Hi-Vis Jackets and Comedown Carbonara: Working Glastonbury 2022
Those Who Were Dancing columnist Lydia Beardmore gives us a review of working at Glastonbury, inspired by field-notes from working at festivals over the years
In some ways I am qualified to write this review. I wrote my Masters dissertation on the relationships between hosts, guests and class identity at British music festivals. And in some ways I went into this as a proper virgin. In my research, I remember deliberately missing out Glastonbury as a field site, it’s too much its own thing I thought. And I was entirely correct.
Glastonbury, as sociologist George McKay titled his book, is a “Very English Fair”. The largest festival of its kind in the country. There’s a lot going on. And it’s very English. It’s very old-school and folksy in some ways, yet expansive and inclusive of different musical-styles in others. It’s global in its artists but also very West Country, with occasional visits from die-hard Somerset band, The Wurzles. It’s also the UK festival with the most varied audience — at Glastonbury you can find kids, hippies, punks, pensioners, teens, doctors, pop fans, families and so on.
I started working and performing at festivals as an artist in my early twenties. I read spoken word poetry, danced for and hyped crowds as a walk-about performer and also hosted stages. This was usually in exchange for a ticket and food, occasionally paid. As a worker I’ve served paella, tended bar, life-modelled and Covid-stewarded, which meant giving lateral flow tests to the people working in the Event Control Centre.
The ECC is known as the ‘nervous system’ of the festival, where operations such as weather, traffic, emergencies and anything else BIG might be coordinated. The barn where I worked had huge TV screens showing the CCTV footage of the site and emergency services coming in and out, and included the site helipad. It was all so interesting to see how a working farm becomes a huge, amazing site, and how long that takes to achieve. Some people work at festivals because they need the money (security guards can earn £15 an hour working 12 hour shifts for 45 days for example , totalling at more than £5,000), others because they love festivals, living semi-nomadic lifestyles in vans with an established community in the festival circuit, or a combination of both.
I started work onsite a week before the festival started. I was working alongside security, the ECC “big guns” staff , build crew, sign painters, and many more. Glastonbury is the size of a village and more than 200,000 people come to the festival. Each year there are around 34,000 people working on the farm. Some workers arrive onsite months before the festival begins, and later others, including stewards, general security, traders and finally, artists. As a regular crew member at festivals I’ve always enjoyed the crew nights, the calm before the storm when the festival site is like a playground and you can hang out with your “festival family”, the people you only know from festivals. I thought I knew about crew nights, but I didn’t know about Glastonbury crew nights.
Glastonbury starts being built around April, so many of the workers will be onsite from mid May-early June. There are bars dedicated to onsite staff, who also have showers, bunk beds, tents or caravans. The bars are serviced by a ‘traxi’ or tractor taxi which drives people across the site. My first night in the bars I’m working a night shift. We walk over to see the fire breathing Arcadia stage still being constructed. We have a nice time at the Tow and Hitch pub, and then we get on the traxi to Maceos, a great bar with a dance floor on the back of a lorry playing ’00s hits and DnB. Another staff bar has an old underground train on the top, and another lies next to the memorial stone for Joe Strummer with the name “SS Broke Britain”, but it isn’t nautically-themed.
Some of these remain staff bars after the festival opens so that the crew can mingle away from the ‘punters’, and others become public. In Maceos I meet old ravers reuniting with friends from the time they drove a lorry across Spain and it broke down and they dragged it to Benidorm to find an expat mechanic to fix it and it went to shit because they let a junkie live in it and it got infested with rats and left in the Andalusian desert with a priceless Banksy painted on the back. I learned this story because the guy telling it had just bumped into a hitchhiker they picked up in this truck 30 years ago. It makes me nostalgic for a life I never lived. Everyone knows each other like this. This is the West Country and this is van life, new-age travellers and rave culture. Every single person from that time seems to be in this bar. To ‘get in’ to the site, the jobs you can do range from building seagull sculptures to cutting crew’s hair, being a mechanic, or running an ‘axe throwing’ stall. These people come every year. My boss has been coming for 37 years now.
I work with Vikki who gives me a lift from the station. She’s an old hippy from Bath, always works Glastonbury, has done some crazy things to get a ticket, knows everything about passouts (getting in your friends and family without a ticket), secret paths and shortcuts around the site, jumping the fence and other such things from 30 years of the festival. It’s an institution. Once the festival opens, the vibes can feel a bit middle-class and privileged, but Vikki’s kids have grown up in these fields. She has friends she has never seen outside of festivals (I too have these kinds of friends). She tells me she helped pay the mortgage on her council house by selling vodka jelly shots.
This festival has been a huge part of her life and her livelihood. She drives me through the site and gives me a tour. A former train-line runs through the site connecting East to West. Above the railway track are The Healing Field, Green Futures, the sacred stone circle and Tipi field, Shangri-La and the last remnants of the old Traveller tradition at Glastonbury. Everything on the other side of the railway track is ‘Babylon’ she tells me. This includes the Pyramid stage, Other stage, West Holts, The Park, Kidzfield and the Circus Field where all the big rock and pop acts will play, whilst her side of the track is full of hippies, druids, witches and Travellers.
