Glastonbury Festival

Glastonbury Festival is the MOTHER of all festivals…….it is in the magical area of Somerset, England, and it has to beexperienced to be understood……it is so big that it feels like a new community, a voyage of discovery in music, art and culture…..with 150,000 people of all colour, age and lifestyle… music from every genre imaginable…. Dance, rock, chill, retro, commercial, house, latin, break beat, world, pop, indie, acoustic, grunge, drum & bass, R & B, jazz, trance, spiritual, the styles are endless… music to blow your mind wide open!!!

The festival evolved over the last decade by Michael Eavis, from a simple hippie gathering with rock music, to one of the biggest, commercial and most diverse music culture festivals in Europe, with tickets selling out in one week, at over £100 (8000 rupees) a throw!!!! On ebay tickets can go for up to £500 (40000 rupees)!!!!!

Photos of the festival are incredible…it seems like a whole city is pulsating on the Somerset fields with so much life, I mean 150,000 of anything is huge, let alone all those people, their cars, tents, shops, lights, stages, restaurants, bars, dance arenas, cinemas, tipees, sculptures, exhibits of art and madness, stalls of every description…….

So how does the festival spend that £10 million pounds (80 crore!) in entrance money I hear you ask!! Well, much is spent on security and constructing a huge outer perimeter fencing around the entire festival area to make sure people can only enter with tickets…. Years before, people would enter free by climbing over the ditches and hedges around the site, then it became large fences, and now of course it’s a huge, high fence, patrolled with security in 4×4 vehicles and dogs, and impossible to climb over without breaking bones…

I arrived straight from sunny hot Ibiza to a cold day to drive to the festival……the rain arrived that evening, and didn’t stop for 24 hours……The whole festival was under water…..unimaginable pictures of mud, mud and more mud..!!! The dance village where I was playing had to be evacuated…. lightning hit a stage and wiped out the electricity…. We had no sound system, no crowd and nowhere to hide from the rain!!! My shelter was the geodesic dome from ID Spiral…..

We were lucky that by evening the rain had died down enough for the power to be switched back on, people allowed back onto the dance village field, and we were able to continue…it really was amazing to see the energy of the team go so low with the weather, but still soldier on and make the best of a really mad, bad and messy-messy situation!!!! Slowly the fields filled with people determined to have a good time…no matter what!!!

The music continued…the crowd filling the fields with positive energy… the main stage was awesome…people dancing in the rain……the main DJ was suspended in a cage on a wall on the main stage… saw Fat Boy Slim kick ass!!!!
So much to see…you just could not take it all in…the photos, the reports of the festival just can’t describe the energy…it just has to be experienced… whether you go to dance, to meditate, to work, or party with your friends…Glastonbury is such a personal voyage of discovery… even though it has become such a huge commercial festival, you will meet magic people that may change your life forever, and open your mind…………

Ma Faiza was born in Africa and is of Indian origin. She evolved as a DJ in London, and is based in Pune, India. She is a DJ, an Artist, Producer and Head of A & R for Masti Music. She writes for several international publications, and she DJ’s globally, madly travelling around the world, participating in some of the most cutting-edge concepts in sound, vision and experience…
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