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Surely the festival would send you an email saying the refund had been cancelled anyway? Then you could query it.

Morning Campers, news from the front line. 48 hrs since it went into isolation mode Nurse Lycra reports that her unit have still to receive a covid 19 patient. Several have been admitted query covid 19 but it turned out they are suffering from other corona viruses. All hospital visiting has been cancelled and staff from other units are being trained in barrier nursing respiratory care.

And 1995: They have lots of good glastonbury vids from the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/user/kinokastvideo/search?query=glastonbury

Below is a snap shot of advice for Buying Glasto Tickets on Radio X. I’m a bit confused. What does ‘If an attempt to book has already been held against your registration number’ mean. So if I get in and one of my friends trying for me to get in does that mean we are both stuffed !!! It's not uncommon for people to complain of registration numbers seeming to not work once they get on the booking page, and now the festival has indeed confirmed that "registration numbers will be locked for up to 10 minutes" for the following reasons: - If your card details are entered incorrectly - If an attempt to book has already been held against your registration number - If your five minutes on the booking page ends

hi all gonna try and get a ticket this year, the coach tickets go on sale first, so hoping to get one then, if I choose not to go on the coach is it a problem, do I just loose my 50 pound deposit , or does the ticket not get allocated till you get on the coach, also if I ended up with a coach ticket, can I try for a general admission ticket and return the coach ticket or is that not possible thanks for any tips, rob

Hi, Basically, we are going to Creamfields as a group and we all got bronze camping tickets other than this one daft sod. What I need to know (as I’ve been told various stories) is the lad with the standard camping ticket can still camp with us as I’ve been led to believe the difference between the two is just we with the bronze get access to the showers etc within the price we paid (makes sense as it was literally only £20 difference I think) Anyone’s advice or experience would be great! Thanks.

which were also 2 of the only festivals she's ever played in her entire career (if you even count BST as a festival). https://www.setlist.fm/search?query=stevie+nicks+festival playing 4 festivals next year, the most she's ever done, and one she's subbing, and one is basically a glorified concert.

We've currently hired a motorhome from MotorHome Hire (South Gloucester Depot). If successful in the resale, we're due to fly back home out of Bristol on the 7am flight on the Monday morning. This would mean a 5am drop off which the Motorhome depot cannot faciltate. Would anyone know of a rental crew in or around Bristol who would be able to facilitate such a drop off time? Thanks in advance!

Hi, I hope you can help. I got someone a ticket on my card in a group. This person then did not pay the balance as this person now can't go. I was asked if I had received a refund but asked if the Person had actually cancelled the ticket rather than just not pay the balance. I am assuming that you won't get your deposit back unless you specifically cancelled the purchase rather than not pay the balance. Am I wrong? Suddenly feel responsibility for someone else's money and don't want them to think I have taken their money. Hope you can help

If you feel able to discuss private issues with HMRC, they have a team called NES (Needs Enhanced Support), who are specialised in dealing with complex cases and are able to give you more time and care than generic advisers. Good luck, hope things get sorted soon xx Edit: name changed, see first link: https://www.litrg.org.uk/getting-help "HMRC also offer the ‘Extra Support service’ (previously known as the Needs Enhanced Support service or NES). A small team of specially trained telephone advisers can spend more time with vulnerable individuals and so offer a more personalised service. The team do not follow scripts rigidly. They also join things up with other parts of HMRC, so that you do not have to. They can hold face-to-face appointments. This could include a face to face visit in your home or at a specified venue near to home – whatever suits you and your query best. A typical example of the type of work the Extra Support service do can be seen by looking at the case of Joyce. Joyce is a cleaner from Portugal. She has limited English and is unfamiliar with the UK tax system. With the help of a friend, she registered as self-employed in 2014/15. Her 2014/15 tax return was submitted a few days late – her mother had been taken ill and she was back home in Portugal at the time of the deadline. Joyce submitted her 2015/16 tax return herself, on time – her earnings were below the personal allowance so it was quite simple. Joyce stopped working as a cleaner in 2016/17 but forgot to tell HMRC, so they continued to send her tax returns to complete, all of which are still outstanding. By the time Joyce reaches the Extra Support team, she thinks she owes HMRC nearly £4,000. The Extra Support team help Joyce make a late filing penalty appeal for the 2014/15 tax year as she had a ‘reasonable excuse’ for not filing her tax return on time. They help her complete her 2016/17 tax return – the tax return for the year of cessation. They withdraw the requirement for her to file the subsequent tax returns as she was not actually self-employed for any of those years – and cancel the late filing penalties associated with those years. Now the amount of Joyce’s debt has been properly quantified, HMRC’s debt management team will discuss with her how it might be paid (more on this below). The Extra Support service can offer help with: Income tax and PAYE Self Assessment Tax credits National Insurance Tax debt (see question below) Inheritance Tax Child Benefit VAT Corporation Tax Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) Employers’ queries You can access the Extra Support team (EST) via the ordinary HMRC helplines – you should tell the telephone adviser about any special circumstances that may be affecting you on either a temporary or permanent basis, in order that they can put you through to the EST team. The helpline advisers decide, based on their contact with you, whether they need to hand you over to EST. If so, this should be a warm handover to the EST team so that you do not have to explain your circumstances again". https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/needs-enhanced-support-nes-customers https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/hmrc-issue-briefing-support-for-customers-who-need-extra-help/hmrc-issue-briefing-support-for-customers-who-need-extra-help

