Glastonbury 2024 — a review

Our music correspondent reports

It doesn’t seem necessary to introduce Glastonbury, because it’s the most famous festival in the country. It’s probably the closest equivalent the English have to the Rio Carnival. Demand is high, you’re locked in for a week, and it’s one of the few things that almost everyone in your office wishes they were going to rather than fiddling around with the alignment of boxes in slides or checking calculations on a workbook. Here’s what I made of it.  

Getting tickets and getting there 

This year’s Glastonbury experience started in the late summer of 2023. Around a week after getting back from a holiday with friends, I found myself at a pub somewhere in the South London area that could be called the ‘graduate belt’, which roughly follows the recently renamed ‘Windrush Line’ on the Overground from Clapham Junction all the way up to Canada Water. Having decanted from our previous trip, I pitched ideas for what we should do next. The consensus around going to Glastonbury formed quickly, and the admin around registration took a couple of days. On a Sunday morning in late November I woke up fairly early, paced about the house for a bit, refreshed the site page several times, and purchased six tickets. Having previously had bad luck with tickets, a ‘hack’ that had been ‘forwarded many times’ and that I personally had thought was of dubious reputability ended up working for my group. 

My journey to Glastonbury itself started on the Wednesday morning at a relatively leisurely time compared with most of my peers. Around a decade ago, I’d made the unfortunate mistake of setting off on the Thursday morning (due to scheduling issues) on the train through Paddington. Much as how a foot infection once led me to swear off staying at a hostel ever again, being on the first possible Great Western service ram-packed with slightly bleary-eyed festival-goers gave me the impetus to arrive earlier this year.

Having found a forward operating base in the West Country, I sauntered down on Tuesday afternoon to Somerset; consequently, I had a sleep, the drive in was relatively peaceful, and I arrived on site at 8:30am. Taking advantage of a staff wristband acquired through meticulous planning and several WhatsApp communications, I bypassed the five-hour queue and got into the festival itself through the ticket checks by around 10am.

Accommodation and equipment  

If possible, one should treat the festival as they would treat a trip abroad sans girlfriend. Pack light to avoid being lumbered with equipment in the heat, find a spot as close to the centre of the festival as possible, and don’t waste money on frivolities unless absolutely necessary. In this case, an air mattress was deemed a non-necessity, though a portable shower came in handy. The reduced cost option of sharing a tent was floated, but the thought of waking up groggy due to natural light piercing my eyelids while Nicholas (26 ans) lightly snored away in substance-induced bliss did not have a great appeal.

In terms of location, I did manage to park myself centrally. Finding a spot was eased by my speedy bypass of the queues, though I was burdened due to the skills-related issues of others in my group in negotiating the queue. Eventually, by around 1pm the infantry had caught up with the reconnaissance patrols and we were able to set up shop. Importantly, we’d avoided Pennard Hill and so didn’t face the unidyllic cocktail of drum and bass loving second- and third-generation crusties from the West Country and Scousers who had managed to jib their way in.  

Our next door neighbours instead were a normal group in their mid-to-late twenties from a town in Somerset I can’t recall the name of who had been going to Glastonbury annually since they’d finished their GCSEs. Our interactions with them were sparse but friendly, though one night I did have the pleasure of listening to a hoarsely voiced, coked-up female member of the group getting agitated at her boyfriend because she thought he disliked her. My years of industry experience kicked in and, desperate for content, I listened avidly, tuning out only after the third ‘I just feel like…’ had been delivered.  

Food and drink were relatively well-priced, at least by music festival standards. I managed to spend around £20 a day for three filling meals, and the Brothers Pilsner and Cider options were decent if one needed to go to the bar. For future festival goers, I’d recommend taking advantage of the rules that allow canned booze to be taken in and maxing out on that. You will be best placed to do this, however, if you happen to have a friend who brings a chiller with them.  

Lineup 

The high points for me were Friday and Saturday, so my review of the acts will focus on those days. Except for drone killcam footage playing out of the IICON headpiece on Thursday night while an ersatz Blawan attempted to copy the man himself, there was little to report on Thursday evening, and Sunday was a tired limp to the end.  

My Friday properly kicked off with a rare excursion to one of the stages people actually watch on the television. I arrived at the Other Stage to catch the joyful, TikTok adjacent dance pop of Confidence Man, followed by a pit stop for dinner, and then a brief viewing of Bombay Bicycle Club. Several songs in, I remembered why I had never been a huge fan of theirs when they’d been relevant in my youth and left.  

The real highlight of Friday evening was Heilung, who describe themselves as an ‘experimental folk music band’ but gave a performance far more akin to a Norse ritual. I had high expectations that were comfortably met. A shaman walked on to greet us, followed by drummers that repeatedly sent a reverb through me. As they performed, a group of young men and women walked onto the stage to perform a mock human sacrifice of a topless young woman. I had never felt a greater level of understanding towards the need for war. By the end of it, I was activated. This really was what a Roman soldier saw before his demise in the forests of Germany. Perhaps Eurodance from the noughties was only one of the solutions required to lead us to the Golden Path.  

