Glastonbury worst I've seen!

[Ontobetterthings]

Anyone else? I tuned in last night and couldn't believe how bad it was! 1975 was headlining and it was so middle or the road.

Maybe I'm getting old but the music was awful!!! So bland. Im early 40s 🤣

What are your thoughts?

Yes I was thinking the same that it is rubbish this year or i was wondering if it was just me cos im getting older. watched a bit of Alanis morrisette and En vogue as they're my era, at one point could clearly tell one of the En vogue girls was miming. 1975 were boring also currently watching Raye, also boring. 2023 was a good year they had Texas, the lightening seeds, Rick Astley and a few other good ones.

@Sidebeforeself

Very true!

I’m only an armchair commentator anyway. Haven’t been to Glastonbury in over 20 years and you couldn’t pay me to camp <shudder>.

How do you suppose they convinced the UK press to publish stories about things that happened at concerts over a year ago in the run up to their Glastonbury appearance?

What do you think any of them will get 'banged up' for? What repeat offences do you see them commiting (other than expressing options that you don't agree with?)

Glastonbury has not ALWAYS been political - in the early days it was a place where hippie-type people could hang out without being harangued.

It might be political now but it really wasn't before. And nb: it does indeed seem that us so-called 'useless hippies' created some great shit for people to enjoy for many years to come.

And I therefore relax in the knowledge someone here is older than me 😍
I find the majority of festivals now are positioning towards some cause or other. I choose to focus on the music.

Or maybe, like most people, you don't actually know much about Irish history and can't understand why a people might have sympathy for the Palestinians having suffered from 800 years or brutal British occupation, almost having their culture and language destroyed and an attempted genocide that the population has never recovered from....

Glastonbury is basically a pop festival these days. That's fine but it's not for me anymore. Had some great times there in the 90s/00s though and I would still recommend anyone to go.

@ffsfindmeausername it isn’t that Raye can’t sing-she can - but we are definitely into Amy winehouse/Adele territory here and unmemorable songs ‘in my opinion’ but as I said at 63 - I don’t think it’s aimed at me

The festival brought in £5.9m in pre-tax profits for the year to March 2024.
During the same period, the event also donated £5.2m to charitable organisations including Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid.

I know a fair bit. I still don’t like Kneecap and the stuff they spout. That doesn’t mean I’m pro Israel either.

In fairness, I’ve always felt like Glastonbury was only for the elite and celebs based on the cost, general attitude, and the impossibility of actually getting tickets.

I liked Bestival when in used to be on the IOW.

The headline for me is Neil Young, if he turns up.... that bloke can do what the fuck he wants in my book as he's already laid down some of the best songs in my living life.

I might indeed tune in for him.

Neil Young is off to a shite start

Those “nasty little cunts” donated their entire fee from headlining Wide Awake festival to Doctors Without Borders…

I tried to watch highlights on iplayer and you couldn’t forward it. Only wanted to watch 1975

I'll always be sad that I missed Dolly, but my festival going days are over now. There just don't seem to be many good headliners any more and so it's been the same ones for the last 20-60 years.

@Profpudding Well that's to be expected. Just tuned in my telly machine and there's some rap-bird going on....where can I find that old Canadian hippie codger then?

In the same way The Pistols did - the right wing press are just foaming at the mouth about everything they say and do now. The Daily Fail have all but claimed Mo is a member of Hezbollah!

I can't see the band, considering the amount of cash that is likely to roll in after the attention re the court case, changing tack now. Any press is good press, right? THAT is my point.

I do think Mo and the others are likely to get dragged back to court repeatedly now because part of notoriety is being watched. There will be many more 'complaints' and the court case shows that complaints are being taken seriously.

Also, I gave my opinion on their politics at no point so you can shove your assumptions.

Im enjoying Raye, but my main takeaway is how bloody hard it must be to sing along to a lot of artists these days.

i don't really get this, there's SO many bands and artists on, do people not look beyond the headliners?

I also find it so funny that people presume Glastonbury has changed soooooo much rather than reflecting that maybe they've just got old 😂

i say this as an old person myself.

if you go to glastonbury you will see it is a huge celebration of all sorts of arts culture and green type thinking - it gives over whole fields to green politics - when I went in the 90s it was my first exposure to that sort of thinking and shaped my adult approach to politics. Many of the people in the green fields are real out there radicals and are given life long support and space at glastonbury - this is real stuff not fake. Many people barely make it up to the green fields but it's always been there and it's for real.

re. arts and culture - the performing arts in particular the stuff like unfair ground/ shangri la - are also genuinely giving a stage and space to people in the counter culture.

what's shown on the bbc is a tiny fragment of glastonbury - i've been to many festivals and there is nowhere like it.

re kneecap - young musicians of the punkish/ angry/political variety are supposed to annoy people it's literally why they exist. anyone getting wound up about it is just giving the young punks oxygen just as they want!

I'm half Irish, with a dot of Native American from a rather unpleasant encounter in the 19th Century when some of my ancestors were fleeing Ireland for Canada. Plus half English-ish, with a bit of Welsh and Austrian. So.. my ancestors have been colonised by the British, the Americans, the Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Normans and the Nazis. Who am I allowed to hate?

@TranceNation Ive been going since the 90s and it's better than ever - the pop is just the smallest drop of it all! In fact one amazing thing about the past 10 / 20 years has been the massive expansion of dance music there. Which in the 90s was barely starting out in mainstream festivals. I saw orbital play in 1994 and nothing like that had ever happened at glasto.

I think a lot of the people commenting on Kneecap aren't familiar with Irish culture and don't realise perhaps how different Ireland is the Britain due to collonialism. Kneecap regard their home as occupied land, they see their language being restricted, their culture being restricted. They fought and won a court case against the British government on the grounds that they were discriminated against because of their nationality and their politics just this year. You just have to look at all of the bollocks over signs in Belfast when it comes to the Irish language in NI to see why Kneecap see their use of the Irish language as a form of resistance to British rule, why they want to resist British rule when their culture is being actively suppressed.

Obviously coming from what they see as occupied land, being from a nationality who were starved by their occupiers, whose culture was made illegal they are going to feel some kind of kinship with other people also under occupation.

It's really not a simple situation of Kneecap are cunts, the end.

I so resonate with all of this (except that I'm not 63). I've heard a lot of hype about Raye over the last year all so but never knowingly heard her sing until now. There is no doubting that she has a lovely voice and can sing but for me her songs are utterly bland and forgettable.