Fact #64050

EYE WITNESS - THE FIRST GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL
by Johnny Black

Brian Seal (local journalist) : Pilton is well-endowed with retired Major-Generals, Sirs and Ladies. The local Tory MP, David Heathcote-Amory lived in the village. So when Michael Eavis came up with the idea of a pop festival, he was facing stiff opposition from the start, but then he’s not exactly the normal farmer type.

Michael Eavis (farmer) : I knew I was in for a fight, but my background has always been Nonconformist. Our whole family down the years have been Quakers, Methodists, very anti-establishment, always looking dubiously at central government.

I’d been into pop music all my life. I started with Pee Wee Hunt, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, but by the late 60s it was Dylan and Van Morrison and I was very anti the Vietnam War. Anyway, I had such a good time at the Bath Blues Festival in 1969 that when I got home I thought, ‘We’ve got a good site here in Pilton. Why don’t we do something similar?’

The first problem was that I knew nothing about the music business. I started by ringing up the Colston Hall in Bristol to ask how I could get in touch with pop groups. A chap there gave me the name of an agent, and the agent put me in touch with The Kinks, who agreed to appear for £500, which was a lot of money for me to pull out of a milk churn.

Still, with The Kinks on board, I was able to book more acts and I got Amazing Blondel, Quintessence, Sam Apple Pie, Steamhammer. It was going along well until I made a bit of a public relations faux-pas. I said in the papers that if skittles was the ultimate form of local entertainment then it was a pretty poor culture.

Of course, all the local farmers loved their skittles nights and they thought I was ridiculing them, so I had my first taste of public furore.

Shortly after, Melody Maker printed a piece describing it as a mini-festival, which so incensed Ray Davies that The Kinks pulled out. He actually managed to get a doctor’s certificate claiming he had a sore throat and couldn’t sing.

I was ready to give up. I woke up every morning before milking time worrying about how much it was costing me, thinking it was doomed to failure. The crucial thing that turned me round again was my daughter Juliet. She was just ten but she said I’d look such a fool if I didn’t go ahead with it. I got back onto the agent and he said Marc Bolan was playing at Minehead and he would be available. It was perfect because Ride A White Swan was just about to hit No1 and T.Rex was much more the group of the moment than The Kinks.

Once I was sure I was going to do it I realized we needed a stage. I got a local housebuilder to put something together out of scaffolding and plywood. I asked him what would happen if a high wind came along, would it blow away? He shook his head and said he didn’t really know. None of us knew. So I got him to lash it to two apple trees with some hefty ropes.

Another problem was accommodation. Where, on a farm, were we going to put up all these bands and their crews? Luckily, I got a couple of my neighbours to agree to let us use their cottages for the weekend.

A week or so before the big day, I had a call from this fellow with a rich local Somerset accent. He sounded very genuine, offering to do security for the festival at two pounds per person per hour. That seemed very reasonable so I agreed. When the day dawned, he and his mates turned up and they were the ugliest lot of Hell’s Angels you’ve ever seen. What a fright I got, but I had agreed, so I had to take them on.

Brian Seal : There were signs up on the local pub, The Crown, saying ‘Hippies Keep Out’. People were just generally opposed to the whole idea.

Michael Eavis : When the fans started to arrive I immediately felt a lot better. These were softly spoken, middle class hippies. Nice, attractive interestingly dressed people. I found them very appealing. I felt right away that this was the beginning of something that would change our way of life.

Jane Cady (fan) : I’d just dropped out of college with my friend Di Chalker, so we got our festival kit together – a bottle of apricot wine, a kazoo each and a carton of bubble mixture. We’d seen people on the Woodstock movie with purple hair, so we dyed ours and set off. I wore a floral skirt and Di had denims that she’d sewn a huge insert into, so they would be like bell-bottoms.

Michael Eavis : I was apologizing to the fans as they arrived because we didn’t have The Kinks, but most of them were delighted. A lot of them actually turned around, went back to their villages and got more friends to come along because T.Rex had just become the big thing.

Ian Anderson (performer) : I was living in Bristol and a bunch of us drove there in our van. Al Stewart had been playing a gig at the Bristol Troubadour the night before, and stayed with us, so he came along too.

Mike Ringham (DJ) : There was an ox-roast, which would be frowned on now, and there was free milk from the farm. You got the feeling you had found a vast new family. There was no donation to CND or Greenpeace then. No-one gave a bugger about that.