Reasons to believe - It makes sense. They are a band who could headline, but are on the other stage. The clash would be horrendous & a typical 1st world problem. The notification mr Toe Nails received. Says "Somerset", which is specific. Dates match. Reason to query it - No likes. No one other than this post seems to have seen it "live". The artwork doesn't seem RATM. The theme is, but it looks more Green Day than Rage.

Hi Guys It’s been a fair few years since I’ve been to Reading Festival, switched to Leeds start of the noughties and not been there for a good while. Well taking the Daughter to her first big festival at Reading next year as her 2 faves are foos and 1975, do they still have quiet camping? Can’t see anything on the website.

After a bit of advice, after getting tickets for next year and if the weather gods are kind we are contemplating bringing our 4 year old for a couple of days (Wed-Thurs) before off loading with grandparents once the festival gets into full swing. My query is where is the best place to advise grandparents to go to meet up with us and collect said child?

This year I am going to be looking to bring 2 children with me to Glastonbury - I was going to arrive on the Wednesday myself to get things setup and carry all the big stuff, and then nip out Friday morning to collect the kids and bring them for the weekend and limit time off school for them too... I was going to see if I could setup camp in family camping (my 11 year old has downs syndrome and would benefit from a more relaxed campsite). Would I be allowed to setup camp in family camping without any kids in tow so I could go and get them on the Friday? Thanks! bob

Thanks all for responses. I am in the ballot for tickets to Glastonbury and have bought the book from Waterstones so am hopefully in the competition as well..but after researching into Boomtown, I’ve decided that I’m definitely going to this crazy place anyway. Been to Glastonbury 3 times already in late 90s/early 00s so not too worried if I miss out. I am out of my 30s next year so have some concerns that I’m going to feel slightly too old for the demographic but sod it, I can still stay up all night and consume pretty much what i used to so sure it will be great. The next query I have is whether to splurge on Boomtown Springs/Skylark or not..given we will be arriving on the Thursday, it may be an option...anyone done this before...is it worth it? Thanks again

Not magic, just that your query is being directed to one of several different back end servers. One of which may have collapsed under the load, one of which may be working perfectly and responding (near enough) instantly, so it's natural that you'll get different behaviour.

Not quite. As long as the balancer stays up and available during your booking session then you shouldn't have a problem. It would only be if the balancer you are pointed to becomes unavailable during your session that you'd be stuck as essentially you will continue to ge pointed by the cookie to a non-existent balancer. Closing and re-opening the browser should therefore fix this, although there is still the chance that you could get directed to the dead balancer again next time you query....until See remove it from the list of available balancers that is.

Ok, then it sounds like between that and what Virgin have done, you've pretty much comprehensively proven that the problem isn't coming from your devices or router. One other thing I'd check to make it a bit more conclusive - can you use Network Utility (instructions on this page) to lookup glastonbury.seetickets.com and post the results here? By process of elimination it seems pretty likely that seetickets are blocking your IP address* for whatever reason, regardless of what they're saying. One possible explanation for this would be if someone else did something naughty in the past and got blocked, then that IP address subsequently got issued to you. I'd E-Mail them back with your IP address and ask them to check again - bear in mind that the front line people answering E-Mails probably aren't going to have a clue about this kind of query, so ask them to pass the query to the people responsible for website security. You can find your IP on this page. Specifically, you're looking for the IPv4 address. *IP address = think of it like your "location" within the internet, and the main way that seetickets and other sites identify your router. So it's like getting a new phone number and finding you get loads of spam texts on it because someone else had the number in the past and signed up to all kinds of shit.

I agree with you. It didn't feel right to me either. It feels like a potential breach of confidentiality otherwise. Likewise the "see a doctor" digs. Someone once pulled me up on here for querying Neil's mental health. At the time, my query was genuine, because we were having a vicious argument, which clearly I wouldn't do to someone vulnerable, that would be bullying. And I wanted to know if I had to pull my punches. I asked him straight out if he had a mental health diagnosis. But someone pointed out, mental health is a serious matter not for point scoring. We're not psychiatrists. And discussing someone's mental health is inappropriate, whatever the motive.

