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Fact #140171

When:

Short story:

Despite torrential rain turning the site into a four-inch deep mudbath, Glastonbury Festival headlined by The Who, The Killers and The Arctic Monkeys, has its most successful year to date, with 175,000 people attending.

Full article:

Arabella Churchill (organiser) : I dislike that it is more commercial now, but I do still think it has a lot of charm.

Emily Eavis (Glastonbury organiser) : I’ve started a new area this year, The Park. It’s in the far corner of the site. One of the original Eavis’s lived there, before they moved to Worthy Farm in 1860. It was called the Park back then as well, so we’ve really just kept the name.

It’s basically to accommodate the extra numbers but the idea is to have an area with several stages, very relaxed, acoustic performances and collaborations. It has the most beautiful view overlooking the whole site. It feels a bit like an island. (Source : interview with Johnny Black)

Martin Elbourne (Music director, Glastonbury Festival) : I was an agent and I sold Michael The Smiths in 1984. And after that I started advising him, and I’ve been involved one way and other ever since. At that point, of course, there was only one stage but now I book around 100 acts every year just for the Pyramid, The Other Stage and the John Peel Stage.

In some ways, it’s the easiest job in the world because everybody wants to play at Glastonbury, but the logistics are mind-bending. I have to liaise with the Leftfield, the Jazz World, the Dance Tent and with Emily, because we often have acts who do shows on more than one stage.

There’s also some debate about which stage is the most appropriate for certain acts. Michael was very keen to have John Fogerty this year, but we had to decide if he should be on the Pyramid or on the John Peel Stage. It’s a complex business deciding who will work well on the Pyramid, because although I know exactly who, for example, John Fogerty is, there could be a lot of younger people who might know all of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s hits, but don’t necessarily know that John was the songwriter and architect of the band.

By the time the festival starts, my job is more or less done and I can hang around the bar chatting to people, being the public face of Glastonbury, but things can go pear-shaped if, for example, someone falls ill and can’t play. (Source : interview with Johnny Black)

Bill Egan (applications engineer, Aggreko) : The real issues are caused by the sheer scale of the event. It is in many ways lots of different festivals on one site at the same time. This means that there are many people to contact and gather requirements from and then correlate all these into one master plan.

There is then a large off-site operation to gather together all the generators, cables, distribution units, and lights together and get it to site on time. This is only possible due to the very hard work of a large team of “back room boys” at our various depots and warehouses who locate the equipment, get it ready and send it to site. Without them I would be sat in a field with just an elaborate but useless plan!

We also have to feed and house a crew of forty-plus technicians in an empty field for a month or so! So this is quite a logistic challenge in it self.

Often some of the biggest headaches may not be the most obvious such as when the grass is to be cut for silage so we can get access to the fields, or the exact positions of any of the 70 odd toilet blocks that all need to be “adequately lit” to meet the licence conditions.

This year a particular issue has been incorporating a significant amount of bio-fuel (from re-cycled vegetable oils) into the event which has been both technically and politically complicated with lots of heated debate and some interesting new tax rules to be discovered.
 
We use around 190 Generators with an installed capacity of around 30 Megawatts (about 10 times that at Download for example). We will install around 40 kilometres of cable and literally thousands of lights. We will use around 50 trucks to bring the electrical equipment to site and take it away again (about as many as a good sized stadium rock tour!). We will be operating over an area of around almost 9 square kilometres. We will do it all in about 5 weeks with a crew that at times will be around 60 people on site and many more supporting the operation from Ireland to Dubai! (Source : interview with Johnny Black)

Bob Wilson (Greenpeace UK Special Events) : We build and run solar assisted hot showers and we estimate that we deliver over 9,000 hot showers during the festival.

Our new Skate ramp being launched at the festival this year is constructed entirely from FSC timber and will be the biggest touring skate ramp in the UK.

We want to sign up 100,000 people to this year’s festival campaign, ‘I Count.’

We tend to wipe away the memory of the near disasters as they are just too painful to re-live sometimes. Like the time our 40ft mobile solar truck generator sank so deep in the mud that it took three huge JCBs chained together to pull it out after the first one that arrived sank over the drivers seat!

Or when Greenpeace were erecting a full-size wind turbine next to the Pyramid stage and the local Council, who had never dealt with or probably seen one before, got a bit freaked out and negotiations went on right up to the opening time. Scariest moment probably last festival when that early morning freak storm backed up rainwater on the other side of our field held back by the old railway embankment. But there’s a tunnel through the embankment and guess where it leads?  Yes … the Greenpeace field. So guess where all the water rushed? Whoah! It was scary.
 
Funniest moment and their have been many – like someone on my Crew telling me that a woman had turned up to climb our 40ft climbing wall – naked! - and I decided that as she had shoes on she wasn’t naked and up she went. 