Sadly, my night ended earlier than expected due to the shift in demographics further away from ageing hippies, and more towards London-based graduates who cared less and less for music with words as the night wore on. While several thousand of them who didn’t have their sights set on Block 9 were catered to by Charli XCX playing in the Levels stage, around twice the number queued outside to listen in. This paled in comparison, however, to the planning issues faced by Block 9 itself, where Bicep packed out and closed off the area to perform an audio-visual set. I took a detour to attempt to wait it out via the Glade Dome and enjoyed a slightly whimsical tech house set with others in the presence of a plethora of glammed-up Scouse women and their Berghaus- and North Face-clad boyfriends. I’d never seen so many immaculate 95s and 110s in my life. 

Finally, I’d had enough of edits of the James Bond theme and attempted to walk with purpose to get to Block 9. I made my way through by finding an open passage, but my friends were less lucky. Having repeatedly informed my group chat I was at a what3words coordinate, I was met by messages stating the queue was ‘taking forever’. My solutions-based approach of ‘finding an entrance’ was not met well, and with little desire to stand waiting for a queue, I trudged back to my tent and went to bed. 

Determined to make the most of my Saturday, I woke up early to grab breakfast before checking out the areas that had a lesser degree of appeal to me. I was never going to be able to enjoy any more than an hour in the Greenpeace field and I had little time for sitting and reflecting, so I headed through to the Silver Hayes once again to catch something more in line with my preferences. On my way there, I caught a brief glimpse of a band whom I’d heard accusations of nepotism towards from an ex-girlfriend called ‘The Last Dinner Party’. There was little to report on their performance beyond the eye-roll-worthy song ‘Nothing Matters’, which reminded me far too much of a girl I’d known from university seminars who had a penchant for trying to make a provocative statement. Much like journalism, indie rock has become increasingly female. Where were the anthems for blokes in the pub trying to make a football chant? What other point does guitar music truly serve beyond that?

I arrived at Assembly. Greeted by a St George’s Cross which had a lion in each quadrant and ‘ENGLAND’ written across the horizontal red part of the cross, it was easy to feel at one with the English side of Glastonbury. While the stage was supposedly a takeover for ‘Body Movements’, a gay festival I was vaguely aware of, the crowd was anything but. Englishmen between the ages of twenty and thirty in vintage football shirts acquired from Depop, Vinted, and the Classic Football Shirts website were accompanied by their girlfriends wearing ‘festival outfits’ purchased from Lazyoaf, Reformation, Goodhood, and the like. I had little doubt that come Tuesday morning, ASOS were going to see a heap of returns, and even greater certainty that conversations on the topic of ‘debt to Klarna’ were to be had in shared houses in London. Job Jobse soundtracked a fantastic period between about 4 and 5pm, as a crowd enraptured by Eurodance passed keys, beers, and single-use vapes between one another. The only regret I had was that he didn’t venture into an edit of ‘L’Amour Toujours’ which has been doing the rounds in the club scene at the moment, if only to see who in the crowd would react. 

Saturday night was about tackling the South-East corner (in particular Block 9) and having a big night for the ages. There was a split on where to go within my group; several girls wanted to see a DJ set by James Acaster and Nish Kumar, several of the serious clubbers wanted to go to the NYC Downlow, and I was content to actually be outside in the large field of the IICON. We made our way there early to beat the crowd, while the groups and conversation split along gendered lines. While the girls discussed a mutual friend of theirs who hadn’t come but did need to break up with her boyfriend, the lads attempted to recall every Premier League player who’d won the league at two clubs, every player who had played for three or more ‘Big Six’ teams, and finally, every country without a closed loop letter in its name.   

Having seen sights while stopping to go to the loo at a club in Berlin years ago, I knew the NYC Downlow wouldn’t appeal to me. I bode some of my friends farewell and left them to it. The next few hours were brilliant. At the IICON stage, DJ Stingray began a performance to a crowd made up of men like myself in replica England cricket shirts and their beleaguered girlfriends, who probably wanted to sit on the stone circle and talk about how special it was to be experiencing their first Glastonbury together.  

Over the chatter of ‘are you up yet?’ and ‘yeah I've got a cig’ whizzing past me, Detroit-inspired electro pounded out of the tops and subwoofers either side of the giant head laid down at a 90° angle. The punters were in no doubt as to it being what they wanted. ‘This could only happen here. This week is what England could be. This is what England should be’, said a friend to me in the crowd. I nodded. Even our European equivalents, high on a supply of Master’s degrees and sparkling water, would not be able to ‘get’ the mix of appreciation for a low time preference sport based on a sense of fair play with a love of techno that was more than simple 125bpm pounding. It hammered home something I’d thought up months before in the smoking area of Venue MOT: four-on-the-floor may be the world's preferred drum pattern, but the breakbeat? That belongs to England. 