Brian Seal : I covered it for the local paper and the first thing I saw was naked youngsters riding around on Harley-Davidsons. They looked like indians. Then they started walking up to the village, still with nothing on, and all the curtains were twitching.

Ian Anderson : It was incredibly ramshackle. Lots of Afghan coats and nothing resembling a backstage area. You could just drive in, park at the back of the stage, get out your guitar and climb up onto the stage. The audience had total access everywhere.

Michael Eavis : Marc Bolan was late arriving, and I was quite worried, but Ian Anderson saved the festival. He knew I couldn’t pay him, but he played a great set that got everybody in the right mood.

When Bolan finally showed up, he had this amazing car, a Buick I think, covered bumper to bumper in velvet. I thanked him for coming and leaned forward to stroke the velvet on the roof. He snapped, “Don’t touch it!” and drove off towards the stage.

Ian Anderson : My partner Ian Hunt, another guitarist, decided that the whole thing was so utterly unlike Woodstock that we had to do Country Joe’s Fixin’ To Die Rag, so we invited Al Stewart up on stage with us, and half the audience came up as well.

Jane Cady : Di and myself were fledgeling vegetarians when we arrived but, as the day went by, we got really starving and the smell of the ox-roast was wonderful. So, by the end of the day, we were carnivores again.

Michael Eavis : I thought we were in for further problems when Wayne Fontana didn’t turn up but, as it happened, everybody was quite pleased because people thought he was a bit of a drip by that time.

Jane Cady : Blues was my music then, and Duster Bennett played the best set of the show as far as I was concerned. One of the best things about it was that it was all so informal and rustic. You could watch the stars making their way through the mud to the stage. Marc Bolan’s car ended up quite mud-spattered and he was not best pleased.

Keith Christmas (singer/songwriter) : I’d supported Al Stewart the night before in Bristol, and I had another gig immediately after the festival which was paying me much more, so I really did Pilton just for the crack. I was tripping when I went onstage, and I think there can’t have been more than 300 people in the field at that point, most of them stoned.

Eddie Baird (Amazing Blondel) : Festivals were great for us, and we went down well at Pilton. There were about seven of us including the road crew and, after the gig, we managed to get off with some of the local tottie, so there was quite a few of us went back to the cottage. But there were only four beds, not enough for us to enjoy ourselves properly. We convinced the St John Ambulance Brigade to lend us stretchers, so we were all accommodated in one way or another, and we retired well out of it.

Jane Cady : A photographer from the local paper came up and asked us to pose for a picture, which we did. Then he asked for our names, but we were a bit reluctant to give them, because you never know who you can trust. So Di said she was Janis Joplin and I said I was Grace Slick. The next day, in the Bristol Evening Post, there we were and the caption underneath said, ‘Janis Joplin and Grace Slick enjoying themselves at the pop, folk and blues festival.’ We just fell about.

Michael Eavis : I regarded the whole event as a kind of cross between a harvest festival and a pop festival, so I had some bales of hay up on the stage and Marc Bolan perched on one of them while he was singing Deborah. Despite my first encounter with him, I have to say that he was wonderful, easily the highlight of the festival. The sun was going down behind the stage, a red sun. There were only 1,500 people there to see it, but you knew this was music that was going to last. To this day I reckon it’s one of the best things that ever happened here.

The Hell’s Angels created quite a few problems for us though. In the night they burnt a hay wagon that had belonged to my father. They also stole the ox from the ox-roast. In the morning they all marched into the farmhouse and I paid them and, I’m glad to say, never saw them again.

Eddie Baird : The real laugh in the cottage was the next morning, though. A family with about three kids arrived at nine o’clock and walked in to find this gang of hippies and women all over the floor. They had rented the cottage for a holiday and didn’t really expect to find anyone in it. The mother was fascinated by it all, and really good about it. She got stuck right in and made bacon and eggs for everybody.

Michael Eavis : Bolan was incredibly reasonable about his fee because, when it was all over, I didn’t have enough money to pay him. So I offered his manager payment in instalments and he agreed to accept it. Not only that, but he donated tracks to the next year’s Glastonbury Fayre album for nothing.

Quite a few people stayed around for a few more days. I felt my world had been shattered because I knew by then that I’d lost £1,500 on the weekend. I really thought I might lose the farm and everything I’d worked all my life for. Barclays Bank stuck by me then, but they eventually deserted me when the 1979 festival ran into financial problems.

The big banks are queuing up now to get in on the festival because it has such a huge turnover. I met the manager of Barclays Bank some years later and he told me that it remains one of his abiding regrets that he didn’t have faith to stick with me during the bad times.