Our climbing wall did attract lots of attention. One year it had huge slogans stenciled on it encouraging everyone to ‘Buy FSC timber.’ FSC meaning that it had the seal of approval under the Forest Certification Scheme (FSC) that’s what the climbing wall was made from and was an advert for it. Anyway these two guys appeared on the site. They’d come down a long way from one of the hills. They were pushing a wheelbarrow. They said they’d seen the sign and wanted to buy some timber ....for their bonfire.....Duh !
 
Our biggest problem every year is coming up with something new that hasn’t been seen before and that will excite, inform and entertain, So we try and do things that give festival-goers something back as we’re aware that in buying a ticket they are supporting us because Michael donates some of that money to Greenpeace for our campaign funds. (Source : interview with Johnny Black)

Katharine Donohue (Finance and Budgeting) : I love working for Glastonbury Festival, and my life would have taken a completely different turn if I hadn't come down here and stayed.

I work in the Site Office all year round - I'm one of the few people that do. It's great to be able to keep an eye on all the changes at the farm, especially when you think of all the things that have happened here over the last 35 years. (Source : interview with Johnny Black)

Steve Russell-Yarde (Parking Manager) : The main exodus starts some time between 0800 and 0900 on Monday morning.
 
There is a mini rush on Sunday night from midnight to about 0200 but in the main not many leave overnight.
 
We will in 2007 for the first time be putting on the coach service for the extra ticket holders overnight so that they can get home without getting caught in the queues.
 
On the Monday morning we start with a trickle of cars leaving from around 0600 hours that slowly builds. Up until about 0800 to 0900 in the morning the local road network can cope with the traffic levels but around 0900 the numbers leaving the site reaches a critical point and within 30 mins the car parks are queued back to the pedestrian gates. At this point if anyone is parked near the pedestrian gate they can look forward to a wait in the region of 9 hours! The traffic on the west of the site is the worst and the car parks do not start to run freely until around 1900 hours.
 
What festival goers seem to forget is tat we got them in over a period of at least 24 hours of steady inflow plus others arriving at off peak times. They then all want to leave at once 42,000 cars leaving throughout one day is a vast task and a lot of people end up spending it in the car. If more people left over night from 0300 to 0700 then they would guarantee getting out of the site easily.
 
The main problem for me is to stop the through traffic on the main roads in order to increase the capacity of the road network for the festival traffic. We effectively have four major routes away from the site on two major A roads. The capacity of these roads is in the region of 1000 to 1200 cars per hour for each route. It is not difficult to see that the road network will take 9 hours minimum to take all our traffic away if there is no through traffic. By adding the through traffic times can be increased dramatically.
 
For 2007 we are closing one of the major A roads for nearly ten miles as well as a number of other local roads in an attempt to help with traffic flow. We also have our own motorbike traffic staff, 9 sets of traffic lights, 10 traffic staff on road junctions, 10 CCTV cameras on Roads around the site giving us as much information as we can to help manage the traffic flow as pest as we can,
 
All our best laid plans can be undone when Festival goers don’t follow our directions when leaving the site, start doing U turns in the middle of the roads, stop and pick up in the road holding up others. It is amazing how people’s attitudes change when they get off site. It is almost as if they forget how long they have waited. An example is how on one of the routes out of the site vehicles do not keep up with the car in front so when the traffic lights do change we cannot get as many of the cars out of the car park in a set time.
 
The problems on the way out are related to the capacity of the road network that we have no control over. We have tried to tell ticket holders when the main problems are, details of queue times are on the web site, we have put on our coach service this year and arranged departure times for overnights so that the increase in numbers of coaches leaving do not increase the peak traffic problems.
 
Our main problem on the traffic side is how to spread the exit flow of people off the site. This is something we will continue to work on.
 
The more people we can get to use public transport the better as this will reduce the amount of traffic on the road. (Source : interview with Johnny Black)

Brandon Flowers (The Killers) : I was trying to channel all my nerves into some positive energy, but ten minutes before I was total wreck. The idea of headlining this festival was just so far off for us when we first played here. (Source : NME, 27 June 2007)

Michael Eavis (Glastonbury founder/organiser) : For the first time in my life I went up in a helicopter, and I was amazed to see that there was still spare camping space and car parking space.

We can’t change the date of the Festival because we’re guided by the Summer Solstice, and we have no control over that. We’re going to stay where we are – where we’ve been for 37 years.

Emily’s (his daughter, Emily Eavis) efforts in the Park have been very good. She supports me a lot, but we disagree a lot about bands. This year I asked her if she wanted to do an area of her own. I think it’s been brilliant and works really well. She’s done a good job. We’ll give her the Park for a few more years and see how she does before giving her more responsibility.

Tim Roberts (Health and Safety Co-ordinator, Event Safety Shop) : The major floods in 2007 were horrendous. We had to stop stewards from diving into submerged tents to search for bodies. Dreadful moments. There were hundreds lined up on the Railway Line watching the scene. then one guy dives in and disappears beneath the sludgy brown water. He emerged a few moments later with a slab of beer triumphantly aloft. A massive cheer went up. Pure Glastonbury.  

(Sources : all quotes are from interviews with Johnny Black, unless otherwise noted at the end of a specific quote)