Nick Kent’s take on Glastonbury

Neil Young performs on the main Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury last year

Glastonbury – a name steeped in ancient mystic lore, true, but now better known as the site of the largest and most media-saturated live music event on the British calendar. Somewhere in the region of 150,000 revellers congregate each summer – the thing has been going for 40 years now – to witness hosts of musical acts and to partake in the four-day festival’s zanily drug-addled ambience. Everyone who has passed through its gates seems to come away with racy anecdotes to relate, usually involving some unfortunate friend who took too many mushrooms and then fell into a ditch while his or her favourite group was playing.

I am not among their number. I’ve never been to any of the Glastonbury festivals and probably never will. My rock-festival-attending years pretty much ended with the 1960s when I was still a teenager. I was present and correct for two seminal Isle of Wight marathons (in 1969 and 1970, if memory serves) as well as two Reading Blues and Jazz Festivals from the same era. A three-day endurance test at Bath in the early summer of 1970 was where I fell out of love with the whole phenomenon, specifically during the 24 hours I spent sardine-packed inside a humungous crowd and unable to heed nature’s call. While live music can be most invigorating to spend four days and nights being bombarded by, it’s ultimately not worth the cost of a sorely weakened bladder. From that point on I was still committed to rocking out in the public sector, but only if adequate toilet facilities were close at hand. Which meant that festivals were struck from my list of “experiences to repeat” once I’d passed into adulthood.

I was briefly tempted back, seven years ago, when I was employed to direct a documentary on a big European rock gathering of the tribes known as “Les Eurockéennes” for French TV. Most of the time I was at work in the well-catered-to backstage area but on the last night I went out into the crowd of some 50,000, to get a better measure of how festivals had developed, only to come face-to-face with the same depressing factors that had soured me in the first place: mud and debris everywhere, exploitative vendors, mostly mediocre music spilling out from the big stage and hordes of exhausted-looking, drug-diminished people being herded around by bullet-headed security men. In short, all the elements that had moved one spectator memorably to refer to the 1970 Isle of Wight festival as “one big psychedelic concentration camp” were still in abundant effect 30 years later.

But Glastonbury is different – or so its many starry-eyed aficionados reckon – and even a comfort-driven 58-year-old pragmatist senses that they have a point. To its core converts, attending the event is as much a mystical quest as it is a good excuse to get cabbaged and check out heapings of live music-making, though the two are clearly not mutually exclusive.

Long before farmer Michael Eavis staged the first Glastonbury “celebration” back in 1970, scholars had been talking up the location’s spiritually charged presence with its sacred lay-lines and ancient runes. For the pleasure-seekers who converge on the event each year in search of some kind of communally shared spiritual epiphany, the Glastonbury experience could be labelled a modern-age religious experience – if not for the fact that no self-respecting religion would anoint Rolf Harris in the role of resident holy icon.

The event’s figurehead and instigator Michael Eavis certainly resembles some strange human remnant from a long bygone age. With the demeanour of a slightly bonkers Quaker and the facial hair of a 19th-century whaling captain, he looks like someone who’d be more at home organising quilt-beating contests at a village fête than in the mind-boggingly costly and complicated wheeling and dealing that goes into putting on the “Glastonbury experience”. Eavis is a fascinating human specimen – an old-world moralist who believes devoutly in hard work and a chemical-free existence and yet who spends most of his working hours bringing to fruition a gigantic music festival that offers its clientele ample opportunity to experiment with every drug known to humankind.

Still, I applaud the man, if only for the fact that he has so convincingly tapped into a growing need in contemporary society – the need to step briefly away from the drab realities of the working week and reinvent oneself as a simple child of nature. In Julien Temple’s 2006 documentary Glastonbury , one young fellow propped up next to his tent cheerfully admits he’s there “because my job [in an insurance company] is mundane, desk-bound, unreal ... I come here to be really me.” Two middle-aged blokes who look like they might run a pet shop in Bradford babble effusively about how the festival is a chance to connect with “the love vibe, sugar. We want to go back to that Woodstock feeling.”

Maybe you find such remarks risible; in the past, I might have too. But now I find them oddly touching – noble, even. As I enter old geezerdom, I’ve become pleasantly haunted by my brief era of teenaged hippiedom, of letting the old freak flag fly and generally pushing the envelope on one’s perception of personal freedoms.

For now, though, I’m more than content to experience the Glastonbury love vibe at long-distance. Temple’s afore-cited film spices up its account of the festival with a healthy pinch of mystical blather but ultimately portrays the Glastonbury phenomenon as – more than anything – a glorious yearly mass celebration of all-purpose British eccentricity merging with modern-day hedonism. And when the film inserts images of concert-goers standing goggle-eyed on the Tor awaiting some God-like vision to rend the skies, I can’t help experiencing a tiny fleeting yearning to be there in their midst.

But not this year. Muse, Gorillaz, Dizzee Rascal, Florence and the Machine, Vampire Weekend ... the line-up is enormous and varied. For all the talk of spiritual questing, Glastonbury 2010 may be more like being a spectator at a gigantic professional wrestling event with some of the biggest stadium rock acts in Christendom slugging it out in a full-blown high-tech face-off.

Glastonbury Festival runs June 24-29; www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk; BBC coverage is provided online and on TV