. But I assume, with my cod knowledge of the internet and digital downloading and uploading, that recorded music has become impersonal and devalued. Live music has much more importance than before and various sectors are waking up to that - we’ve seen a lot more sponsorship interest from mobile phone companies, which is encouraging - but not our thing.

“At the end of the day, seeing a band live is a unique and personal experience that can’t be copied and distributed and communicated. Either way, the tickets last year sold out in record time - although I prefer to measure the success of Glastonbury by how many flags I can see being waved in front of the Pyramid. There were flags everywhere last year - so it’s an exciting time.”

If any decisions have been made about acts or ticket numbers for 2007, Emily isn’t giving anything away (U2 are not playing, it’s been confirmed). But the business of re-applying for the licence is underway, and the ‘annual cycle’ has resumed, with Emily currently trawling London for new acts.
“We’re talking to bands and sorting out the licence but it’s too early to say anything. The main hassle for me at the moment is batting away the constant phone calls from people blagging for tickets. I hate having to turn people away, but the phone doesn’t stop ringing. In the mean time I’m sure there will be surprises and changes. We always change the festival around, but it’s a year by year process, so we won’t know how good it’s gone until it’s over - this time next year, when the cows have come home.”

Words: Leo Batchelor

From: October 2006 Issue

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