1. The first year (1970) Glastonbury festival’s first ever booking came from Michael Eavis serenading his cows with the Kinks. “I was playing Lola to them through a sound system in the milking parlour,” he says. “I’d been to Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music at Shepton Mallet showground, wandering in on the Sunday because there was no fence left by then. I was totally inspired. Jean and I had just fallen in love and we were all loved up, among all those bands and millions of people … I’d never seen a hippy in my life before – the boys and girls all looked the same! From that, I was determined to do an event of my own. I had a better site, facing Glastonbury Tor in the vale of Avalon – it was all a bit romantic. “So I phoned the Kinks and booked them for £500. My favourite band coming to the farm! It was an amazing feeling. Then there was a story in Melody Maker that said: ‘Kinks for mini-festival’. The band didn’t like that: they were No 1 across the world, why were they doing a “mini festival”? So they pulled out. I’d already sold 100 tickets, so I felt very guilty. But the same agent said his mates had got T.Rex going down to Minehead Butlins, which is on the route. They did it for the same 500 quid. So I was saved by Marc Bolan, really.” 2. Arabella Churchill and Andrew Kerr (1971) “I attracted quite a lot of trendy hippies,” Eavis says. Two of them were Arabella Churchill and Andrew Kerr, who had read John Michell’s 1969 book The New View Over Atlantis, “which had Glastonbury as the new Jerusalem – he wrote about leylines and all sorts of silly things. A lovely fellow: an Etonian, old-school British with a stiff upper lip, but also a hippy. Andrew and Arabella put the two together: Michell’s book and my farm.” They worked together on a free festival, with David Bowie, Joan Baez and more. “Arabella and Andrew ran out of money so I had to carry the can for it in the end. I was getting more and more worse off.” 3. The festival returns (1979) Eavis hosted free festivals on the farm throughout the 1970s. “The police were bringing all the waifs and strays off the side of the road and into my place as somewhere to dump them, and I didn’t seem to mind, so we had a party every year.” He started the festival up officially again in 1979. “We ran out of money and had to go to the bank to get £15,000 to see that one through,” he says. The bank now had the deeds to the farm, and it would be theirs if he kept losing money. “But I was keen to carry on.” 4. CND join (1981) Eavis steadied the ship by joining forces with the anti-nuclear campaigners CND, initially naming the festival after the organisation. “They picked up 300,000 posters and stuffed them into envelopes, so people suddenly knew who we were. We took the costs, CND took the balance, and they ended up with £20,000, a fortune in those days.” 5. The festival grows (1982) Eavis calls this one of his favourite years, for the performances by Jackson Browne and Van Morrison, but also for the growing scale. “Sixty thousand people turned up to that – we were looking at fives and 10s before. The CND thing helped, and I attracted a lot of people who were anti-Thatcher, so I’ve got Maggie to thank for our success in a way. We had out-of-work miners working on the security fence, from Maggie closing down the mines.” 6. Curtis Mayfield (1983) The NME’s review of Glasto 83 is wonderfully snooty – the crowd are regarded as “sun-soaking slabs of human tripe” – but even they were entranced by Mayfield: “It took one song from this wondrous man to discover the unearthed treasures of the Pyramid.” 7. The Style Council (1985) One of the most incongruous fashion choices in Glastonbury history came when Paul Weller performed with the Style Council amid mud in a bright white suit. “It seemed a bit at odds anyway, a band like us doing Glasto,” Weller tells me. “There was a post-apocalyptic fashion look, a lot of anarchists. It was just a mudbath, like something out of the first world war, and I had to resort to wellies. We felt out of our depth, so we got straight on the Pernod. By the time we went on I was completely gone. I realised I couldn’t play properly, so I put my guitar down and just sang instead. All the anarchists down the front were chucking mud, but because I was even more out of it than the audience was, I think we won them over. We played Long Hot Summer, which was really taking the piss – it was pouring down with rain – but everyone seemed to see the funny side of it, and it ended up all right. The suit was fucked up, though.” 8. The healing fields (1985) Dedicated to esoteric therapies, the healing fields opened in the mid-80s and are still going strong. In 2019, the Guardian spoke to a couple of gong bath practitioners who had managed to see just one music performance in 15 years. 