A little addition to the quecha query .... does anyone have one of these that they managed to make comfortable ? i added a self inflating roll mat but ditched the bed after one night as it was just sinking into the gaps

Hi Not sure if this is the best place to post this query so please move if in-appropriate Rammstein are doing a stadium tour next summer https://www.rammstein.de/en/tickets/ Only one gig in the UK which doesn't work for me so I'm looking to book tickets for a German show I'm not sure which website tickets will be available through, is it simply a case of creating a German Ticketmaster account and purchasing using that on Friday, or are there other websites that i should register with? Any advice appreciated as I've never booked international gig tickets TIA

But it's one person. It's not perfect but nothing is in a political party. Unless I've missed something, it's one crank sending an email query which somehow leaked to the press. The Tory deselection stuff is a lot worse, and more common with half the media coverage. Tory leadership were hardly out in force to defend David gauke

No not the name of a TBA act on the park - a genuine query, has anyone ever had to take medication that requires being kept in fridge until day of use? In the excitement of getting ready for the festival I’ve just realised my next round of biological meds’ is due next Friday. A sort of epi pen type pen that have to self administer. I’ve fired off a frantic email to the festival but probably far to late to do much about it. So anyone got any advice ??‍♂️

Caitlin Moran and Emily Eavis, 40, at Worthy Farm last monthTOM JACKSON The Times, June 14 2019, 5:00pm Share Save Glastonbury, 2017 Sunday afternoon. Barry Gibb – legendary frontman of the Bee Gees – launches into Stayin’ Alive under a blue sky. There are 175,000 people on site, and a good half of them are here – going absolutely crackers to one of the greatest songs ever recorded. The audience aren’t the only ones, for, as Gibb plays the opening chords, the entire front-of-stage security detachment – all in their blue “Specialized Security” T-shirts – form a line and break into a surprise, synchronised dance routine. Really, you don’t know what the phrase “unlikely joy” means until you’ve seen 50 burly Glaswegian security guards hip-thrusting to the falsetto screaming of, “I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk.” Halfway through the song, an audience member – wearing an amusingly huge set of Gibb-honouring false teeth – throws a sparkly gold jacket onto the stage. There’s an anxious moment – Gibb is always on a trigger-alert for people mocking the Bee Gees’ disco-era image, as those who saw him walk out of an interview with Clive Anderson in 1996 will know. But Gibb, on seeing the jacket, puts it on delightedly, busts a funky dance move, and the crowd erupts. The sunshine on the sequins makes him look like a 72-year-old glitterball, as befits his slot: “Glastonbury legend”. Beyoncé, 2011PA Gibb is playing on the last day of the biggest festival on Earth, with 2,800 performers over 120 stages, with a combined audience of 28 million watching at home, on the BBC. Over the previous five days, Gibb has been preceded by Katy Perry in a silver body-stocking throwing herself into the audience and crowd-surfing; Stormzy in a “We Heart Grenfell” T-shirt prompting Glastonbury’s biggest ever mosh pit; Jeremy Corbyn blinking, startled, as a whole field chant, “Oh! Jeremy Corbyn!” at him, and Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga appearing on the Pyramid Stage to record a pivotal scene for the forthcoming A Star Is Born. It’s been a year of iconic moments. But, elsewhere, Glastonbury is going about its extraordinary business as usual: over in Arcadia, a 40ft high spider belches flame into the air. The NYC Downlow gay disco operates in full-scale, film-set replica of a ruined Seventies Lower East Side tenement. The Unfairground sports a crashed East German plane. There’s a secret underground piano bar; a pirate ship; saunas; whittling workshops; Power Ballad yoga; 30 bars; 3,300 toilets – 1,300 of them fully compostable; 250 food stalls/cafés, and 175,000 unique experiences happening in tents, yurts, camper vans and around campfires. This is a rural factory of memory-making – if you have attended Glastonbury, chances are at least one thing that has happened here will be in the Best Bits montage that flashes before your eyes as you die. The Glastonbury Festival has a population larger than Bath. Its scale is so vast it has its own hospital, wholesale market, sewerage system, and cast-iron preparations in case of disease outbreak or terrorist attack. Next year, it celebrates its 50th birthday – going from a £1 per ticket event in 1970, when Marc Bolan played and all attendees received free milk, to one of the defining events of the British calendar – attended by Prince Harry and Prince Charles, Brad Pitt, Kate Moss, Benedict Cumberbatch, the Beckhams and the Dalai Lama. It has survived floods, lightning strikes, stages being burned down, riots, protests, births, deaths and endless controversy, to become one of the best known, best loved brands in the world – the yearly scramble for tickets when they go on sale is global, with applications from Australia to Afghanistan. The organisers have been offered endless multi-million dollar deals to sell the brand, expand it, franchise it, roll it out internationally – all of which they have declined. Michael Eavis, Emily’s father, and a maternal rights campaigner, 2017GETTY IMAGES For, uniquely among festivals, it donates more than £3 million of its yearly profits to charities – Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid. It