Crossing the railway track is slightly frowned upon by the old-school lot and people don’t do it if they don’t have to. There are some scraps of the old Traveller Glastonbury around the other side of the railway track. Security aren’t allowed in the stone circle, AKA the Sacred Space. The Sacred Space is where to find whatever you’ve been looking for, the place to see and be seen at Solstice and sunrise on Monday morning. It’s where you’d join a drum circle, meet a druid or buy ketamine. It is the spiritual centre of the festival and the place where the festival’s opening ceremony takes place.
Vikki tells me we have to hunt for wristbands as these can cut corners for us, getting us into secret bars once the festival starts. I get a pass for the exclusive Guerrilla Bar (a secret, leopard-print decorated bar in Shangri-la), the Unfairground and Block 9. I look for the ‘queue-jumper’ pass, which means I can go against the one-way systems once the festival starts and cut through the backstages. We meet people and make friends. Everyone is a brilliant artist and owns a van and deals in large mechanical things such as flamethrowers. When we work we talk to other people about passes and meal tickets and how these were always used as currency and how contactless style meal cards will kill the tradition.
Inside our work the people we deal with either talk about how they’ve had no sleep and are fucked or about how everyone is an idiot except for them and no one has any common sense and they are the smartest guy in the field. The words health and safety get said a lot but this very much feels like the make-believe of utopia where we can have a go at running our ‘dream city’. One worker says that what he loves about Glastonbury is that people will come into their own when it comes to problem solving even if it isn’t their role because things work a bit differently than real life.
These skill-shares and trade-economies can feel highly romanticised through somewhat temporary Hi-Vis goggles, although it’s a true way of life for many people working at the festival who live nomadically. Vikki remarks that she loves how everyone is an old hippy but as soon as they get a hi-vis jacket and a walkie-talkie they become a fascist.
As a crew, we get some insight into the infrastructure. What goes into making something of this scale. The teams that sort out what to do if it rains, who orders all the wood chips for the mud and how to manage the crowds, how the crowd rushes are organised and waste management. At festivals I’ve noticed the spaces for decompression as you enter or leave and how that needs to be planned carefully. There are actual cattle gates to walk through at Glastonbury, the stewards giving out giant foam high fives to slow the crowd down in a way that makes them happy and perhaps even makes them feel that this isn’t a tactic for managing a large group of people when they are supposed to feel their freest. Everything is planned meticulously. Tragedies have happened at other large gatherings built around love (Love Parade and Astroworld) therefore festivals of this scale require serious work and planning.
Around the site are sprinkled other workers that I know or have just met. I know Ben and his work with the Iona community, a multi-faith group run by a lovely group of people from all over — feminists, socialists, music fans, excommunicated pastors from Salem. They provide a campfire and chill out space as pastoral support. A safe space is created, woods, benches, campfire, bunting, fairy lights and mead. Its similar to Hare Krishna (free food and a place to sit) where I meet two young men whom I bump into more than once per day, enjoying their innocent energy.
I know Becky over at Synthetic Gardens, a sculpture garden run by anarchists making sculptures out of plastic waste. I have another friend painting things in Kidzfield, another playing in a band, and another doing walk-about with a stage. We are all here as crew or entertainers. I don’t think I know anyone who paid for a ticket. I’m not even sure I know anyone who can afford a ticket at £280, with meals on the site costing about £12 each. While the ‘golden age’ of jumping the fence is over, there are still ways to get in, feed yourself and enjoy the vibes. You just have to know.
The festival has to open on Wednesday, and once it does I am nervous. I move my tent to ‘punter’s’ camping because my staff site is under a pylon and I keep getting electrocuted by the grass. Punter’s camping is more central but it’s with the punters, who crew like to call names like “the glitterati”, “the great unwashed” and “the bucket-hat brigade”. I’m nervous because I’m used to the festival with no one in it, and some of the punters are obnoxious as fuck (one of them puts their tent over the entrance to mine). They are excited and well-meaning, and I’m just not used to it. Months before, the tickets go on sale at midnight, selling out in minutes. Some groups have huge spreadsheets and try to buy using multiple devices.
So I’m a bit scared of them but my friend tells me that we can turn anxiety into excitement. There’s a huge hologram sign of Michael Eavis saying “GET ON MY LAND”, a farmer pun that I find hilarious. I try to ride out the change in energy, but I also overhear a lot of people talking about shitting themselves, or get annoyed by large groups putting tape around ‘their’ camps for them and their 30 friends, making access to my lonely tent a lot more difficult.
Once the festival opens I need a day to acclimatise. I’ve got the four days off work and I’ve never had this privilege before. I go and see a friend in the Tipi Field and we spend some time walking around. I intend to go and watch the opening ceremony but I’m not enjoying the crowds. Instead I nip into the cinema to watch the opening scene of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and end up staying for the whole movie, walking out just as the fireworks begin. It’s lovely not talking to anyone for 2 hours. I’m very aware of my energy levels these days and how to recharge myself. These areas are good for that, meditation tents, cinema tents, campfires, saunas and chill areas.
