Last week I was incredibly lucky to meet my absolute idol and founder of world famous Glastonbury Festival, Michael Eavis. Glastonbury festival is the largest greenfield festival in the world and is now attended by around 175,000 people every year. I met Michael at a live Desert Island Discs evening in Bridgewater, all of the songs chosen were performed by young musicians from Somerset Rural Youth Project’s ‘Rural Music Network’. I am so, so incredibly happy to have been given the opportunity to interview Michael, I could never of imagined this happening last week! 🙂 So I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do, and good luck this Sunday in the ticket sale! (also, obviously I would have asked more questions, but I wasn’t really thinking straight, I did it in person and I was very, very nervous… but the answers are quite long anyway, so it’s still a beefy interview)
What inspired you to start Glastonbury?
I always liked pop music anyway, when I was at school I was really keen on The Who, Elvis Presley and all that sort of thing, I was always keen on music; but when I went to the Bath Blues festival I got the idea for Glastonbury.
Have you always wanted to run a festival?
Always wanted to? Not necessarily, no, I just sort of waded into it really, I didn’t know what I was doing really because I was farming, you know what I mean? But it was fun thing, I always liked music anyway, and played loads of pop music records and stuff, but I never really saw myself as a festival organiser, not really.
How did you establish the festival?
Well I don’t know how it succeeded, I’ve got no idea! It just grew like mad, it grew like Topsy! We’re doing something right, I don’t know what it was though, we just liked what we were doing.
Did you know anything about event management before you started the festival?
No way! Nothing, no.
How long has Glastonbury been running?
46 years actually, I keep saying 47, but it’ll be 47 next year.
I know you are a very passionate and dedicated farmer, but running the festival can have a lot of damage to the land, does that upset you at all? What comes first the farm or the festival?
Well it does damage the land certainly, but it can be repaired; soil is very forgiving, it rains and the sun shines, then it gets dry, then it gets nice to work, and it breaks down to a nice seed bed, so we re-seed it with grass seeds every year, we use thousands of pounds of grass seed. But the soil is very forgiving, whatever you do to it, you can’t do much harm to it because the weather brings it back to life. The farm land looks lovely now, 3 months later, but the festival this year was so muddy, it was horrible after the event, but not now though!
Was/is there any times where you are tempted to stop running the festival?
No not really, I mean we take years off, every fifth or sixth year or something, but that’s a break for the farm and a break for the village and the stock, and the families of the staff who help run the festival.
I assume you have a massive team of music scouts booking all the bands, but do you ever get a say in who plays, the festival, and do you sometimes sneak a few of your personal favourites onto the lineup?
Oh, I do the headliners usually myself, I have 12 people including my daughter that are involved in the booking; I did the Avalon stage this morning for instance, which is a sort of folky stage, and Eddie who runs Cambridge Folk festival also books the bands for me for Avalon, so he came down from Cambridge this morning.
How long after the festival do you start booking next year’s bands?
Oh we do it all the time, we’re talking about 2019 at the moment actually, upper headlining bands.
Did you ever mean for the festival to get as big as it has?
Not really, I don’t know why it did, it just did grow you know? So we cope with the crowds and we sell a lot more tickets now, but we’ve actually reached the limit of what we can do I think, I think numbers are high enough!
If you could give any advice to someone wanting to start their own festival, what would you say?
Oh dear, I wouldn’t recommend it you know? All the elements come together, you need to be able to afford to lose money to start with, I’ve never gone bankrupt you see, because it’s too high risk. Loads of festivals are going bust all the time and down your way there was Hood Fair and they went bust in the end, and then Campus went bust which was also in Exeter. They don’t succeed unless you have a lot of… oh I don’t know what it is, but we’ve always covered the cost of the event, but actually it is a nightmare, you can’t really do it unless you’ve got the resources, you have to lose some money, otherwise you just go bust. I think there’s a future for small sort of homespun festivals like Beautiful Days for instance, some of those do seem to work, there are a few small ones that are working. To be honest selling the tickets is the first thing, for people that want to come! That’s the biggest thing isn’t it? I’ve got nearly 3 million people that are registered to buy tickets, maybe not every year, but that’s five percent of the entire population of the UK want to come, it’s amazing isn’t it?! So a lot of people want to come, for whatever reason, whatever it is, I don’t know, I’ve got no idea; but it’s got a kind of magic about it, and everybody wants to get involved with it.
Glastonbury official website:http://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk
Glastonbury Facebook:https://www.facebook.com
Glastonbury Twitter:https://twitter.com/GlastoFest?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Last week I interviewed Lucas Beaufort, French skateboarder and artist, click here to read.
(Also if anyone was hoping this interview would have any 2017 exclusive news, the only thing I have is one of the headliners is a he 😉 )
Arty Farty 
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