9. In the shadow of Stonehenge (1985) Backed by the then home secretary Michael Heseltine, the police cracked down violently on travellers who organised a free festival each year at Stonehenge, in a confrontation that was later called the Battle of the Beanfield. Eavis gave the travellers refuge as they fled west. “I put them in the field next door and they ran their own thing, with their own music. And it was free, even though I was doing a paying event on my farm. You had all these lovely posh girls from Hampstead coming down, and they all ploughed off to the hippy festival next door. “I quite enjoyed the hippies’ music and they did make me laugh,” he says. “I was just a dairy farmer, but I thought of them as friends. Being a dairy farmer in Somerset, milking and calving cows, some people do get depressed and kill themselves – it’s quite a lonely life, really. So this was an excitement that I’d imported, and they came on board and added a bit of extra spice to it. I was doing the Cure, Elvis Costello and stuff – and they came up with a new dimension in their music.” 10. Mutoid Waste Company (1987) Those hippies turned out to be extraordinarily creative, and have come to define Glastonbury’s aesthetic. You can see it in the flame-belching creations of Arcadia or the cyberpunk shanty town of Shangri-La, but a large part is down to Mutoid Waste Company, who kicked off in 1987 with their Carhenge installation. 11. Fela Kuti (1989) Named by Rolling Stone as one of the 50 greatest concerts of the past 50 years, this headline show featured just two songs: CBB and Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense. But what songs. Fela delivered solos on percussion, soprano sax and organ between statesmanlike vocal addresses, all over that inimitably tripping, rolling beat. 12. The hippy dream dies (1990) The cordiality with the crusties dissolved in spectacular fashion. “They were selling too many drugs for my liking,” Eavis says. “I got a security firm from Wolverhampton who were all judo gold medallists, and they confiscated all their drugs. It got nasty in the end.” His daughter and now co-organiser Emily Eavis tells me she remembers “people running past the window with molotov cocktails and burning telegraph poles and blowing up Land Rovers. The fact we’re still here is miraculous.” “But all those people still work for me now, you know,” Michael continues. “They’re a very clever, creative crowd – never got proper jobs – and the things they build every year are unbelievable. And they get paid now – they weren’t paid in the mid-80s. So they’re a lot happier.” 13. Archaos (1990) Every Glastonbury-goer will find themselves suddenly agog at a daredevil circus act, and the peak for this kind of eccentric performance was the French troupe Archaos in 1990. While they weren’t allowed to do some of their more outré material involving chainsaws and motorbikes, they still wowed with high-wire and trapeze from their base high up at the apex of the Pyramid stage. 14. Stone Circle built (1992) This festival-friendly addition to the megalithic structures that dot this part of the west of England is technically called the Swan Circle. Its designer, Ivan McBeth, conceived it while living on the Glastonbury site in a portable geodesic dome. “As the full moon rose over King’s Hill, my inspiration arrived,” he writes. “I was to build a stone temple whose prominent stones represented the major stars of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. I experimented with my star map. It was not possible to make a circle of stones given the positions of the stars, but an egg would fit.” Anyone visiting his ovoid temple, “consciously or unconsciously, will be irrevocably changed by their interaction with spirit. Every year tens of thousands of people – pilgrims all – enter the Swan stone circle and fly on her back through Dreamtime, and experience transformation. Yo!” To be honest, flying on a swan through Dreamtime is positively vanilla compared with some of the stuff that goes on here at 5am on Monday morning. 15. Experimental Sound Field (1992) Rave culture reached Glastonbury with this epic dance happening. “It was the first dance field, where Shangri-La is now,” remembers Underworld’s Karl Hyde. “We set up on a two-storey tower in the middle of the field surrounded by a quadraphonic Funktion-One sound system – over two nights, DJs, live musicians and visual artists jammed, only stopping at the point we got taken over by a hardcore rave crew who, thankfully, got booed off by our crowd. Eight thousand people turned up to the last night, when we collectively played for 18 hours straight. By the time they asked us back, we were headlining the Other Stage.” 16. The Levellers (1994) The hippy-heavy crowd at Glastonbury were in thrall to the Levellers: swelled by gatecrashers, this is possibly the biggest-ever Glastonbury headliner crowd, estimated at 300,000 people. “Because it’s dark, you can’t actually see the crowd,” singer Mark Chadwick later said. “Except when they put the lights up between songs, and they look like a field of ploughed potatoes.” 