My Glastonbury Festival Memories: Chapter 18, 2002

Chapter 18. 2002.

 Two long years had gone by and it was time to return to Glastonbury. There was never any doubt about it, we had to go. It would be unbearable to be at home when the biggest party in the world was going on only thirty miles down the road. Another reason for going to Glasto every year is that there were some people who I didn’t see all year apart from at the festival and we would probably have lost touch if it wasn’t for Glastonbury.

Michael Eavis had not been idle in those two years. He had designed a brand-new steel fence which had cost £1,000,000. The design meant that it was too high to climb, and it couldn’t be dismantled either as all the sections fitted into each other. There was a metalled walkway all around the outside of it as well which made it impossible to burrow under the fence. Glastonbury was now surrounded by a ring of steel. Another change this year as well was that the Mean Fiddler organisation had taken over the security duties. This wasn’t approved of by a lot of festival goers, but it turned out to be quite successful. It was now almost impossible to gate crash Glastonbury. Most people didn’t mind the gate crashers and I don’t think even Michael Eavis really objected to them, but it had to be stopped because of risks to health. Also, even though the site was huge there simply wasn’t enough camping room for an extra 100,000 people. The other major benefit was that it kept out the gangs of thieves who were ruining it for everyone else. Crime dropped dramatically and now you could leave your tent unattended without worrying that it would be pillaged. The organisers and security had overlooked one thing though. The car-parks were still outside the fence and when the thieving scumbags found they couldn’t get into the festival they started robbing from cars outside. When we left on Monday we saw lots of cars with smashed windows where they had been broken into. Luckily, they hadn’t touched Kim’s little Fiat Panda. Other people I know weren’t so fortunate though. My niece Katherine had her car stolen and it was later involved in a  car crash which was very upsetting for her.

With the nice weather and a lot of the problems solved Glastonbury 2002 should have been one of the great festivals but it seemed to fall short somehow. A few months earlier the atrocity of 9-11 had happened, Afghanistan had been invaded and the war in Iraq was being planned. Back in the 1980’s there would have been speeches from the stage warning of the dire consequences of going to war. Strangely though this didn’t seem to affect Glastonbury. It had become a lot less political. A lot of the gate-crashers of previous years were working class people who probably couldn’t afford to buy tickets so from 2002 onwards the audience at Glastonbury became more middle-class and wealthy. They were part of the throwaway society. This is the time when people started abandoning tents and other belongings at the end of the festival. There was a lot more room for camping in 2002 but strangely that seemed to take away from the atmosphere. This was the year we moved our camping area again and moved across the old railway track to Pennard Hill Ground.

I think another reason 2002 didn’t live up to expectations was because the line-up wasn’t that great. Rod Stewart was the headliner on the Sunday. It had been thirty years since I had seen Rod at my first ever festival at Lincoln. Back in 72 he was great, playing with The Faces and he was a great rock singer. Now, he just seemed like a parody of his former self, lost in show-biz. Kim really enjoyed it though. Rod seemed to be enjoying himself and kicked about thirty footballs into the audience. What I really regretted was that Kate & Anna McGarrigle were headlining on the Acoustic Stage when this was going on. I would have loved to have seen them because their debut album of 1977 is one of my all-time favourites. I’ll never get the chance to see them now because Kate has since died. Another great band I would have liked to have seen was the Be Good Tanyas. I wasn’t familiar with their music at the time, but I love it now. I missed all that to see Rod The  Mod. The real headliner should have been Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame. He was good. The sound for his performance was the best ever at Glastonbury with the music coming at you from all directions. Originally, they planned to have plastic pigs descending by parachute into the crowd but that wasn’t allowed for health and safety reasons.

We saw Brian Kennedy play who has a great voice. You could hear the music from the Pyramid during his performance and he asked the audience who it was. When he found out it was Ash who also come from Northern Ireland he didn’t mind. Also, we saw Eric Bibb again and Nick Lowe who always seems to be on at Glasto. The best performance in the Acoustic that year for us was a very emotional set by the late great Richie Havens.