The BBC’s usual rolling Glastonbury permacoverage on the final weekend of June is usually one of those cases of television overwhelm to match the World Cup or Wimbledon.
That is, the kind of event where anyone who’s interested gets so excited about the wealth of good upcoming entertainment on offer that their brain short-circuits and they barely manage to catch the final / Saturday night headliner in the end.
Glastonbury 2022 feels different
Yet somehow, Glastonbury 2022 feels different. Like going to a football match, the Edinburgh Festival or just a busy restaurant, the act of crowding together in a field feels somehow more essential than ever after two years of necessary abstinence.
Plus, this year’s Glastonbury has probably the finest triple threat headliner selection in living memory.
It features 80-year-old Paul McCartney, the urgent and contemporary voice of Kendrick Lamar, and one of pop’s greatest young stars, Billie Eilish.
It’s the latter star who opened Glastonbury: 50 Years and Counting (BBC Two), standing in a gleaming red tracksuit amid the idyllic Somerset countryside.
Lambs baa, birds Twitter, and Eilish points at a field.
‘Is that it?’
“Is that Glastonbury?” she asks. “This empty s*** over here? I don’t believe it. It’s all empty, dude.”
It is indeed all empty, for 11 months of the year. For a British cultural institution, the Glastonbury festival has a remarkably short history, and this scene-setting documentary took us through each stage.
The hippyish, Woodstock-like event of the early ‘70s, revived in the 1980s as an annual fundraiser for CND, Oxfam, Greenpeace and the like.
Getting bigger and bigger
The 1990s saw the event evolve and get bigger, from clashes between security guards and some of the crowd in ’90, to the infamous overcrowding of 2000.
The transition into a televised, international platform came with Jay-Z’s headline set in 2008 – Noel Gallagher, who loudly disparaged what proved to be a visionary move, looked sheepish here.
Director and Sex Pistols associate Julian Temple has already created a definitive, if 16-year-old, Glastonbury documentary, but this new tale has its own artistic kudos.
It was made by director Frances Whately, also responsible for the astonishing, definitive David Bowie trilogy (Five Years, The Last Five Years and Finding Fame).
Great Bowie cameo
Bowie makes an entertaining cameo here, in singer Linda Lewis’ recollections of taking magic mushrooms with him then going onstage back in the ‘70s.
Whately’s list of contributors is impressive – as well as Eilish and Gallagher, we see past stars Radiohead, Florence Welch, Stormzy, Orbital and more, all admirably frank.
It covered many bases, from immersive social history, to source of some great classic live clips, to a prime source of anecdotes.
Organiser Emily Eavis is amiable but sharp; her dad, 86-year-old founder and farmer Michael, is endearingly unaware of much pop music.
Emily explains how she had to write down Jay-Z’s name as ‘Jay-Zee’, so he’d stop calling him ‘Jay-Zed’.
Elsewhere, he pops into a hedonistic gay club at the Lost Vagueness field and declares, “it doesn’t get much worse than this!” A back-handed compliment.
Watch it now, then switch on the real thing if you aren’t there already.
