Elaine Hastings: From the Pyramid Stage to My Sofa – A Love Letter to Glastonbury

Back then, Glastonbury tickets were £83 and the capacity was just over 100,000. You took photos on a disposable camera, handed them in, and had no idea how they’d turn out until a week later. The photos were always a surprise – and somehow, that made them feel more magical. A lot has changed since then. Today, it’s all phone screens in the air and Instagram Stories live from the field. Tickets now cost £370+, and you’re one of 210,000 people. It’s different, but the feeling when the music starts and you’re singing with strangers? That stays the same.

My love affair with Glastonbury started before I’d ever set foot on Worthy Farm. I was a 21-year-old art student in London when Channel 4 broadcast the festival for the first time. I became so obsessed that I wrote my dissertation on it. Watching it on TV felt like being handed a secret map to another world – a wild, creative place just a train ride away. I ended up in Michael Eavis’s kitchen, interviewing him for my dissertation, barely believing that the man behind Britain’s most iconic festival was the one making me tea.

The following year, I scraped together enough money to go for the first time, and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. I missed a cousin’s wedding to be there (not entirely forgiven, even now). I saw Skin from Skunk Anansie command the stage at midday while half the site was still shaking off the night before. And yes, that was the year Jeff Buckley played – my idol, whose Pyramid Stage set would become the stuff of legend. I can’t believe I missed it. Thank goodness for the footage that lives on via BBC iPlayer.

Back in the nineties, it all felt more intimate, more alternative, and wonderfully ramshackle. You didn’t need a syndicate of six laptops to secure tickets or a £500 survival budget to get through the weekend. We had paper maps, but no apps telling us where to be. You just followed the bass line or the glow of fairy lights, wandered aimlessly, and found something unforgettable without ever planning to.

These days, I don’t even try to get tickets. Partly because it would require a small army of friends in a group chat and an hour of collective anxiety, but mostly because it’s changed. Maybe I have, too. I saw a photo recently of the queue for the showers. In my day, there weren’t any – you brought wet wipes.

Now, from my sofa, I see what the crowd can’t: the awe in a performer’s eyes as a chorus roars back at them, the grin that spreads when a field of strangers becomes one voice. It’s a front-row intimacy you can’t capture while standing in a field. And at home, there’s a flushing toilet, a queue-less shower, and a bed that doesn’t deflate overnight.

That Glastonbury – the one I fell in love with – lives on in my debut novel, When We Were Young. I wove in two fictional festivals: one in the lush Irish countryside during the 90s, seen through the eyes of a touring musician, and one in Gloucestershire in 2016, following a teen festivalgoer who stumbles into the VIP area. Writing those scenes let me recreate the magic of live music, and I got to play God for a while, crafting the perfect festival where it never rains.

I’m not here to criticise what Glasto has become, just to write a love letter to the way it was – to a time when I was young, and so was the festival. We’re both older now, and I’m not sure I’d last three days in a festival tent, even if I could get a ticket. But it doesn’t change what it meant to me then, or the quiet inspiration it left with me.

I only went twice, but that was enough for Glastonbury to weave itself into my life and into the stories I tell. Now, the sofa suits me fine – but every June, the thrill of Glastonbury finds me again, even if it’s only in my living room, volume up, beer in hand, feet tapping. Grateful for how memory and music keep the magic alive.

When We Were Young by Elaine Hastings is published by Avon on 17 July