has funded a whole housing project in the village of Pilton. It pioneers sustainable supply chains – this year, it goes wholly single-use plastic free – and its organisers are in demand, world experts in humanitarian disaster relief, for who else has the experience of building whole temporary camps in appalling weather, surrounded by freaked-out people? Glastonbury is one of the greatest British artistic and philanthropic success stories of all time. And yet it is a temporary, fleeting thing. The city appears at the summer solstice, in the Vale of Avalon, under the gaze of Glastonbury Tor, parties hard for five days, sending out kinetic images across the world – and then disappears, leaving not a single trace on the trampled grass. It’s like a Mardi Gras Brigadoon or cider-fuelled Land of Green Ginger. For the rest of the year, it’s just an ordinary, working dairy farm in Somerset, off the A361. For the rest of the year, it’s primarily a massive, ambitious, anxious, extraordinary idea in the head of Emily Eavis. And for Glastonbury 2019, I am following her, from start to finish, as she puts on the biggest festival on Earth. Sunday, October 7, 2018 261 days until the festival 8.30am. I am woken by six alarms going off in various rooms across the house. My teenage daughter wants to go to Glastonbury this year – and so she is up early to be ready online on the dot of 9am, when tickets go on sale. I go into her bedroom. She has her laptop, my laptop, my husband’s laptop and her phone all on the Glastonbury ticketing website. She is on FaceTime to a group of friends – who are all similarly poised before a bank of computers, ready to press “buy” the minute the site goes live. “I’m so scared!” she says. “What if I don’t get through? I WILL DIE OF SADNESS.” Sadness is fairly likely – this year, an unprecedented two million people have pre-registered for a ticket, but only a lucky 135,000 will be able to buy them. In 2017, the entire allocation sold out in 50 minutes flat. With no festival in 2018 – it was a customary “fallow” year – 2019 is predicted to be even quicker. “Oh babe, I’m sure you’ll be lucky …” I start. Paul McCartney, 2004GETTY IMAGES “Shut up! It’s happening! Oh my God! OH MY GOD!” she says, as the sales go live. She starts pressing “buy” on each available screen. On Facetime, I can hear all her other friends panicking and doing the same. Unable to bear the tension, I go downstairs to make a cup of tea. Twenty minutes later, I hear a scream: “F***! I’VE DONE IT! I’M GOIIIIIING!!!!!” The BBC News website is recording that Glastonbury 2019 has sold out in record time – 135,000 tickets at £248 each in 36 minutes flat. She is one of the very, very lucky ones. At 10am, I light a fag and call Emily Eavis. “How you doing, love?” I ask. “What you up to?” “I’m just walking around the site – I’m by the Pyramid Stage,” she says, slightly out of breath. “It’s a gorgeous day.” “So, record-breaker,” I say, “how are you feeling?” “Relieved it’s over, to be honest,” she says, cheerfully. “You want it over and done with quickly – so people can get on with their lives. So at least they know the sad news before breakfast.” “There’s a lot of trauma on Twitter,” I say, unhelpfully. “I know!” She sounds genuinely agonised. “It’s terrible – I just want to bring everyone in. We get people ringing the office at the farm. Someone called from Afghanistan at 9.30am, absolutely desperate. We get a lot of parents telling awful stories about how their child is the only one in their friendship group who didn’t get one and pleading. People sending in doctor’s certificates, saying it’s their last wish to go. We keep an allocation back for those,” she adds. “So, 175,000 people will be turning up in 261 days,” I say. “How are you feeling about that?” “Pressure,” she says, frankly. “Three months ago, it looked like we had three headliners – and now we’ve lost one. We’re reassuringly tense. My husband’s having sleepless nights, but I’m like, ‘It’ll be fine. It always is.’” I tell her I’ve been looking on Twitter, at all those disappointed by not getting tickets, and they’re suggesting several ideas she might want to consider. “Go on.” “Jodie B says, simply, ‘Why don’t you just make Glastonbury bigger?’” “What – big enough for all two million people?” “Yeah. Come on, you lazy cow.” Caitlin Moran and Emily EavisTOM JACKSON “The valley’s not big enough,” she says, like someone who has actually looked into throwing a festival for two million people. “We use the land of all 12 nearby farms now, and it physically can’t get any bigger without putting camping sites on the other side of a main road, which would be dangerous. So, sorry Jodie B. We’d love to, but we can’t.” “Jon Langford says, ‘I have a theory that only people who work in IT have broadband fast enough to get tickets, and so this ticketing system unfairly privileges nerds.’” Eavis laughs. “We’ve looked at the stats, and it’s an even spread across the country. We have tested the site – we sat in our office in Somerset and all tried to get on to buy tickets – and some could, and some couldn’t. And we’re not in IT. So we know it’s quite random.” With tickets so tight, people have, over the years, found … innovative ways to get into Glastonbury. In 2017, someone got over the 15ft high Super Fence “with a jet-pack. He landed in the Green Fields. At least, he toldus he’d used the jet-pack to get over the fence. Who knows?” She shrugs, amused. Then adds, casually, “There was a guy with a hang glider, too. He glided over the fence.” Did you throw him out? “Well, we were like, if you’ve gone to all the trouble of sorting out a hang glider, fair enough. Even security applauded