Best Guitarists in The World

Special thanks to ThisDayinMusic.com.

Current Glastonbury Festival chief Michael Eavis put on a small music festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset in September 1970. The following year, the same location saw another more ambitious, more magical festival, where ancient ley lines met in some mystical pattern and which organizer Andrew Kerr and his cohorts called the Glastonbury Fayre, setting the spiritual tone for Glastonbury festivals to come.

Eavis, writing an obituary for Arabella Churchill (granddaughter of Winston Churchill and one of the Andrew Kerr gang) for the Independent newspaper remembered the 1971 organizing team as a “crowd of upper-crust hippies … who wanted me to let them have the farm to put on a free festival to coincide with the 1971 summer solstice.”

Bill Harkin, who would design the original giant wooden pyramid stage that was designed to focus the energy of the solstice, met the upper-crust hippies while out walking on Glastonbury Tor (hill). He writes on pyramidstage-glastonburyfestival.co.uk:

“I found myself at the foot of Glastonbury Tor at about midnight and on making a brew of tea on my Primus in the back of the van, I was surprised to see a group of freaks, big hats, long scarves and cloaks stumbling down the Tor path towards me with shrieks of laughter.

“They said that they were meeting a farmer the following day, Michael Eavis who had staged a small music event, Worthy Farm Pop Festival some weeks before … they wanted to rent a farm for a free festival the following year. They had all been so horrified by the steel fences and commercialism of the Isle of Wight Festival and wanted to do something very different.”

Eavis was happy for the plan to take place and explained in his Independent piece why he was not actually involved in 1971. “When I had a disagreement with them they threw a load of Tarot cards on the kitchen table. The message read: ‘No one with the name of Michael should be involved with the festival.’ And I said: ‘Hang on a minute, isn’t this my farm?’”

Glastonbury, as a site rich in myth, legend and converging ley lines, was significant for the organizers. Just as the builders of Glastonbury Abbey hundreds of years before had been drawn by the spiritual connections of numerology and geometry and ley lines, so the Glastonbury Fayre was to be far more than a music and arts festival.

Kerr, quoted on ukrockfestivals.com said:  “After we chose the site for the stage at Worthy Farm we discovered if you could stand in the middle of the Glastonbury zodiac watching the sunrise on the summer solstice, the stage would be in direct alignment. After that we discovered the constellation Sagittarius, the Glastonbury zodiac, the stage, the sun and the central sun of the galaxy would all be aligned on June 22, 1971.”

Anyone who has attended a Glastonbury festival over the past 40 years knows that music is always secondary to the overall experience, no matter who the headliners may be.

Back in 1971 the likes of Al Stewart, Wayne Fontana, Roy Harper, Fairport Convention, Quiver, Terry Reid, Gong, Traffic, Melanie, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, Henry Cow, Arthur Brown, Family and even a young David Bowie played their music for all, but it was the participation and reaction of the audience that made this the prototype of all Glastonbury events to follow.

As a local newspaper noted at the time: “The whole festival seemed to take off and people now, dancing, exotically dressed happy, grubby, seemed more like those people who gaze from medieval paintings than if they belonged in present times.

“Everyone was dancing. In front of the stage, amidst the dense crowds there, people were dancing, their hands held high above their heads.

“Carried away, a vicar entered the dancing throng and high on the scaffolding of the stage; clapping hands were raised to the sky. As the festival reached its climax, it was as if the earth was vibrating too, vibrating like a long suffering drum.”

Beat that, Glastonbury 2011.