“Boo, the Glastonbury line-up’s rubbish … Yaaay, the Glastonbury’s line-up’s amazing.” It happens every year, but so it goes when you’re a festival the size of a large town with about 100 hundred stages which basically means your line-up is anyone in the world on tour. Anyone can manipulate the names to make the bill look brilliant or terrible, watch us do it now: so you wouldn’t get us going to a festival if we were told the line-up was The Courteeners, Newton Faulkner, Hurts, Jake Bugg and Miles Kane. They just don’t float our boat. But tell us that it’s a festival featuring Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Phoenix, The Horrors, Portishead and Foals? We’d probably snap your arm off for a ticket (and we would, if any Glastonbury PR happens to be reading this.)
Mumford & Sons are headlining Glastonbury for the first time
The point? Glastonbury is never just about the headliners and it’s never just about one stage. Sure you could argue that this year’s Pyramid Stage bill toppers amount to nothing more than a dinosaur act merely ticking off the last career accomplishment they’d not yet completed, coupled by a band who woefully under performed last time they headlined and another group who half the country want to start picking up pitchforks and farming for, and who half want to pick up pitchforks and want to start farming their organs, but if you were only going for The Rolling Stones, The Arctic Monkeys and Mumford & Sons then you’ve really missed the point of the festival entirely.
Continue reading: Glastonbury 2013 Line-Up Revealed, But Is It A Let Down?