him when he landed.” Eavis gets asked for tickets all the time. “The most notable was just after I gave birth to my first child,” she says. “It was a brutal, forceps birth. He came out screaming. And, as they were stitching me up, the midwife said, ‘Eavis … Eavis? Could you …?’” “What did you say?” I ask, aghast. “I said yes. I was off my face!” she laughs. January 16, 2019 160 days until the festival I am at Worthy Farm. It’s cold but sunny, and the ground is firm underfoot. I have been to every Glastonbury since I was 17 – back in 1992 – but I have never been here when the festival isn’t on. This sounds really obvious, but – it’s just a farm. There’s nothing here – no people, no stalls, no Dolly Parton, no tents, no flags. Only the Pyramid Stage, which stays up year-round, and a huge wooden pirate ship in the Greenpeace Field tell you this is anything other than a normal dairy farm, in a particularly lovely part of Somerset. “The local kids come and play on the pirate ship. We built them the new outdoor play area at the school, as well,” Eavis says. The festival generates £73 million for the UK economy We’re in a Land Rover, driving around the site. Every so often, I see a place I recognise from festival time – that tree, for instance, is where I saw a heavily disguised Lady Gaga out partying at 3am in 2009. And that glade – that glade is Strummerville, where the late Clash frontman used to hang out, around an all-night campfire, jamming. “Joe Strummer offered me my first ever drugs,” Eavis reminisces, changing gear as we go up a precipitous slope. “It was my 16th birthday, and he offered me a wrap. I didn’t want it – I’d seen too many people out of it, at the festival – but he thought I was just shy about having his drugs. He was being so courteous. He kept going, ‘Go on – it’s OK!’ And I was like, ‘I’m actually fine!’” We pull up outside the farm. In 2014, an office was built to house the organisation of the festival. Before then, all meetings still happened around the farmhouse table. “See that barn over there,” Eavis says, pointing. “The festival is in there.” I look confused. She laughs. “We try to minimise waste, so most of the festival – the stages, the signs, the benches – are flat-pack. When it finishes, we just fold everything down, put it in labelled containers and put it in there, ready for the next one.” We go into the office building. There’s a huge Lego model of the festival on the table, and a massive, life-sized cardboard cut-out of the Rolling Stones, who headlined in 2013, signed, “I was wrong – it was a great day,” by drummer Charlie Watts. Today is a massive planning meeting for the festival – the primary topics being security and sustainability. For 2019, Glastonbury – always one of the greenest festivals – is having an extra eco push. “We usually use over one million plastic bottles per festival,” Eavis says, starting the meeting. “This year, the target is zero.” The Rolling Stones, 2013PA All vendors on site will be banned from selling soft drinks in plastic bottles. Instead, they will sell cans of pop and water, which the festival will recycle in its own forge. Of course Glastonbury has its own forge. The festival is installing 37 stainless-steel water kiosks, 60 water stations and 500 drinking taps from which people can refill reusable water bottles – either their own or official Glastonbury ones they buy on site. “Be careful with the branding on the bottles,” Eavis warns. “I don’t want to make it look like we’re pushing merch at people. The message is, ‘Bring your own – but if you’ve forgotten, you can get one here.’” At the bars – which usually pump out more than 1.2 million drinks over the festival – new cups have been ordered. Instead of the traditional cardboard models, which are lined with non-recyclable plastic, the festival has tracked down a 25-year-old who has invented 100 per cent biodegradable bottles made of old newspapers. “Ask him if he thinks he could prototype a cup using the same technique,” Eavis suggests. There is a discussion of how they could fund him to pioneer this technology. No one else has tried it, but Eavis is determined. For 2019, the festival is also aiming to cut its power needs by a third, with a combination of efficiency measures and using the farm’s digester, which is run on methane produced by cow manure. The Pyramid Stage is already wholly run on a combination of methane and solar power. Eco matters sorted, the conversation moves on to security and event safety. What kind of things do you have to plan for, I ask. “Weather, contaminated drugs, bacterial outbreaks, terrorist threats,” Eavis begins, briskly. “If there was an outbreak of foot and mouth, the whole festival would be off. Volcanoes! When the Icelandic volcano erupted in 2010, we had loads of cancelled flights – artists just couldn’t come in. Lightning storms – we have to shut all the main stages. Rudimental didn’t play at the Pyramid, because we could see lightning coming in across the valley. Heatstroke – last year was so hot, we had to spray people with hoses as they came in, as they were so overheated from queuing. Structural collapse – festivals in other countries have had stages blow away. We stress-test everything. We had 80mph winds in 2008. We’re OK at 40mph. When it gets to 50mph, you have to close all the tents.” It’s a pretty terrifying list. Joe Strummer offered me my first ever drugs over there “2016 was the worst,” says Adrian. Adrian is operations director. “2016 was an extreme challenge.” So much rain fell in the preceding days that the Eavises had to warn people to delay their arrival. Michael Eavis said afterwards it was the worst weather they’d had in the festival’s entire 