Glastonbury

The Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, commonly abbreviated to Glastonbury or Glasto, is the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world. The festival is best known for its contemporary music, but also features dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret and many other arts. For 2005, the enclosed area of the festival was over 900 acres (3.6 km²), had over 385 live performances and was attended by around 150,000 people. While the villagers of Pilton have been complaining about the noise generated during the weekend for many years, in 2007 over 700 acts played on over 80 stages.

Glastonbury was heavily influenced by hippie ethics and the free festival movement in the 1970s, especially the Isle of Wight Festival. Organiser Michael Eavis stated that he decided to host the first festival, then called Pilton Festival, after seeing an open air Led Zeppelin concert at the nearby Bath and West Showground in 1970. The festival retains vestiges of this tradition, including the Green Futures/Healing Fields area, but the fact that it is now run by a media group that was until recently controlled by Clear Channel Communications might suggest otherwise.