The forgotten Glastonbury headliner
To every other musician in existence, a Glastonbury Festival headline set is one of the greatest honours. It’s the pinnacle of their career and forever proof that in one, shining moment, a band or artist had the whole of rock at their feet. Radiohead’s peak was their 1997 headline set, ditto The Smiths in 1984. David Bowie and Paul McCartney’s headline sets in 2000 and 2004, respectively, are among their greatest achievements, which is saying a hell of a lot.
However, there’s one band that headlined the greatest music festival in the world and it’s something of an afterthought in their career, making them more of an answer to a pub quiz trivia question, and something even the band treat as more an amusing anecdote and not one of the most important things to ever happen to them. Granted, they were filling in for a previously announced headliner, but that hasn’t stopped previous understudy headliners from making history.
Pulp stepped in for The Stone Roses and launched themselves into the mainstream in 1995 with one of the best headline sets the festival’s ever seen. Florence and the Machine were already set to play second on the bill to the Foo Fighters in 2015, but when Dave Grohl broke his foot and had to cancel, their ascention to the headliner slot was seamless. So much so that a few questions were asked about why they weren’t already a Pyramid Stage headliner.
So, who was it? Who stepped in at a moment’s notice in 1997 to head Sunday night on the Pyramid Stage and did the best they could with the time they had? The answer is the unlikely Northern Irish pop-punk tykes Ash, who’d only just released their debut album a year earlier. The lads found themselves headlining Glastonbury mere months after frontman Tim Wheeler had just turned 20.
How did this Glastonbury headline set come about?
To be clear, it wasn’t that Ash were a small-time band in 1997. The said debut album, 1977, had been a big hit, and the band were riding high off a number of hit singles, so much so that they’d been given a headline slot for Friday night on the Other Stage. A fine set by all accounts that merely had the bad luck of clashing with Radiohead’s epoch-defining Pyramid Stage set.
However, the other thing that people remember about the 1997 Glastonbury Festival, other than Thom Yorke and co smashing it, is the rain and the mud. Obviously, this is usually par for the course when it comes to the greatest music festival in the world, but 1997 was an apocalyptic year for the weather, even by their standards.
Something had to give and on Sunday, and it finally happened. The booked Pyramid Stage headliner, the slightly baffling choice of Steve Winwood, called the organisers to say that the weather and the terrain were so bad that they literally couldn’t get on-site. They wouldn’t be able to make their set. This sent the committee scrambling for a plan B, and, thankfully, they found one doing what a bunch of 20-somethings at Glastonbury do best.
Frontman Tim Wheeler explained what happened afterwards in an interview with Louder: “We’d stayed around to party and hang out, so we got a knock on our tour bus door and asked, ‘Can you guys headline? We had to sober up pretty quickly, we were absolutely wasted… we were like, ‘Oh crap, we have to get our stuff together!'”
So, the rapidly sobering band, only just out of their teens, managed to save the day!
