A New Beginning For Glastonbury Festival

01 Jul 2003

Glastonbury Festival 2003 was widely reported as the best yet. As the great clear up begins, MICHAEL EAVIS reveals why he believes the world’s greatest outdoor music festival has reinvented itself yet again. And why the best is still to come - next year.

‘THIS year is a new beginning for Glastonbury Festival. It is as simple as that.

I admit there was a point last November when I honestly wasn't sure if I wanted to go on with the Festival beyond 2006, when the agreement with the Mean Fiddler Group, which helps to run the Festival, expires.

There were problems with the licensing, I had just remarried and I thought perhaps I ought to settle down and lead a normal life.

But things have settled down so nicely and I always believed we were right about the numbers of people who would turn up without tickets this year.

This year was definitely the best festival ever. I have not had one complaint from anyone in the village and now at last we can say we have cracked it. We proved the fence worked last year and we were sure far fewer people would come without tickets.

But you can talk until the cows come home - you have to
prove it. Last year, about 300 people turned up without tickets, though pessimists had predicted 40,000. We could see that we were already getting the message across but, unfortunately, we chased these people out of the car parks and into the village. We didn't intend to, but that was what happened.

So after last year's festival we were saying to villagers that fewer people would come and we would also improve security. We spent a fortune on securing the village and it has all worked. It was not a question of highs and lows for me during the year, even when Mendip District Council rejected the first licence application. I believed in what we were doing.

We had considered asking the village pub to close this year because last year so many people, including people trying to deal in tickets, were sitting outside it on the main road. Melvin Benn of the Mean Fiddler Group who is now the festival's operational director thought it was something we really had to do so he went and dealt with that. (And the publican was compensated!).

That was a major step forward and it was a pleasure for me to see the publican, his wife and his daughter actually enjoying the festival for a change - they were so pleased about it.

I have known Melvin since the 1980s, before he went to Mean Fiddler and his work is superb. Now that he is operational director I can do all the things that I really enjoy doing, the artistic side - all the band stuff on the site, all the charity work and fund-raising, all the publicity and press and entertainment side. I am an ideas man and that's what I enjoy.

Obviously there are things that we want to improve - to help students who probably don't have credit cards and so on to get tickets next year - but we are all really delighted with how things have gone.

Now we are looking forward to next year. And I am certainly not thinking about retiring any longer…


(with thanks to the Western Daily Press)

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