Crikey. Brunhilde has just reappeared and she's telling Siegmund that the joys of Valhalla await him, but Siegmund is protesting and muttering something about Wotan's secret wish. Anyway, it turns out Siegmund is slain by Hunding, who himself is then struck to death by a contemptuous wave of Wotan's hand.
Wotan then legs it, vowing vengeance on Brunhilde. . . You join us as we watch - rapt - The English National Opera's production of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries on Glastonbury's Pyramid stage. It's right complicated this opera lark - a bit like Eastenders turned up to 11. All the women sing like Björk having a bad hair day, while the men sound like Lemmy with bronchitis. All told though, we can pronounce this unique Glasto high-art experiment to be classicaltastic and safely predict that opera could well be the new cocaine. And we'll take Wagner over Oasis any day.
More flamboyantly theatrical than The Scissor Sisters, better movers than James Brown and sonically more effective than Muse, the ENO gang stole the festival for many. It was just another prime example of Glastonbury's capacity and willingness to surprise, entertain and challenge - and all merely for the sake of it. Opera in a field? That will do nicely.
Why anybody and everybody involved in the staging of live music wasn't at Glastonbury this year taking copious notes and drawing up diagrams and bar charts is a mystery. Firstly, Glastonbury is now the most heavily subscribed musical event in the world - over two-and-a-half million people were looking for one of the 112,000 available tickets this year. And all 112,000 sold out in less than an hour.
It's not the line-up that generates this phenomenal amount of interest; it's not the Travelling Homeopathic Collective Clinic, not the Recycled Metals Sculpting Centre and not the Healing Arts Workshop talk on "Making Constructive Use of Your Negative Emotions". It's that ineffable Glastonbury thing, which author George McKay comes close to capturing in his book Glastonbury: A Very English Fair when he writes: "It's about idealism, anarchy, being young, getting old disgracefully, trying to find other ways, getting out of it, hearing some great and some truly awful music. . . this attempt to position festival culture within a political praxis and discourse, a politics which admits pleasure, pop and rock music, temporary community, landscape, nature, promiscuity and narcotic".
And Glastonbury actually stands for something beside corporate sponsorship, promoter greed and treating paying punters with contempt. It remains non-profit making and each year gives over £1 million to Oxfam and Water Aid. It demonstrates that people, and an awful lot of them, will go the extra yard if they know something substantial holds the festival together. If they know that the main band on the main stage aren't being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for going through the motions but, as in Glastonbury's case, will play for only a fraction of their normal fee, then priceless goodwill builds up.
Not that this would bother the Clear Channels out there who eye up Glastonbury as a trophy festival to add to their portfolio. Clear Channel would buy up the festival tomorrow if they could and any music promoter out there would give Michael Eavis a blank cheque for the rights to license out a Glastonbury franchise.
Glastonbury cannot be replicated anywhere else (the ley-lines, dude) but aspects of it can. It doesn't all have to be inflated ticket prices, beer company hoardings and mobile phone companies plying their trade at festivals. And if bands didn't demand such obscenely high payments for bashing out their greatest hits in the wind and rain to a demoralised audience, ticket prices could be reduced to a fair level and some of the surplus could go to organisations that actually need it.
Glastonbury is empirical proof that there is a better way. Want two-and-a-half million people interested in buying tickets for your music festival? Give Oxfam a ring.
