Glastonbury

Glastonbury Festival, probably the world's greatest music event, now in its 50th year, though sadly this year, 2020, it, along with pretty much everything else, found itself cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Personally I have never been, even though it is only a couple of hours drive away, but every year I sit at home and take in as much of it as I can on the TV. I like Julien Temple's work,a very talented film maker. Sadly I don't think that Glastonbury is one of his better works. It started off very promising, with the festival being set up and people arriving, inter-cutting footage from different decades. Pity he didn't maintain that throughout. This film is more focused on the festival goers rather than the history or musical acts, although there are many great performances of the latter. Most of these are from the 1990's/early 00's, I would like to have seen more older stuff (assuming footage exits). Too much time is given to the New Age Travellers period, and seeing Rolf Harris being adored on stage now feels rather sickening (he is now serving time in prison for historic sex offences). One of the last tracks played is Bowie's"Heroes", the heroes of this film were father Ray plus his sons Andrew and Mark, who each day empty the brimming toilets, taking great pleasure in their work.At just over 2 hours I chose to watch in instalments rather than one swoop.

Glastonbury feels a lot like a home wedding video: If you were there, watching it back will probably be a fantastic experience. If not, expect to struggle in places.

The movie is a mix of music, background events and smiley faces in silly costumes. While the smiley faces are important if you intend to create a sense of the atmosphere, two hours of this starts to drag. As you might expect, there is a fair bit of music, although inevitably only a tiny proportion of all the acts that have appeared at the festival over the years. Some clever production techniques are used, such as mixing performances from different years together, and using specific songs to provide a narrative to other festival scenes.

But this subtle narrative is about all there is to guide the uninitiated through the movie. This might be acceptable for the music, but not the interviewees. The movie seems to revel in this to the point of arrogance: Early on, it includes a scene in which the organiser, Michael Eavis, is talking to festival goers who have no idea who he is - much like me at that point in the movie.

Background events and history are covered, but not very well explored. Genuinely interesting themes, such as the involvement of travellers and the growing commercialisation of the festival, are dealt with rather too quickly. There is a lot of social history here, which could have made this quite a challenging documentary. But perhaps if Glastonbury had covered these fully, I would be bemoaning the lack of music or complaining it didn't convey a festival atmosphere?

With well over a hundred thousand attendees per year, The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts is a famed counterculture musical event held in the English countryside not far from where the mystical Neolithic monument, Stonehenge, is located. Comparisons to Woodstock are clearly inevitable, but whereas Woodstock was basically a one-time thing, The Glastonbury Festival has been an annual event dating all the way back to 1970. Some of the styles and attitudes may have changed over the years, but the spirit of free love, political consciousness-raising, New Age mysticism and sheer unadulterated rebellion for which the festival is famous still remains.

Julien Temple, the director of the documentary entitled simply, "Glastonbury," brings an almost patchwork quality to her film, indiscriminately splicing together grainy footage from the earlier festivals with far clearer images from the much more recent past. She doesn't identify which year any particular sequence is from, so one minute we'll be watching hippies and flower-children "doin' their thing" in the meadows and the mud, followed the next by spike-haired punk-rockers head-banging their way into mind-altered oblivion.

The glue holding this excessively long, frequently repetitious and somewhat unwieldy film together is Michael Eavis, the idealistic yet deeply pragmatic festival organizer whose running commentary illuminates the history behind Glastonbury that he himself lived through and indeed helped to create. He discusses the changes he's seen in the participants over the years, acknowledges some of the more crassly commercial aspects of the event, and recounts a few of the less savory moments that have come close to spelling the end for the festival itself. The latter include the occasional run-ins he and his fellow celebrants have had with both the law and some of the more disgruntled residents of the town nearby.

But, clearly, the main reason for checking out "Glastonbury" is for the music, and, indeed, the festival has played host to a surprisingly eclectic mixture of musical performers and styles in the four decades since it first came into existence. Heavy metal, reggae, acid rock, electro, blues - all these genres and then some have found a home at Glastonbury. Some of the more well-known performers in the movie include Bjork, David Bowie, Coldplay, The Velvet Underground, Radiohead and Tangerine Dream. It's a pity that we are treated to little more than snippets of each of their acts, but even in small doses they create quite a tasty little smorgasbord for die-hard music lovers to sample.

As the King of all music festivals takes a break in 2006, Temple's documentary is the closest thing you can get to the Glastonbury experience this year. It charts the history of the event, but is formed in a way that recreates the feeling of three days of fun rather than simply following chronology.

Two hours and twenty minutes might seem a long time for a documentary, but as you're kept smiling most of the way through, it's not in the least overbearing. We are treated to a number of musical highlights, but just as entertaining is meeting some of the weird and wonderful people that make the festival so unique. Particularly memorable are the three-man family team who run the tanker that sucks the, aherm, human waste out of the portaloos – such are the moronic faces of the two children, they really could be characters from Little Britain!

Glastonbury is special, a festival you can go to where the sum is greater than all the parts, where the lunacy of the some of the punters is as essential a part as the headline acts a festival you can lose yourself in.

As a Glasto veteran from 1981 until the present I was fascinated by what this film would show, would it reflect the nature, feel and fun of Glasto, would it portray the worst with the best, most of all would you get a feel for the magic of it and would a veteran be transported back there for a couple of hours.

This film succeeds on all counts. Beautifully edited with a soundtrack including as wide a range of the music as has been encountered in Michael Eavis' fields I did indeed feel transported.

It manages to reflect all the essential elements, the people and the lunacy, the beauty, the sounds, the sights and even the smells of Glastonbury.

It tells the history accurately with no punches pulled. It shows the terrible mud and floods as well as the beautiful in one scene of a trapeze artist suspended under a balloon.

It captures the spirit of Glastonbury Festival.

A magnificent achievement.