17. TV coverage begins (1994) The BBC has long had the TV rights to Glastonbury, but it was Channel 4 that first broadcast from the festival, helping it go from hippy curiosity to British cultural heavyweight. An enterprising YouTuber has uploaded VHS-taped coverage, complete with sax-backed Tampax ads. 18. Johnny Cash (1994) “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” With those words, as ever, Cash launched into Folsom Prison Blues and cemented the Glastonbury tradition for legends to play on a Sunday afternoon. “I’ve seen a lot of people who are not like me,” he said in an on-site interview. “That’s all right. Everybody’s got the God-given right to be who they wanna be.” As good a maxim for Glastonbury as any. 19. Oasis and Robbie (1995) Having recently left Take That, Robbie Williams turned up to the festival with Oasis for the year that Britpop reached its zenith. Emily had just done her GCSEs and, in typical teenager fashion, was camping out in the fields well away from her parents. “We’d never really had a pop star here before, and there was such a buzz about Oasis too. It felt like a turning point in the festival’s history; we captured what was happening in the outside world, culturally and musically.” 20. Pulp (1995) Drafted into a headline slot after the Stone Roses pulled out due to John Squire breaking his collarbone, Pulp seized their moment and became pop stars with a common touch. “If a lanky get like me can do it, you can do it too,” Jarvis Cocker told the crowd. Emily calls it “one of my real musical turning points – when you’re 15 and standing in a field and watching those bands that mean so much to you, that was Pulp for me. It was a storming, incredible set.” 21. Shit happens (1997) Thanks to what was diplomatically described as “an unfortunate operational error”, the dance tent was flooded in gallons of excrement after the machine that was meant to be sucking up excess water did exactly the opposite. 22. Radiohead (1997) In perhaps the worst year for mud and rain ever, Radiohead hoisted the audience off the soaking ground. “A moment of transcendence: when it becomes something greater than a gig in a field, and turns into something that people talk about for a long time after,” Emily says. “It had this almighty resonance. People were probably feeling a bit stranded – it was Friday night and they had two more days of these extreme conditions; tents were already sliding downhill. But this band came on and spoke to them.” Their monitors stopped working, so while it sounded great in the crowd, they couldn’t hear themselves playing. “There was a deep connection with the crowd, because both sides were vulnerable,” Emily says. Guitarist Ed O’Brien recalls: “It was the biggest gig we had ever done and would ever do for years. We were in flight-or-fight mode during the show itself as the monitors weren’t working. It was so emotionally charged up on stage that night and it wasn’t until Thom asked Andi our lighting director, to switch on the lights that we were finally able to get an idea of the sheer size of it. That was the only moment of euphoria. We thought we’d blown it when we walked offstage. But something happened that night.” 23. Tribute to Jean Eavis (1999) Just one month before the festival, Jean Eavis died of cancer, aged 60. Michael and Emily led a memorial event during the festival, where a phoenix was burned with a brass acorn inside, and an oak tree was planted where it fell. “We were in a very delicate state,” she says. “But even though it was a sad year it was a real celebration of her life. The festival was due to end in 2000, but the amount of support we had made us think we could keep it going. “In the early days of the festival, it was very unpredictable and wild – every time you walked out there might be a pagan on the doorstep who’d had some kind of brainwave. A melting pot of people, and my mum was the anchor. She even held my dad down – he needed a bit of grounding because he got overexcited, running away with things. Back in the 80s, there were a lot of drug casualties because there were a lot more dealers on site, so after welfare had gone home, my mum would look after them. There would often be people there when I got home from school – she’d be giving them sweet tea, and wrapping them up in blankets. And then parents would call and ask us if we had their children – she would drop them off back to where they needed to go.” 24. David Bowie (2000) “Bowie’s agent, John Giddings, phoned me and said David wanted to play,” Michael says. “So I said: ‘What’s he doing now, can we listen to the stuff he’s playing?’ He was doing a show in Manchester Arena, so I took the kids up. We walked into the box in the arena, and people started cheering below, and I thought: ‘My God, how do they know who we are?’ Turns out Eric Cantona was just behind me. I didn’t really like the show – it was a very experimental stage in his life and he was all over the place. We didn’t know a single song. I thought: ‘What’s the point of going with this?’ I phoned John back and said: ‘Can’t he play some songs we know?’ So he said: ‘We’ll do another show in London for you, then, of all his hits.’ And we loved it – it was so good. I told John I could afford £90,000. John said: ‘Is that all? How are we going to tell David?’ Well, that’s your job, John. And it was a done deal. The whole crowd went crazy on it – it was a wonderful show.” 25. Gatecrashers galore (2000) This was a truly feral year, with gatecrashers in record numbers. “I wasn’t prepared,” Michael says. “The fence wasn’t good enough, the security was crap. So I was hauled over the coals by the police, who said: ‘You’ve got to get someone to organise your show. You’re a nice bloke and all that, but you couldn’t arrange something in a brewery, you know the saying?’ I said: ‘Fair enough. At least I can be guaranteed to get 150,000 people at the drop of a hat – I did get the knack of that!’” He hired Reading and Leeds promoter Melvin Benn to sort the operational side. “He used to work for me in the 80s; I’d trained him up, in a way. Bless his heart, he convinced the police he could make it a lot better.” 26. Coldplay (2002) A set that turned the band into superstars, winning the crowd round with songs from their second album just before its release. Chris Martin had done Michael a favour the previous year by coming from Paris to do a charity gig at two days’ notice. “He and Jonny [Buckland] flew to Bristol and I picked them up in a truck. For this, I said, you can headline Friday night next year. Chris said no way, but I said: ‘Definitely, it’s in the bag.’ I was driving while turning around and talking to him. He said: ‘If you don’t face the road, Michael, none of us will be going anywhere.’ “I then had their agents saying the band weren’t ready for it: ‘Can’t they go on in the middle of the afternoon?’ No, they’re headlining. I thought these people were controlling his life, saying they weren’t fit for it. And they were fit for it, and did a wonderful job. And they went from strength to strength after that.” 27. Kate Moss (2005) By pairing Hunter wellies with tiny shorts, Kate Moss invents the definitive British festival look – even for men – that is still going strong today. 28. NYC Downlow (2007) One of the hottest, most enthusiastically queued-for experiences in Glastonbury opens, an ultra-sweaty den of drag, disco and debauchery. “I was there at 5am last year, and I had never seen scenes like this in my life,” Emily says. “An incredible club in New York full of drag queens dancing all night: can this really be happening on Worthy Farm?” 29. Arcadia (2007) Glastonbury already had a Mad-Max-on-perry vibe about it, but was massively enhanced by the arrival of Arcadia. The collective’s Afterburner installation made it debut in 2007 and gradually grew legs and became a 50-tonne spider. “Anatomically, it was very incorrect – real spiders don’t have built-in fire cannons,” its creator, Pip Rush, brother of Mutoid Waste Company’s Joe, told the Guardian last year. In 2019, it was replaced by a fire-breathing crane rescued from Bristol’s docks. 30. The Park (2007) The best views, the best secret sets – the Park stage is now a much-cherished gem. “We got a licence for 15,000 more people, so we asked a farmer if we could use a bit more of his land and start a new area,” Emily says. “I wanted the Park to be really random, musically – stuff which you wouldn’t see anywhere else. It’s got its own feel.” 31. Jay Z v Noel Gallagher (2008) “I’m not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It’s wrong.” This blinkered view from Noel Gallagher teed up one of the funniest moments in Glastonbury history: Jay-Z opening his headline performance with a sarcastic version of Wonderwall. When it segued into 99 Problems and onward, the energy levels never dipped. 32. Leonard Cohen (2008) Under a blue sky turning pink, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was a beautiful moment of secular communion. He took his hat off and held it to his chest, a gesture of awed respect for a Glastonbury crowd that always does singalongs better than any other festival. 33. Blur reunited (2009) Emily calls this “a very emotional end to the weekend”, and how: Damon Albarn cried as he led his reunited band into a climatic This Is a Low. “That’s what we dreamed of, that sense of commune – we’d done it,” Albarn later said. 34. Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young (2009) “We can get Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash; why can’t we get Neil Young?” Emily thought. “And Springsteen as well. As it happened, they both said yes the same year. Although Jay-Z helped get Springsteen, to some degree, because the festival was a talking point in the US, which it hadn’t been before. “Neil Young walked on stage and looked like he was thinking, ‘Am I going to enjoy this?’ But by the end he was really smiling. It was such an amazing gig, definitely one of our best moments. Springsteen opened with Coma Girl, which is a song Joe Strummer wrote about Glastonbury. Playing that song, it personalised the set, made it different to a stadium show and made people feel like he really understood it. The power of Bruce when he goes for it is like nothing else – we were all blown away.” 35. Shangri-La (2009) “We wanted to have a bigger area for late-night entertainment,” Emily says, “instead of just dancing outside a blanket stall.” This was the south-east “naughty” corner and Shangri-La, a kind of post-apocalyptic walk-through rave-cum-art-gallery, turned it into an otherworldly destination. Emily came up with the name because “my dad always called the farm Shangri-La. He didn’t really like going on holiday, and whenever we got back he always be like: ‘Aaah, Shangri-La, the best place on Earth!’” 36. Thom Yorke (2010) The Park has hosted plenty of big secret gigs, from Pulp to Foals, although the biggest coup of all was an acoustic set from Thom Yorke, with Johnny Greenwood turning up to play piano on Karma Police. 37. Taking back control (2011) The festival had changed enormously in the 10 years since Eavis was hauled up in front of the police – and Benn’s contribution was no longer needed. “Melvin was a marvellous chap but he was a control freak,” Michael says, picking this out as a key, if not strictly great, moment. “We didn’t need him any more, because we knew what we were doing. It was my show, and yet he was doing all the donkey work – he didn’t like that combination and said he didn’t enjoy coming down. I said, well, can we call it a day then? He was unhappy to go – we probably did fall out. But two jockeys on a horse doesn’t really work, does it? We’re best of friends now, though.” 38. Beyoncé (2011) Beyoncé’s Vegas-style revue of a set, straddling power ballads, Prince and Etta James covers, a six-song Destiny’s Child medley and a version of Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire, saw her make sure every single person in the 100,000-strong audience was having a good time. They responded with remarkable vocal dexterity in a raucous rendition of Irreplaceable. 39. U2 (2011) “Kate Moss and all those fashion icons were saying: ‘You want to get U2, they want to do it,’” Michael says. “Eventually I had a phone call to my kitchen from their agent, saying the band want to play. I picked the wrong day for the weather; it did rain, but they did a wonderful set. Incredibly well-mannered, that lot.” 40. The Rolling Stones (2013) In terms of crowd-pleasing headliners, the Rolling Stones have arguably never been topped. Read Mick Jagger’s memories of the performance here. 41. Dolly Parton (2014) If Johnny Cash set the trend for the Sunday-afternoon slot, Dolly supercharged it. “She’s the ultimate teatime legend,” Emily says. “So many different tribes came to see her. She talked about her upbringing on a farm and how she had this love for mud, and everyone warmed to her. In person, she was lovely, warm, friendly, and my kids were completely transfixed. Everything about her oozes perfection and grace, with her voice, and accent, and songs – it was like this magical person had arrived.” 42. The Dalai Lama (2015) “The Dalai Lama was turning 80 that year, so we asked him to come,” Emily says. “We were thinking: who could give him a birthday cake? Patti Smith. Her gig was incredible – when she tripped over and said: “I’m a fucking animal!”, the crowd’s reaction was so good. Obviously I was on stage going, who put that lead there? But the energy was so high, she got the audience into a bit of a trance. I was thinking, we’ve got to bring on a birthday cake and the Dalai Lama now ... It was quite a contrast, but it worked really well. I enjoy bringing people in who people wouldn’t necessarily expect to see and giving them platforms to speak. Like David Attenborough, or Pussy Riot when they brought a tank in.” 43. Florence and the Machine (2015) With Dave Grohl doing a Stone Roses and breaking his leg, forcing Foo Fighters to pull out of their headline slot, Florence Welch got called up to the biggest gig of her life. By keeping it percussion-free, and backed by brass and acoustic guitar, her cover of the Foos’ Times Like These kept the Pyramid crowd in a kind of suspended animation. 44. Burt Bacharach (2015) At 78, Paul McCartney was set to be the oldest Pyramid stage headliner ever this year, although that’s still nearly a decade off the oldest person ever to play the stage: Burt Bacharach, aged 87. “To walk on to that Pyramid stage, at the 5pm slot, had to be one of the most exhilarating and nerve-wracking moments of my life,” the now 92-year-old tells me. “Daylight, where faces of so many people just seemed to stretch to foreverland. I’m so grateful for the experience.” 