What was the first song ever played at Glastonbury Festival?
In a few weeks, the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts will be celebrating 55 years of its existence, an extraordinary feat of convivial longevity that likely not even its dairy farmer and head honcho, Michael Eavis, could have predicted way back in 1970.
It’s a different beast now, forming a greater mainstream presence in the nation’s cultural calendar, attracting many a private Tory, and operating a vastly mammoth operation that seems to grow with every event. But anyone lucky enough to nab those golden tickets in recent years will know its infectiously homespun atmosphere and impressively minor corporate presence for a festival size that exceeds many of Somerset’s cities.
Purist grumbles abound as to its broadening programme ever since the festival booked The Smiths in 1984, and accusations of bourgeois smugness, delighted upon by reactionary sections of the press, are as much an annual tradition as the festival’s hallowed descent unto Worthy Fam, but Glastonbury keeps a firm footing in the Methodist, humanitarian principles Eavis was raised on, a keen passion and care for community and social democracy that it’s never lost across the many decades.
Glastonbury Festival was born of the country’s counterculture. All in 1970, Isle of Wight had held their biggest festival yet, Phun City brought some far-out anarchy to Worthing’s Ecclesden Common, courtesy of The Deviants’ frontman and provocateur, Mick Farren, and the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music was held in Shepton Mallet, boasting performances from Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and Led Zeppelin. Through the latter, Eavis was in the crowd, inspired to join in on the festival game.
Glastonbury had its music festival roots in the Edwardian era. Inspired by Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth celebration—an annual event conceived by the German composer to afford the ‘common’ folk a chance to enjoy his grand music dramas—socialist composer Rutland Boughton and librettist Reginald Buckley were drawn to Glastonbury’s Arthurian heritage to host the first of a regular run of events in 1914. Encouraged by George Bernard Shaw and receiving funding from the local Quaker shoe manufacturers Clarks in Street, a summer school was devised for aspiring artists and Boughton’s The Immortal Hour opera was performed in the village’s Assembly Rooms.
With further assistance from feminist playwright Alice Buckton’s Guild of Glastonbury & Street Players, ‘Glastonbury Mk 1’ would persist, aside from some wartime interruptions, solidly until 1925, when Boughton’s membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain became popularly known and soured local support. Sympathising with the 1926 general strike, a scandalous version of his Bethlehem nativity opera in London depicting Jesus born in a miner’s cottage and King Herod as an upper-class capitalist fat cat guarded by soldiers and police caused uproar in the press. The Glastonbury Festival’s liberal-leaning patrons withdrew funding, scuppering that year’s event and any further from then on, for a few years at least.
So, what was the first song ever played at Glastonbury?
In stark contrast to today’s main line-up reveal designed by Radiohead art director Stanley Donwood and the myriad of bespoke posters attached to the plethora of stages, the first-ever Glastonbury advertisement was an infinitely more humble affair. The 1970 Worthy Farm Pop Festival, as it was called then, was £1 a ticket and came with a free bottle of milk. The only household name on the programme was The Kinks, who dropped out last minute to be replaced by Tyrannosaurus Rex, one month away from frontman Marc Bolan‘s band name reduction and jump into glam rock with ‘Ride a White Swan’.
With the help of Plastic Dog Agency’s Mike Tobin for promotional assistance, a Bristol folk-prog outfit called Stackridge, whom Tobin was managing, was roped in to play with a brief from Eavis to plug in any performance gaps, anxious that acts were not going to show. Opening the festival on Saturday, 19th September, Stackridge kicked off the set with ‘Teatime’, a proggy number that starts off with a gentle folk aura before swelling into a grand stomper of stirring flutes and fiddles. It would stand as a fan favourite and close their 1972 sophomore LP, Friendliness.
Modest success would follow in terms of recording 1974’s The Man in the Bowler Hat with Beatles producer George Martin and playing Wembley Stadium along with Elton John and The Beach Boys, before disbanding in 1977, with members James Warren and Andy Cresswell-Davis forming The Korgis in the 1980s. Reuniting in the late 1990s, Stackridge would return to Glastonbury in 2008, playing the Acoustic Stage on Sunday afternoon to a festival crowd far removed from the slapdash hippy happening they opened to all those years ago.