46-year history – the place was a treacherous, slippery swamp. I saw people sliding down liquid hills as if they were skiing. That year was an endurance. “I’ve never had so many people in tears in my office,” Eavis recalls. “The beefiest security guards, they’d walk in and just weep. There were very strong suggestions that we pull the entire festival. The roads were blocked, we couldn’t get people on or off site …” And yet, despite the nightmare for the organisers, most festival-goers will primarily remember 2016 as the year they pulled on their wellies, had an extra nip from their hipflasks, still enjoyed headline sets from Adele, Coldplay and LCD Soundsystem, and vowed to buy tickets for the next year. “That’s why, at the meeting, we finally decided we’d crack on,” Eavis says, shrugging. At this point, Michael Eavis – Emily’s father, founder and co-organiser of Glastonbury – comes in. Despite it being January and cold, he’s wearing his customary outfit of shorts and sandals, augmented with black, leather, fingerless gloves. He’s a powerful presence, even at the age of 83. He immediately seems to know what the conversation is about. “The only thing that will ever stop us,” he says, firmly, “is Chinese chicken flu. That’s the only one. We never stop for rain. Nothing would ever, ever stop me.” “Michael loves a crisis,” Eavis says, fondly. “People were sliding in the car parks – and they loved it!” Michael cries. “It’s an adventure training course! It’s character-forming!” During this meeting, it has occurred to me that Emily Eavis doesn’t just run a festival – she is basically the head of an alternate future city-state, with pioneering technology. 1971CAMERA PRESS And yet it’s not a role anyone can apply for: there has never been a vacancy for “organiser of the Glastonbury Festival”. It is a role this quiet, shy woman has unexpectedly inherited – taking over from the charismatic, ground-breaking King of Festivals when the family faced a life-changing crisis. In a way, she’s like the Princess Elizabeth of revelries – set for an ordinary life, until fate took a couple of left turns and landed her with responsibilities she could never have dreamt of. May 31, 2019 25 days until the festival Eavis picks me up at Castle Cary station. At festival time, the car park is filled with thousands of festival-goers, sitting on rucksacks, smoking fags, politely queuing for the festival’s fleet of double-decker buses. Now, in May, it’s empty. “Things are going good!” she says, in answer to my inquiry, barrelling down country lanes. “We’ve got 200 people on site now, building – by May, it’s got its own momentum. We’ve got our final headliner – the Killers! And we’re building a giant, 50ft-high head in Block 9,” she concludes, as if this is a perfectly normal thing. “This bit of the year is so addictive. The buzz. There’s nothing better.” What makes this conversation extraordinary is something Eavis casually mentioned last time I saw her. That, as a child, she hated the festival. “Yes – I can say that,” she says, thoughtfully. “I hated it. I just associated it with … fear. My parents would be so, so stressed about it. They often didn’t book the headliners until March, April – so there would be a whole year of being scared we wouldn’t actually have any bands. When the festival was on, I would just close my bedroom curtains and pretend it wasn’t happening.” I’ve been going to Glastonbury every year since 1992. It is, without exception, my best week of the year: five days in a place filled with joy, creativity and endless diversion. Eavis is only five years younger than me. I can’t believe she hated having the most amazing festival in the world happen in her own backyard. “Really? You hated it?” I query, astonished. “Do you want to see something?” she asks, turning the car down a single-track lane. After half a mile, Eavis pulls into a lay-by, and points. “Look.” There, in the middle of the field – on top of a hill – is a huge, white crucifix, 30ft high. “That’s been there since 1990,” she says. “A neighbour put it up. To protect the village from the evil of the festival.” I look at it. “It lights up at night,” she says, helpfully. “You can see it from the festival site. The festival had a bad reputation when I was growing up,” she says, turning the engine on and driving away. I watch the crucifix recede in the rear-view mirror. “At school, the rumour was that there were people at the festival who went around injecting people with drugs. I’d get kids all the time, saying, ‘My parents say your parents run a festival where people inject people with drugs.’ It was … difficult.” As a child, I hated the festival. My parents would be so stressed The village treated the Eavises warily. There were constant complaints to the local council – about the traffic, about the travellers, about the noise. Every year, it was a major fight to put the festival on again. In 1990, its future was put into doubt after violence broke out between travellers and the on-site security guards, in an event that was subsequently known as “the Battle of Yeoman’s Bridge”. Despite having performed at the festival at the age of five – singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on the Pyramid Stage, before the Style Council headlined – Eavis felt wary about it. Then Britpop happened. “I was 14, 15, and suddenly bands I likedstarted to play. I can remember Rage Against the Machine headlining in 1994, and thinking, ‘This is amazing.’ Then Pulp headlined in 1995, and that was it. I loved it. I thought, ‘I am going to enjoy these last few years.’” Back then, the plan was that the festival would end, on a glorious high, on its 30th birthday – June 2000. By the time the BBC started televising Glastonbury in 1997, the “edginess” of the Eighties had dissolved, and Glastonbury had begun to establish itself as part of the English season: like a pagan Glyndebourne or Wimbledon, with drugs. But the family had sacrificed any semblance of a normal life to do it – and so the Eavises planned to finally retire in 2000 and enjoy some sunset years of stress-free leisure, without 175,000 people pooing in their hedges. However, brutally, and unexpectedly, Jean was diagnosed with cancer in January 1999 – and died just four months later. “It was awful – so fast,” Eavis says, now. “We found out in January – and by May 15, she was dead.” The shock still shows on her face now. The 29th Glastonbury Festival started, relentlessly, just 41 days later. “That was a bit of a blur,” Eavis admits. “We were just … so sad.” Plunged into mourning, with all his retirement plans in pieces, and not really knowing any other way to deal with the grief, Michael Eavis made a decision: he would now continue Glastonbury, as the only way he knew to pay tribute to his late wife. Aware of just what an immense emotional burden this was for her father, Eavis, aged just 19 – and by now a trainee teacher in Newham, London – gave it up to return home and co-run the festival she had once hated; at first alone, and then with her husband, music manager Nick Dewey, who was a long-time attendee of the festival. The first year he attended, he had no ticket; he blagged his way in by pretending that he managed Coldplay. “He had … the Glastonbury spirit,” she laughs. Adele, 2016REX SHUTTERSTOCK Eavis turned up to her 2009 wedding to Dewey in a customised East German IFA jet on wheels – courtesy of the festival’s endlessly creative mechanical team – and had a later pagan ceremony on the festival site, by the stone circle. Guy Garvey of Elbow, James Dean Bradfield from the Manic Street Preachers and the Chemical Brothers played at the reception, as befits festival royalty. Over the years, as Michael got older, Eavis and Dewey gradually assumed more and more responsibilities for the festival. They had a sense that what was a very white, male and increasingly ageing musical line-up desperately needed rebooting for the 21st century, and, in 2008, Eavis and Dewey took the necessary risk of securing the festival’s first ever hip-hop headliner: global superstar Jay-Z. “Oh, God,” Eavis says, still visibly traumatised by the memory. “That year was so, so terrifying.” The controversy over his booking was immediate and overwhelming. The music press were up in arms, as were a vocal contingent of old-skool Glastonbury-goers. Oasis’s Noel Gallagher spoke for many of them when he gave an interview, saying, “I’m sorry – but Jay-Z? No chance. Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music, do you know what I mean? I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury, no way. It’s wrong.” Because of the controversy, for the first time in years, tickets didn’t sell out in advance – the festival’s finances were in a perilous state, and many accused Eavis of “ruining” her father’s festival. Michael Eavis himself was unsure of the booking: “He was supportive of our choice, but he wanted Rod Stewart,” Eavis says. Friends who know Eavis said she was, at the time, “almost broken” in the run-up to the event. “It was an intense amount of pressure for her to be under,” one says. “It seemed as if she was fighting on several fronts: to help the festival grow, to maintain its identity and integrity – but also stay at the cutting edge of festival culture, which was changing.” A male-dominated music industry and press seemed intent on casting her as a clueless, wilful girl into “the wrong” kind of music. Her friend summarises: “I worried it was just too much for her, and she basically wouldn’t put on the festival again.” Emily Eavis and the Dalai Lama, 2015GETTY IMAGES In the event, however, Eavis’s carefully calibrated risk-taking was a vital turning point in Glastonbury’s fortunes. Not a billionaire hip-hop mogul by accident, Jay-Z had prepared cleverly: coming onstage singing Oasis’s Wonderwall, in acknowledgment of the controversy – and then, having won over the crowd with one perfectly weighted, swaggering in-joke, ploughing into a version of 99 Problems so incendiary, the field erupted. Not only was it one of the all-time Glastonbury Moments, but the resulting euphoric reviews allowed the festival to open up to a phalanx of genres and acts previously unthinkable: Pharrell Williams, Mary J Blige, Kanye West, Stormzy, Beyoncé. Suddenly, the biggest hip-hop, R’n’B and grime acts were “Glastonbury material”, at a time when white guitar-rock was dwindling. The festival gained a massive injection of energy and relevancy. Beyoncé’s booking – still spoken of in tones of awe – was a massive coup. Eavis courted her assiduously when she came with her husband, Jay-Z, and “bombarded” her with information on the festival’s ecological and philanthropic activity: “I think Beyoncé was my finest hour – we pulled out all the stops.” Beyoncé’s legendary advent onto the Glastonbury stage – Crazy in Love into Single Ladies, with £50,000 of fireworks going off – was an heroic act. “No one knew she was pregnant, and she had terrible morning sickness just before she went on stage. Proper …” Eavis mimes finger-down-throat vomiting. “Acts like that don’t need the festival, and we don’t have the fees other festivals can offer, because we give so much away,” Eavis explains. “So we have to love-bomb them.” Glastonbury’s unique appeal is a combination of incredible exposure – the BBC covers it less like arts programming and more like a major cultural news event, meaning