Glastonbury

Americans have never heard of Glastonbury. That may seem surprising to our British friends, but neither myself nor any fellow "Yank" I've ever spoken to had any idea of what it was. To all my fellow Americans out there, let me explain: It's the greatest kept secret in all of Britain. We don't know about it because there is no way for anyone to make any money telling Americans about it. The only way I can describe Glastonbury is "Woodstock, but cool...I mean really, really cool." I kept saying as I watched this film, I wish it were longer. First of all, as a rock film, it's better than any concert film you can name (even though we Americans only knew maybe 20% of the bands in the film). Better than Live Aid. Better than Live 8. Better than Knebworth. (Unfortunately, we can't see every performance in its entirety because there are so many of them.) And the fascination extends beyond the musical performances. It's a wonderful historical document, showing the evolution of British pop, from classic rock to punk to new wave to industrial to whatever they call today's music. Plus you get an look at the fashions and zeitgeist of each music. Hippy's to bikers to (what we Americans call) lot-scammers. Glostonbury shows nakedness, drugs, mud, music and chaos on a biblical scale, often times on the stage itself. It defies explanation. You can only see it to believe it. Woodstock happened only once. This goes on every summer, and the music doesn't suck. It's a crowning achievement for rock cinema and rock history. I've always wondered why the best rock comes from Britain. This film offers a clue. After the film was over, I walked out of the theater and wanted a hit of acid or a stiff drink. I wanted to smash a window and streak down the street. I wanted to light a fire, quit my job and join a rock band, renounce all my worldly possessions and grow out my hair. I wanted to stand up and cheer because this is a classic film. I didn't do any of those things, except the later, because I'm not a moron; but the film certainly conveys the liberating power of music and it's capacity to free the soul. I am so amazed that the Glastonbury festival even exists in this modern age of the puritanical War on Drugs. It couldn't exist in America. I'm glad it does exist, and I'm glad that this film exists because Bachanalia is no longer valued. It is seen as a threat, as a corruptive force rather than a liberating rite of passage. It is an experience everyone should have at least once in their life, and should the day come when the 'Forces that Be' close Glastonbury down, at least Temple's film will still be here to show future generations how wonderful life can be when lived with perfect unfettered collective freedom, (as Bowie says) "if just for one day."

Glastonbury feels a lot like a home wedding video: If you were there, watching it back will probably be a fantastic experience. If not, expect to struggle in places.

The movie is a mix of music, background events and smiley faces in silly costumes. While the smiley faces are important if you intend to create a sense of the atmosphere, two hours of this starts to drag. As you might expect, there is a fair bit of music, although inevitably only a tiny proportion of all the acts that have appeared at the festival over the years. Some clever production techniques are used, such as mixing performances from different years together, and using specific songs to provide a narrative to other festival scenes.

But this subtle narrative is about all there is to guide the uninitiated through the movie. This might be acceptable for the music, but not the interviewees. The movie seems to revel in this to the point of arrogance: Early on, it includes a scene in which the organiser, Michael Eavis, is talking to festival goers who have no idea who he is - much like me at that point in the movie.

Background events and history are covered, but not very well explored. Genuinely interesting themes, such as the involvement of travellers and the growing commercialisation of the festival, are dealt with rather too quickly. There is a lot of social history here, which could have made this quite a challenging documentary. But perhaps if Glastonbury had covered these fully, I would be bemoaning the lack of music or complaining it didn't convey a festival atmosphere?

It was the 30th anniversary of the first ever Glastonbury festival recently but to be honest I probably couldn't have told you that before watching this film. Sure, I'll tune in to the television coverage when there are bands I am interested in playing but otherwise I'm not really a festival goer. It didn't take me long to twig that this isn't really a documentary about the festival in the way I expected because it is more about the spirit of the place. Now, in a way, this makes for a very good film because it just sits back and pretty much shows the festival for what it is. The problem is that it also means the film has very little structure, precious little insight and features far too many people just being tw*ts. Some of them are just having fun but the funniest ones are those filled with the "beauty" and "importance" of the event – God I would have loved to know how some of them turned out as they got older! Here and there the film produces moments of interest (eg it was interesting to hear the organisers talk about the riot, the security problems and the like) but mostly it doesn't have many good contributions and even when it does. It doesn't use them well at all. This leaves us with two other things to fill a 2 hour+ run time, performances and footage. The choice of performances is, to put it politely, inconsistent. What does it say for a music festival that has been going on for longer than I have been alive, if this film decides to include David Grey giving a typically bland performance, Pete Dougherty falling into the crowd and several other performances that could only represent "choice picks" if taken from a very limited catalogue. There are other choices that are better but they do tend to lean towards the very modern, I assume because the media coverage meant it was better and more of it. However if the available performances lacked sufficient kickers then it could have gone for more of a focus on the scene at the festival.

