Which band literally made it rain at Glastonbury Festival?
It was a beautiful sunny day on Saturday, June 26th, 1999. That’s not a sentence you can utter very often about Pilton, Somerset. The nearest village to one of the world’s biggest music events, Glastonbury Festival, which had traditionally turned into one giant mud bath by its third full day.
Not in 1999, though. The weather was set fair, as it had been all week. Friday’s main headliners R.E.M. had enjoyed a starlit set the night before, and sun-soaked hordes were looking forward to the Manic Street Preachers taking to the Pyramid Stage later on Saturday.
But unbeknownst to all those in attendance, one band had brought a very different weather forecast down with them from Glasgow, Scotland. A couple of songs into their set on Glastonbury’s Other Stage, lead singer Fran Healy looked out over the heads of the crowd donning sunglasses in front of him and thought, “Oh man, I can see a big cloud coming”.
The thousands of revellers below were too busy enjoying the sunshine to notice. “No one believed me,” Healy added. “Until we played this song”.
He was referring to his band Travis’ upcoming single, which, following the festival, would go on to become their highest-charting song to that point. It’s still arguably their most famous tune on the eastern side of the Atlantic and was covered by Gang of Youth back in 2022.
So, which Travis song caused the downpour?
Fittingly, the song that precipitated a deluge of precipitation soaking the Glastonbury crowd was ‘Why does it always rain on me?’.
At the time, Travis thought they’d ruined everyone’s day in the sun. But, as Healy and guitarist Andy Dunlop recently told the White Wine Question Time podcast, they later found out that the moment was widely celebrated and led to BBC presenters Jo Whiley and John Peel calling them “the band of the weekend”.
A year later, Travis returned to Glasto without the rain but with their reputation made. They headlined the festival’s main Pyramid Stage.
Healy recounted the story of what had happened the previous to a rapt audience of almost 100 thousand people, who duly sang the song back to him word-for-word as he began to play it. There’s nothing like a rainy day in June to bring out the singer in everyone.