Glastonbury is a marathon not a sprint and this is not my first rodeo. In the cinema it’s so good to hear everyone cheering when Bernadette throws shade at a transphobe. At Glastonbury it’s easy to feel like everyone has the same politics as you at times like this, and easy to think everyone doesn’t when stuck in a human gridlock on the paths. It is also overwhelmingly white, not that I’m not used to white people (I grew up on the Isle of Wight). But in huge crowds I am used to seeing more diversity, i.e. protests or walking through central London. At Glastonbury I see little of this diversity, especially compared to the artists there to entertain us.
But also, this was a space to be your safe self and explore newness. Looking grubby or looking fabulous. People come up to compliment you, or banter with you about anything. Everyone is experiencing something. I go out dancing and watch music, bump into old friends and make new ones. I manage to see about 10% of the music I want to but it’s okay. I remember as a teenager visiting the Isle of Wight festival and spending whole days pressed against the railings, needing to consume every thing, every band. That was when I was still finding my feet as a music fan and I don’t feel that way anymore. I’m okay with letting it flow through me.
Glastonbury and its artists were politically-charged as ever, with many pleas and signs for Travellers rights, Megan thee Stallion starting up the chant, “My body, my motherfucking choice” in solidarity with women’s rights after Roe V. Wade, and Kendrick ending his set with”They judge you, they judge Christ. Godspeed for women’s rights!”. It felt contradictory talking about Traveller’s rights whilst walking over Yeoman’s bridge — being reminded of the police battle in 1990, which resulted in the ousting of the free Travellers’ fields on the edge of the site (now Shangri-la and former Lost Vagueness). The BLM anthem, “We gon’ be alright” being chanted with Kendrick Lamar through a large crowd of unmelanated faces. Greta Thurnberg making a speech on the Pyramid stage as the field fills up with rubbish. The entrance fee of £280 meaning that only those with expendable income could pay to access all of this.
Yet by the end of it, I couldn’t help but be okay with Glastonbury’s sincerity. I’m at one with the crowds. I’ve grown to appreciate what they bring too, their homemade flags which have such a cult following. The best flag being a home-painted sharp jab at Tory-government hypocrisy, which stated: “This is a work event” in block letters. I still love making friends with everyone, having a picture taken with a couple who are wearing Mary Quant ponchos, meeting a couple of rude boys from London around sunrise on Monday morning and showing them the stone circle and a whole other level of crazy they’d never seen before.
The headliners reflected all the ages. The program included Billie Eilish, who at 20 years-old was the youngest headliner, and Paul McCartney the eldest, at 80 years. I raved with people in their 50s and 70s. I partied with my friend and her dad. I spoke to my friend and her daughter about how Olivia Rodrigo had inspired her to play the guitar. On Friday I was invited to perform poetry in a bus-top cabaret and made my costume out of rubbish I’d found around the site. I spent time in saunas recharging. I had meaningful conversations. And then there was the actual music and how it affected me. I started crying while dancing to Big Joanie’s cover of Planes in the Sky. I saw other people crying watching TLC whilst I hugged my friend and we sang together. It felt like rock and roll was alive in Yves Tumor, and I believed in hot girl summer watching Megan thee Stallion’s backing dancers pretend to perform cunnilingus on her and, finally, watching Kendrick Lemar was maybe the most spiritually-intense thing I’ve ever experienced? It was biblical.
After staying up all night on Sunday I went to work. I’d been dancing all night and finished up at the stone circle as I do every Glastonbury for the sunrise. My shift started at 7am and I packed up my tent to avoid it being tatted the Monday morning and giggled through most of it, my feet more blister than skin at this point. The lunch being served in the staff canteen named ‘comedown carbonara’ was the hug I didn’t know I needed. I said goodbye to my new friends. My friend Sandy gave me a lift to the station and I got home in a few hours. I took a bath and looked at my useless arm full of wristbands, not quite ready to cut them off yet. Since the festival I’ve not been able to stop singing, the music surrounding me giving me this buzz, my feet still in agony. I have SO much creative energy I barely know what to do with it.
Go to the Those Who Were Dancing music playlist for the songs that Lydia Beardmore selected as best of Glastonbury 2022
A while ago I figured out that I needed to let festivals ‘happen to me’. It was around then that I stopped looking at line-ups and started “hanging out backstage and hitting on girls” as an ex (a true punter) would put it. But beyond consuming music, it’s about the dancing at the halloumi-wrap stand and the walks at sunrise back to the tent. Who you meet, and trying not to put too much pressure on yourself to see it all. Your path is the only one you’ll remember. It’s a strangely powerful reminder of how to be in the moment.
Returning to Glastonbury, I felt as if I were in the right place at the right time — backstage and front. Getting to see how the sausage was made and then eating the sausage too. As I was walking past The Rabbit Hole — an Alice in Wonderland-themed, secret bar entered through a three stump — I overheard the walk-about performer scold some girls Instagramming in the queue. Their exact words were: “Don’t be present, just take pictures of everything. That way when you’re old you can look back on this video and think to yourself, why the fuck wasn’t I paying attention?”