Like I said, it does do this reasonably well in how it just keeps churning out footage of the people and logistics of the event but even this is pretty average. By just showing the stuff that got caught on camera I did wonder why this was any different from the annual BBC coverage. Literally in the last 20 minutes, the film finally gets down to some thought and insight regarding the way the festival has drifting from being a sort of relaxed commune, to being fenced in and more controlled. However this is barely 4 minutes of discussion and it is approached to suggest that it is done because it has to be – strangely there is no discussion (beyond one scene of rich people) of how branded it has all become.

Overall then a fairly pointless documentary that achieves very little in 2 hours. It does kind of grab at the spirit of the event in the footage of people but generally it is lacking interest or insight while the choice of performers made me worry about the festival if some of them were in the "top picks" of 30 years! Might be of value to some but you're more likely to get just as much if not more from the annual coverage on the BBC.

With well over a hundred thousand attendees per year, The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts is a famed counterculture musical event held in the English countryside not far from where the mystical Neolithic monument, Stonehenge, is located. Comparisons to Woodstock are clearly inevitable, but whereas Woodstock was basically a one-time thing, The Glastonbury Festival has been an annual event dating all the way back to 1970. Some of the styles and attitudes may have changed over the years, but the spirit of free love, political consciousness-raising, New Age mysticism and sheer unadulterated rebellion for which the festival is famous still remains.

Julien Temple, the director of the documentary entitled simply, "Glastonbury," brings an almost patchwork quality to her film, indiscriminately splicing together grainy footage from the earlier festivals with far clearer images from the much more recent past. She doesn't identify which year any particular sequence is from, so one minute we'll be watching hippies and flower-children "doin' their thing" in the meadows and the mud, followed the next by spike-haired punk-rockers head-banging their way into mind-altered oblivion.

The glue holding this excessively long, frequently repetitious and somewhat unwieldy film together is Michael Eavis, the idealistic yet deeply pragmatic festival organizer whose running commentary illuminates the history behind Glastonbury that he himself lived through and indeed helped to create. He discusses the changes he's seen in the participants over the years, acknowledges some of the more crassly commercial aspects of the event, and recounts a few of the less savory moments that have come close to spelling the end for the festival itself. The latter include the occasional run-ins he and his fellow celebrants have had with both the law and some of the more disgruntled residents of the town nearby.

But, clearly, the main reason for checking out "Glastonbury" is for the music, and, indeed, the festival has played host to a surprisingly eclectic mixture of musical performers and styles in the four decades since it first came into existence. Heavy metal, reggae, acid rock, electro, blues - all these genres and then some have found a home at Glastonbury. Some of the more well-known performers in the movie include Bjork, David Bowie, Coldplay, The Velvet Underground, Radiohead and Tangerine Dream. It's a pity that we are treated to little more than snippets of each of their acts, but even in small doses they create quite a tasty little smorgasbord for die-hard music lovers to sample.

Glastonbury Festival, probably the world's greatest music event, now in its 50th year, though sadly this year, 2020, it, along with pretty much everything else, found itself cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Personally I have never been, even though it is only a couple of hours drive away, but every year I sit at home and take in as much of it as I can on the TV. I like Julien Temple's work,a very talented film maker. Sadly I don't think that Glastonbury is one of his better works. It started off very promising, with the festival being set up and people arriving, inter-cutting footage from different decades. Pity he didn't maintain that throughout. This film is more focused on the festival goers rather than the history or musical acts, although there are many great performances of the latter. Most of these are from the 1990's/early 00's, I would like to have seen more older stuff (assuming footage exits). Too much time is given to the New Age Travellers period, and seeing Rolf Harris being adored on stage now feels rather sickening (he is now serving time in prison for historic sex offences). One of the last tracks played is Bowie's"Heroes", the heroes of this film were father Ray plus his sons Andrew and Mark, who each day empty the brimming toilets, taking great pleasure in their work.At just over 2 hours I chose to watch in instalments rather than one swoop.