45. Mary J Blige (2015) On an afternoon battling some of Somerset’s most stinking weather, Mary J Blige gave life back to the Pyramid audience with a performance of physical and spiritual indefatigability, screaming in defiance and doing repeated jumping squats in high heels. It is raining? We hadn’t noticed. 46. Adele watches Kanye West (2015) “Adele grew up coming to the festival. She’s a proper child of Glastonbury,” Emily says, picking the moment she persuaded the singer to headline as one of her greatest festival moments. “But if she wanted to do 20 stadiums, they would sell out. Some people need a headline slot – she just didn’t need to do it, and doing Glastonbury is a challenge, because of the size, and you’re not playing to your own audience. We looked at the crowd for Kanye from the side of the stage, and it was pretty incredible. I’d gone through a lot of shit to get there, it was stressful; it was probably one of the most divisive sets we’ve done, but I’m really glad we did it. There was a huge turnout and this really charged atmosphere. The excitement and energy you could feel in the field climbed all over your body – that feeling when you’re in a crowd waiting for something magnificent to happen. I said: ‘Are you gonna do this next year? You’ve got to do this!’ And she said yes, and we shook on it.” 47. PJ Harvey (2016) There was a dumbstruck mood on the morning after the Brexit vote, though once the music started up, it seemed to be quickly swept away. More than ever, Glastonbury felt like a cocoon from reality, one that people sealed themselves inside with even more determination. (Perhaps there were more Brexiteers than you might expect, too.) But the issue was addressed head on with grace and stunning power by PJ Harvey, who read John Donne’s 1624 poem No Man Is an Island: “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” 48. Oh, Jeremy Corbyn (2017) At a snap general election earlier in the month, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, chomped into the Tory majority and forced them into a minority government. He took his victory lap at Glastonbury, drawing a vast crowd and telling them: “The elites got it wrong – politics is about the lives of all of us.” The “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant sprang up throughout, and it felt like real change was in the air. Of course, it wasn’t to be, but the feeling endures that a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening here. 49. Kylie Minogue (2019) One of the emotional high points of last year was Kylie, who had been forced to cancel in 2005 due to her breast cancer diagnosis. She finally got her moment. Chris Martin and Nick Cave guested, but Kylie’s joy – “I’ll never get you out of my head!” she told the crowd – is what really lingers. “It was such an overwhelming experience,” she says now. “I’ve never seen that many people in my life, let alone had the honour, and nerves, of performing for them. It was sensory overload, in the best way. All of the ‘experienced’ people who had advice for me before the show, they were all right: try to enjoy, feel the love, it will feel like for ever and then be over in a minute. It was, in short, one of the best experiences of my life. To feel that I had done enough in my career to be there in that moment. Also, to have the chance again, finally, after missing my headline opportunity in 2005, made it all the more emotional and a small personal triumph.” 50. Stormzy (2019) Emily offered Stormzy the headline slot back in 2017, after he blew her away on the Other Stage. “I’d never seen a live show like that before. This guy had so much talent and energy: everything we need right now on the Pyramid stage. His agent was like, really? And we said, yeah, definitely. “The 2019 set was a universal, incredible moment. Not only was it his performance, his delivery and how he was connecting to the audience, but the production stakes were high – I’ve never seen so many BMXs at the side of the stage before. It makes it worthwhile running a festival when you can have moments like that. “I walked off to tell him this was incredible – and he had had a different experience. He couldn’t hear himself on stage. People were saying no one could go in and see him. I said: ‘I need to tell him I’ve seen all sorts of gigs at Glastonbury, but I’ve never seen anything like that; please let me in, I don’t want him leaving thinking that was a disaster.’ I literally held him, and told him how fucking brilliant it was, and he had to realise that. He wasn’t angry, he was just spinning. But he watched it back, and realised, and started smiling. “Despite all the criticism you get for doing things differently, all the negative stuff from other parts of the industry saying: ‘That’s ridiculous, he’s only got one album, he’s not ready’ – you’ve just got to create moments like that, otherwise it’s pointless, the whole thing. It would dissolve. But it made Glastonbury more exciting than it’s ever been.”