What was Glastonbury’s biggest-ever crowd?
Glastonbury Festival draws around a quarter of a million people to a secluded corner of southwest England every year. It’s unsurprising, then, that for many music acts, playing at Glastonbury marks the biggest performance of their career, not just as a musical milestone but in terms of the sheer size of the crowd they’re playing to.
Around 125,000 people swelled around the festival’s Pyramid Stage to watch Arctic Monkeys’ Glastonbury debut in 2007. To put that into perspective, that’s the same number of people who watched Oasis on each night of their famous gigs at Knebworth in 1996 – and for a band fresh out of their teens and one year into the festival circuit.
The scale of headlining Glastonbury has overawed even the most established performers. David Bowie claimed he’d lost his voice before starting ‘Life on Mars’ during his 2000 headline set, which he reportedly performed to around 250,000 people. Those hundreds of thousands duly belted the song’s words back to Bowie as he lapped up the adulation.
And in the festival 2023 edition, Elton John’s farewell to Worthy Farm in Sunday’s headline slot unquestionably drew one of the biggest crowds of all time. But since the official attendance for last year’s event was around 210,000, the Rocketman couldn’t claim the number one spot for the biggest crowd in Glastonbury history.
A next level crowd
That crown goes to an unlikely winner from the festival’s heyday at the height of Britpop. The 1994 festival might be best known for Oasis announcing themselves to the wider world on The Other Stage, but they weren’t the biggest draw that year. Not by a long shot.
It was the British political folk act The Levellers who managed to attract a whopping 300,000 people to their performance. That included those who’d jumped the fence and got in for free, in a move the anarchist band would surely have endorsed.
With stricter limitations on the number of Glastonbury attendees these days and a giant barrier now encircling the perimeter of the festival grounds, The Levellers’ record will likely never be broken. For a band that named itself after the groups who spearheaded popular uprisings during the English Revolution, it doesn’t get more populist than that.
