The festival that never was – rare pictures of Glastonbury at 50

Despite the asking price of £270 for a five-day pass, all 200,000 tickets were snapped up within half an hour of going on sale last October.

The Glastonbury Festival is a corporate undertaking now, but as these pictures from the archive remind us, its spirit and atmosphere is not so very different from when the first hippies arrived there in 1970.

The organiser, Michael Eavis, had conceived the idea after seeing Led Zeppelin play an open-air concert at the nearby Bath Showground. He charged just £1 for visitors to what he initially called the Pilton Festival, and around 1,500 people took him up on the offer, on the promise of seeing Wayne Fontana and The Kinks. In the event, both were replaced at the last minute by the little-known outfit Tyrannosaurus Rex, featuring Marc Bolan.

The following year, the “Glastonbury Free Festival” was bigger and better, with David Bowie and a stage built from scaffolding and metal sheets to resemble the Great Pyramid of Giza. Nicolas Roeg and David Puttnam made a film of it, which they called Glastonbury Fayre.

But music festivals, like the youthful optimism of the late 1960s, proved to be a passing phase, and it was not until 1979 that Glastonbury was officially reborn, with Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins among the acts.

It grew throughout the next decade – despite the pitched battles between security guards and new age travellers in 1990 – and in 1994, Channel 4 began televising it to an audience too young to know who Wayne Fontana was.

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