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| Tepees at Glastonbury |
Two years ago Glastonbury festival’s founder Michael Eavis, the hippy-turned-dairy farmer on whose fields the event is hosted, fretted about the wrong sort of festival-goer.
“People say we’re getting middle class, which is stretching it a bit far, but we’re getting the 30- and 40-year-olds in, which changes the character of it,” he said, lamenting the depletion of Glastonbury’s “spunky” teenagers in the manner of a conservationist flagging up a threatened species.
Yet for all Eavis’s fears, the not-quite-young and the middle-aged continue to descend on Glastonbury in their Crocs and cagoules. “Please do not bring a gazebo,” organisers have asked the 137,000 campers attending this weekend’s extravaganza: a poignant plea from the world’s most celebrated rock festival.
Still, this year’s line-up is hardly designed to deter the more mature festival-goer, with headliners Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Blur acting like catnip to rock’s older fans, unlike last year’s controversial experiment with Jay-Z, the first rapper to headline Glastonbury.
No business likes driving customers away. For all its countercultural rhetoric, Glastonbury is no different. At bottom it recognises that festival demographics in the UK are, if not greying, then getting a paunch and a couple of kids. The appetite for events offering something classier than shantytown squalor, greasy noodles and the strewn sunburnt bodies of drug-addled revellers has correspondingly grown.
The modern rock festival prides itself on its cosmopolitan nature: organic food, theatre and literature tents, child friendliness, proper sanitation.
Latitude, which takes place next month near the picturesque Suffolk seaside town of Southwold, boasts a poetry arena and radio tent where BBC Radio 4 programmes will be beamed out to Middle England. A family campsite is on hand to host children’s entertainment. “The Cabaret tent will contain nudity. The Comedy tent will contain swearing,” the organisers warn parents. No innocents will be corrupted at their festival.
Glastonbury, once the scene of feral hippy kids running wild while mum and dad nodded off to Hawkwind, now has a “Kidz Field” with a big top, fairground rides and a feelgood motto: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood, or enable someone else to.”
Comfort is another area where festivals have transformed themselves. While it’s impossible to banish their great enemy, rain – as Glastonbury’s inhabitants will discover if the thunderous downpours that have been forecast materialise – it has nonetheless become possible to experience them in a greater degree of sumptuousness than from a flimsy tent inadvertently pitched downwind from the lavatories.
Gazebos may be frowned on but an array of other des res accommodation options are available, at a price. Weather-proof “podpads” – small plywood huts with carpets, lighting and airbeds, inaugurated at Glastonbury in 2005 – are available at most of this summer’s festivals.
Other enterprising companies offer the use of pre-assembled yurts and tepees, though, as the Glastonbury website warns, “[Tepee] dwelling is an incredible and elemental experience but not a luxury one”: a polite way of saying they might let the rain in.
So-called “boutique festivals” have given birth to the “boutique campsite”, an exclusive outdoor equivalent of the boutique hotel. At next month’s world music festival Womad, sited in the grounds of a stately house in Wiltshire, you can stay in a “Royal Maharaja shikar tent” in a walled garden with a VIP bar, “luxury toilets” and 24-hour security. Its cost is £1,850, including a ticket to the festival. In comparison, three nights in a junior suite at the Ritz in London over the same period of time would come to £1,470.
However, the gold standard for opulence belongs to Camp Kerala, a private campsite situated in a field adjoining Glastonbury’s site.
Comprising 50 shikar tents from Rajasthan, each costing £7,000 plus VAT for two adults to hire for the duration of the festival, the camp offers holistic massages, hairdressing, cocktails mixed by a barman from a hotel in Val d’Isère and backstage tickets to the festival.
Camp owner Jennifer Lederman, who opened it in 2005, is cagy about this weekend’s clientele. “If I told who was here then I’d have to shoot you,” she jokes. “Basically the people who come here are the people who have been coming for years now, and they’re families who love the festival.” Glastonbury’s transformation into St Tropez with rock music and rain showers is under way.
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www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk
www.latitudefestival.co.uk
www.womad.org