Demographics and Politics  

This is the part that many readers will have really come here for. On a purely ethnic headcount level, Glastonbury’s demographics probably reflect pre-Blair Britain, but this doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Due to the proximity to Bath and Bristol, a disproportionate number of normal people from the West Country show up to the festival after attending it as a post-GCSE rite of passage. For reasons that must solely be due to the See tickets server supposedly being in Liverpool and the resulting low latency, you will encounter an unusually high number of Scousers.  

Ageing hippies and New Age folk also have a fair share because of the festival’s roots, and plenty of normal people with families also attended, although I didn’t cross paths with many of either camp. The biggest signal of the average age being somewhere in the ballpark between thirty and thirty-nine for me was probably that both Keane and Avril Lavigne, artists very much of the noughties, packed out their slots. 

This year there was a notable demographic shift amongst festival-goers. Due to the aforementioned ticket hack bypass, a more noticeable number of people like us attended. The byproduct of this was not just greater demand for dance music acts — hence Levels filling up early on Thursday evening and being packed for Friday, and Block 9 being closed off on Friday evening — but the clothing and the assorted flags that go with the change in crowd.  

While a festival may conjure up images of Penny Lane-esque women wearing flowy, floral attire with Bohemian hats, the festive football shirt for him and semi-athleisure for her combination was more notable. Of greatest interest was the number of ECB wide-brim hats and Vodafone-era ODI shirts seen amongst punters, most of whom floated towards similar stage and act choices as myself. While the football shirt is a staple across all of late Gen Z and early millennial England, the cricket shirt is a rather less common sight. Was this the first defining moment of what Nicholas (26 ans) is beyond his role in the modern British social contract?

Or was the defining moment the flag choices to earmark certain locations where one would be planted in the crowd? National flags and regional/football flags are par for the course at Glastonbury, but three separate flags with images of Neil Warnock reacting on TV stood out to me. My favourite flags, however, were a tie between a ‘LINFIELD LOYAL’ Union Jack and an Ipswich Town St George’s Cross which had a stencil of a Tommy soldier emblazoned on it. 

Glastonbury will always have a left-wing tendency, so the number of Palestine flags on display was of little surprise to me. But beyond that and a few chatters about what Idles had done in their latest fit of rage against a Mary Whitehouse figure that no longer exists, I was able to avoid politics the entire weekend. Indeed, the thing that struck me the most in comparison to my visit in 2016 was the lack of conversation at all around the forthcoming General Election. I mentioned it once, and that was in response to a member of my group asking what Reform believed in. In 2016, a sombre air had filled the festival; while I would like to have believed it was rain-related, talks of Brexit were fairly commonplace throughout the weekend. This time, even Angela Rayner didn’t end up performing her set.  

Getting back

At some point on Sunday evening, the profound fear of being caught in a twee, respectable, but ultimately depressing British queueing situation to get out on what would no doubt be a miserable Monday morning crept into my head intrusively and refused to leave. I had little desire to enable the fantasies of the likes of VeryBritishProblems and even less of a desire to endure chattering on the Monday morning from pals about how it would be ‘so sad’ that it wouldn’t be on for another year, so I decided to act. After finishing at James Blake, I said my goodbyes to friends and non-friends alike. Stopping off at a service station somewhere up the M4 in order to keep the driver awake through fuelling him with a diet of progressively more degenerate energy drinks, we arrived home in London in the early hours of Monday morning. Having had a road experience with a semi-lucid driver that I’d previously never thought I could get this side of the Hajnal Line, I happily exited the car with my belongings.  

The next day, I opened the ‘Glasto 2024’ group chat to check the progress of those I went with. Unfortunately, my group had been hit by demand-induced delays to road and rail alike. ‘It’s going to be sooo long getting home :(’ said one member of the chat. Feeling a sense of compassion for the less organised, I left a sad react to the message before saying I hoped they’d get home soon. 

Should I go?

Yes. I’d break down the ‘why’ into three reasons: 

1. If you like music, you’ve got access to over one-hundred stages, which is something ill-advertised due to the lopsided nature of TV coverage. And if you do wish to stick to the pyramid stage, the price you’d pay for going to the festival and seeing seeing three headline acts is probably worth it when compared to their ticket prices. 

2. It’s a fairly ‘high-trust’ and well-functioning place. The staff are friendly, the punters are largely friendly, and robbery — while not unheard of — is rare. While events were overcrowded and filled out, any issues were rectified quickly. Drug-related deaths are likewise uncommon.

3. As stated at the start, it’s our carnival. We don’t do dancing in the streets, we prefer to have a camping holiday with bits of music involved around the edges. It’s worth going for the particular cross-section of British society you experience it with.