that acts’ back catalogues regularly go into the Top Ten the week after broadcast – and a growing cadre of former performers who will evangelise about how the Glastonbury audience is like no other. After he played Glastonbury in 2013, Kenny Rogers persuaded Dolly Parton to appear the next year (“Kenny puts a word in with everyone he meets in his circle”). Coldplay brought Barry Gibb along and convinced him to play his 2017 set. After Carrie Fisher died in 2016, Eavis discovered she had attended the festival every year with a group of friends: Princess Leia had been wandering through the crowds and no one knew. Real royalty – Prince Harry – had done the same: turning up in 2013 with minimal security, he spent the weekend without anyone recognising him. “I recommended he should go on into the night,” says Eavis, “because the nightlife is what Glastonbury is all about.” He didn’t leave until 4am. When Harry’s father, Prince Charles, attended the festival in 2010, his presence was, unfortunately, more noticeable. “He was up in the Greenpeace Field, checking out some ecological initiatives,” Eavis recalls, “and one of the Greenpeace guys working there had met Charles before, on another project. He went running over, shouting, ‘Hi!’” As far as Prince Charles’s security were concerned, however, a very hairy man was running towards the heir to the throne – and so they pulled their guns to protect him. “We had to do some very fast talking there,” Eavis laughs. “God! Imagine! If we’d had our first ever shooting – and it was the royal household taking out a hippy. In the Greenpeace Field.” Emily and Michael Eavis in the EightiesEMILY_EAVIS/INSTAGRAM We are, by now, in Eavis’s back garden on Worthy Farm. Willows brush the daisy-speckled lawn and the air is heavy with a tangle of roses. Her three children play on a swing. The incongruity of the scene is the embodiment of Glastonbury – a cheerful but quiet woman, fresh-faced in dungarees, pours tea into bone-china cups, as in the background the constant “beep beep beep” of reversing JCBs reminds you that over the wall the world’s biggest party-cum-cultural-event-cum-vision-of-the-future is being erected on her fields. As we sip our tea, a helicopter buzzes the site. “People always want to come and check it out,” she says, waving. “Apparently, Prince William flew over last week.” There is no real privacy when your address is a byword for excitement. Last year, a French teenager turned up, “having walked all the way from France. He kept saying, ‘Radiohead?’ The festival wasn’t on.” What did you do? “We just gave him a sandwich.” Similarly, a coach full of Japanese tourists once parked up in the driveway – confused as to why all they could find was some cows. “We didn’t have enough sandwiches for all of them,” Eavis sighs. Perhaps it’s because I have a Pavlovian, haptic memory of all the joy I have experienced here, but as Eavis is joined by her husband, and I watch this young, warm, simply good couple talking about their plans for the future – how Madonna would be their dream booking for next year; how to provide more physiotherapy for the exhausted set-builders on site; how to increase their involvement in refugee camps – I feel impossibly moved. Eavis has built a 15ft-high grassy mound at the end of the garden, so she can sit and watch the festival site unobserved, and I sit there, smoking a cigarette, and thinking what an absolutely unique thing Glastonbury is. It’s not done for money – there’s no corporate branding, no advertising. While the festival generates £73 million for the British economy, Dewey and Eavis live a very modest life. And it’s not done for fame or glory – Eavis, in her dungarees, attends no parties or red carpets. It’s done for a reason we hear so little of these days: to make hundreds of thousands of people, in the English midsummer, happy. A non-stop, round-the-clock, 120-hour celebration of what humans can do when they want to immerse themselves in the simple exuberance of existing – from the Dance Tent in the valley to the deep peace of the Park; a whole city lit with lanterns and fairylights. The Eavises have made a little kingdom of joy here, fuelled only by decades of exhilarating ideas made real, and there is nothing – nothing – else like it. Here’s a thing: every so often during the festival, you will suddenly hear a cheer begin – a cheer, followed by wild applause. The first time you come, you presume something has happened – a celebrity has arrived, a show has finished. Eventually, you realise: people are just cheering the festival. They’re just cheering being alive. They’re just cheering being here. “When the gates open on June 25,” Eavis says, joining me, as we watch the JCBs trundle across the meadows, “my father and I go down to greet everyone coming on site. He greets everyone, like, ‘Hello! Welcome!’, and they hug him. They all recognise him.” And what do you do? Do you say “Welcome!”? “Oh, no. I just stand back and watch,” she says, smiling.

Evening All, Can anyone in the know....help me with a quick path query based on the current map? Last few years we have always camped in Baileys (yes - quite out of the way I know - but close enough to PGD and near enough to Park etc...which is our favourite area anyway) But I noticed the Pink "Public Pathways" line does not cross up to the entrance to Baileys like I know I have usually walked - the white line on the map snippet below was our normal route from the main pathway into Baileys - is this still a path this year??? My guess is the pink line only covers areas that they put that metal trackway down on???? and the path I have Circled is still an actual path? Just thought it worth an ask Thanks Paul