Levellers: The unlikely band holding the Glastonbury Festival attendance record
By the time Lionel Richie stepped foot on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury 2015, energy levels were at their usual low. A sun-drenched Sunday afternoon usually coincides with a red lining of morale, and your usual schedule picks for that day are those who can leverage some sort of introspection. So in that sense, the opening chord ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ has never felt more tone deaf.
But despite their creaking knees and blistered toes, over 100,000 punters rolled up to the Pyramid that day to briefly pretend that the mud they were standing in slightly resembled a ceiling for them to dance on. Of course, Richie pulled a crowd that large for the Sunday performance. It’s somewhat of a rite of passage these days for the legend slot to smash through pre-existing capacity records and pull a crowd so big that only one-third of it can even hear.
This year it’s Rod Stewart, while previous years have seen Shania Twain, Diana Ross, and Dolly Parton all strut out on a sunny Somerset afternoon and play their greatest hits. The latter in particular was responsible for pulling one of the festival’s biggest crowds in history, with over 180,000 people singing along to ‘9 to 5’ while trying to suppress every instinct of their upcoming Sunday scaries.
These names are all suitably large for the legacy of drawing the festival’s biggest ever crowd, and as I climb up the leaderboard, they don’t get any smaller. Not yet, at least.
No, because while Parton did indeed attract 180,000 people, she didn’t quite manage to top the footfall for David Bowie’s 2000s headline show. Rumoured to be around 250,000 people in attendance, the ever-changing icon put on a show that to this day remains the favourite of organiser Emily Eavis.
She notes, “I often get asked what the best set I’ve seen here at Glastonbury is, and Bowie’s 2000 performance is always one which I think of first. It was spellbinding; he had an absolutely enormous crowd transfixed.”
While Bowie was indeed a legend in his own right, that was one from a headline slot who put up a show worthy of attracting a crowd that large. And while recency bias may be leaning you towards thinking that my teeing up of large headline crowds means that Elton John surely had his number, then you’d be mistaken. While Elton’s show seemed like the entire world coming together for one last performance, the rumoured figures tell a story of a near miss, with a reported 210,000 fans jostling together at the Pyramid.
Who is the unlikely winner?
So, who is even left, you wonder? Not only is it shocking to learn that Elton John can’t even take the crown for a show that seemed to rip a hole in culture for an entire week, it’s genuinely hard to fathom the mere idea of a 250,000-strong crowd record being broken.
Well, the record holder achieved the feat during the 1994 leg, and no, it wasn’t Oasis. It was the political folk act, Levellers and their 300,000-strong crowd of fans singing along to their hits ‘What A Beautiful Day’ and ‘One Way’. While they’re a band who certainly attract a song cohort of dedicated fans, many attribute this ridiculous number to the more relaxed barrier controls back then, which meant a large group of break-ins occurred on-site that year. As such, the band can most likely consider their record safely protected, for the security is far tighter and well, if Elton John can’t break even with all of his might, then no one else will.
