Revellers arriving at Worthy Farm are in the mood for another musical mudfest, writes John Collinsin Pilton, Somerset
A new city has sprung up in the Somerset countryside in the south west of England this weekend. 180,000 revellers and thousands more staff and entertainers have descended upon a quiet dairy farm for the weekend celebration that is Glastonbury Festival.
First held in 1970, Glastonbury 2007 officially got under way yesterday morning at Worthy Farm, but the 1,000-acre site has been filling up with campers since 8am last Wednesday. By 9am on Thursday there were 74,292 people on site - compared with 47,350 at the same stage in 2005 when the festival last took place.
For six days the farm of Michael Eavis, who organises the festival with his daughter Emily, becomes an alternative society complete with its own unwritten rules and social mores. Security is low-key but efficient, although the festival seems to be largely self-regulating. In the first 24 hours there were just 29 recorded crimes, 24 of which were either drug-related or minor thefts.
As in previous years, the weather and the toilets are the two big talking points. A month's rain fell in a matter of hours on the first day of Glastonbury 2005 and the weather gods don't seem to be co-operating this time around either. Wednesday and Thursday saw sporadic heavy showers and, just as the main stages were opening for business yesterday morning, the skies opened up and provided a slick of mud all over the site and put the Eavis's £100,000 (€148,245) investment in additional drainage to the test.
Ironically, Eavis has focused this year's festival on climate change. He is hoping that 100,000 festival-goers will sign up to the I Count campaign. Organised by Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid, the campaign urges people to take 16 steps in their everyday lives to reduce their carbon footprint.
LOCALS IN THE south west blame the weather on the festival rather than global warming. "Them Eavises have brought the weather again," said the owner of the Brook Lodge Farm campsite outside nearby Bristol, on Tuesday night as the rain descended.
This year is the biggest festival yet to be held at Worthy Farm. Local authorities granted permission for an additional 30,000 people to attend - provided they were bused in and out outside of peak travel times. That meant 30,000 turned up on Wednesday, the day the gates opened, and will be driven home in a fleet of 500 buses in the early hours of Monday morning. The logistics of ensuring each person's ticket was waiting for them on their bus must have been challenging, but the system seems to have worked with relatively few hiccups.
Despite the increased capacity, tickets sold out in a record 90 minutes when they went on sale last April. The festival used to have a real problem with ticket touts and gatecrashers. Fence-jumping was tackled with a £1 million (€1.48m) steel fence which was put in place for the 2003 festival, and just 12 fence-jumpers have been apprehended this year. Ticket touting has been an ongoing issue but organisers feel happy they have it cracked this year - anyone wishing to buy tickets had to pre-register in February, submitting a digital picture of themselves which is printed on their ticket.
Musical highlights for the rest of the weekend include The Killers, Shirley Bassey, The Who and Kaiser Chiefs. But, while other large summer festivals such as Oxegen in Ireland and Reading in the UK are all about the latest popular artists, there is much more to Glastonbury than just big acts on big stages.
THE GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL of Contemporary Performing Arts has dozens of different stages and fields which showcase everything from jazz to cinema, circus to comedy. You can get married in a temporary church erected by Lost Vagueness, a contemporary cabaret troupe that pulls out all the stops for its festival appearances. Nearby, treatments for every conceivable malaise - physical or spiritual - are available in the Healing Field. Tony Benn's Sunday afternoon political debate is a Glastonbury institution. There's also three acres of free entertainment in the Kidz Field, for the many parents who took advantage of free admission offered to under-12s who accompany a ticketed adult.
The attendance is not just the usual teens and twentysomethings or even the common stereotype of a new age traveller with dog on a string. On Thursday, walking through the Stone Circle field, a popular hillside field for chilling out while looking down on the rest of the festival, a man can be overheard on his phone saying, "well, if the numbers don't stack up that's what we have to do". It seems even in an idealistic city like Glastonbury, somebody has to take care of business.
TV and radio coverage of Glastonbury continues all weekend on BBC