Mojo - The Music Magazine

After 20 years of solid attendance, MOJO's Andy Fyfe has had his fill of the world's biggest rock festival...

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME coming but, after 20 years of dogged obedience, I've decided that there's just too much grim in my annual pilgrimage to Glastonbury Festival. Tired of traffic jams on the A303 and trudging miles through mud more often than not, weary of a policing policy - totally at odds with the festival's individualist roots - that assumes everyone's guilty until proven innocent, and not a little listless about an event whose layout essentially hasn't changed in a decade, I'm taking some advice from Sir Cliff and this summer going where the sun shines brightly: I'm going exclusively 'boutique' for my festival experience.

Over 16 of the last 17 festivals (I missed 1993, since you ask), I've survived a bomb threat, nearly had a helicopter ambulance land on me just as a white dove exploded in my head, dined on dandelion salad in a silver service restaurant, danced with one of my favourite bands on the Pyramid Stage wearing a chicken suit, been asked by a friend why David Bowie was covering Nirvana's The Man Who Sold The World, bought inadvisable hats and even less advisable other items from bad men mooching about the standing stones (now re-branded as the 'Sacred Space'), enjoyed a Chas'N'Dave style knees-up in a Hobbit-like piano bar dug into the hill, sat around a bonfire sipping jazz tea and burbling cosmic nonsense at Joe Strummer, raved in horseboxes, lost my mind and found it again, and lived a thousand other experiences that could never have happened anywhere else. But few, if any, of those experiences have been in the past five years as the festival, once a byword for fabulous freakery, has become ever more mainstream.

I don't blame the organisers: Glastonbury is hostage to its own fortune. Since inviting in the TV cameras the Eavises, noble as their intentions may be, are necessarily complicit in eroding the festival's character to ensure its survival: sponsors mustn't have their product associated with anything too lawless; the police presence has become stifling (no amount of sartorial finessing can disguise the fact that a copper on horseback wearing fairy wings is still a copper on horseback); and possibly the only thing that's actually gone mad on Worthy Farm since 2002 is health and safety. Even its now-defining characteristic, sheer scale, means that joy is sucked from the experience the moment a drop of rain turns everything into a quagmire. Meanwhile, the very things that once set Glastonbury apart and gave it a sense of liberating freedom - you know, all the outlaw hippy dippy shit we love to laugh at - has been pushed to the absolute fringes by the rise of Arcadia/Lost Vagueness/Shangri-La/Trash City's version of "sexy" "anarchy" (ooh look, drag burlesque and some fire), ironically marking the return of a sanitised version of those smelly travelling folk supposedly kept at arm's length by the super fence.

I know, I know, times change, everything moves on, get over it you old fart, but really, does anyone still think Glastonbury, as headlined by U2 (whose drummer, incidentally, has openly scorned the festival for years) is any more alternative than a T4 roadshow?

So what's the answer? In my case, it's more festivals not less, searching out the spirit of Glastonbury past. And it is out there. It's in the innocent fancy dress charm of Bestival and its Camp Bestival sibling, the slightly lysergic paganism of Green Man, the magical simplicity of Secret Garden, the earthiness of Beautiful Days, End Of The Road's dusty trail, Jersey Live and Guilfest's potty village fête atmosphere, even Norway's Hove (often a warm-up gig for big Glastonbury names) or, should you wish to really follow Cliff and go where the sea is blue, Benicassim on Spain's Mediterranean coast.

Few of these festivals will try to sell you a phone contract, few top 20,000 people, so everything is within 20 minutes of your tent just in case you're caught short, and all are friendly, adventurous, relatively spontaneous and hassle-free.

If you've never been to Glastonbury then you must go, because it will change your life. However, it changed my life over a decade ago, and now, a few rare musical moments aside - The Stooges stage invasion in '07, Coldplay's first triumph in '02, Muse devastating the festival in '04, and any number of "heritage" acts from Al Green to Bowie to Isaac Hayes, Solomon Burke, Leonard Cohen, Edwyn Collins and Neil Young - I need new festival experiences, not repeat ones.

Farewell old friend. And good luck.

Andy Fyfe