Glastonbury 2019 has just finished and was, yet again, a major success, seeing headlining acts like Stormzy and Kylie Minogue. The Glastonbury Festival journey began in 1970 when the tickets cost £1 and included free milk from a local farm!
The first festival took place the day after Jimi Hendrix died, gathering 1500 participants for only £1 per head! It was heavily influenced by the hippy movement and was originally called the ‘Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival’.
The first main headlining band were supposed to be The Kinks, but they were replaced by T-Rex when The Kinks cancelled at the last minute. The first headline is T Rex, who replaced The Kinks after they cancelled the last minute!
It is rumoured that the festival began as a way for the owner of the land to pay off an overdraft. Initially, Michael Eavis found himself in further debt, but this has clearly changed over the decades!
The festival wasn’t called the Glastonbury Festival until 1981.
The ‘Glamping’ that is available at the festival attracts some of the biggest celebrities in the world and their tents can cost up to £ 9,000 each, including luxury items, three bathrooms and some even come with servants!
Amazingly, the festival uses as much power as the city of Bath in one weekend! Throughout the weekend, around 30 megawatts of electricity is used, which is almost as much as the city of Bath that has a populatio0n of over 84,000. That kind of power needs some serious generators. For Generator Rental, visit Newburn Power Rental
Paul McCartney was fined £ 1,000 by the local council. The famous former Beatle played over his set’s curfew time and was sent the bill, although Eavis did offer to pay it for him.
The Glastonbury Festival is the size equivalent to more than 500 football fields. The site covers over 1,000 hectares (and continues to grow every year!). It has more than 10 miles of security fence built to stop gate crashing, and there are also more than 40,000 bins, 100,000 rolls of toilet paper, 40,000 tubes of sunscreen and 4,500 toilets.
The festival has made it into the Guinness Book of Records. At the 1984 festival, 826 people juggled at least 3 objects to keep 2,478 objects in the air at the same time to break the world record.
A whopping 40,000 sun cream tubes were given out to festivalgoers in 2002.
In 2003, more than 400,000 ciders and beers were sold!
Glastonbury Festival costs £22 million each year to stage but is said to be worth £82 million. The wonderful fact about Glastonbury is that every year it contributes to great causes, including Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, by setting up kiosks, charity shops and more throughout the festival itself.
Surprisingly, there was one year when the festival made no profit at all. 2008 was the year following the banking crisis, with everyone feeling the pinch, including the festival, which made no profit for the first time in 39 years.
It wasn’t until 1990 that Glastonbury got a police presence. The festival was held for almost 20 years without the police being needed.