COMMENT: "Who are you? Who, who, who, who...grandad?"

Glastonbury Festival organiser, Michael Eavis, today admitted what many younger festival goers have suggested for many years, the five day summer event is too middle aged.

Telegraph.co.uk and Radio 1 are just a few of the news outlets who have been running this story all day. In all these pieces Eavis is quoted as being worried by the changing demographic of the Glastonbury crowd and worried about the lack of the "NME crowd" despite the current punters being "fantastically well mannered and polite and respectable".

During my time wading through the Somerset fields this summer i must say that, yes, there was definitely a high number of 30/40-somethings sat in foldable chairs with cold beers and warm ciders precariously placed in the cup holders. The nicely pleated ponchos and vast golfing umbrellas are not the gig attar you would expect of people going to see The Klaxons, even if the ground below your feet is more water based than vinyl floored.

Mr Eavis is on record as saying that the way to solve this is to make more tickets available over the phone lines next year. Plans are afoot to dedicate 40% of the 2008 tickets to telephone orders so that teenagers "will be able to use their mobile phones to get tickets."

It's seems to me though that there are several factors that the organiser might be overlooking:

1. £145!!!

When i first went to Glastonbury in 2000 tickets were 80 squid which was amazing value for seeing David Bowie do a hour set. 145 big ones to see two headliner acts who have only just released two albums and another who are touring their asses off trying to get their over-rated back-catalogue back on the turntables of their now vintage fans seemed a bit step.

If Eavis wants to attract a younger crowd he needs to bring the cost of tickets into the pocket-money-market brackets. Yes of course a middle of road career ladder climber can afford a small fortune but an NME reader can hardly afford a decent music magazine let alone half the monthly rent of a inner city flat.

2. MCR not DSB

Eavis' words suggest he's after lynching all the music fans that save up their haribo money to basking in the August sun of the reading festival, if this is the case, and I hate to say it, he's gonna have to cater for their ears.

This isn't to say that I'm suggesting My Chemical Romance should headline every one of the 70 stages at next year's fest, nor am i saying that Dame Shirley Basey should be banished from the fields of Avalon forever more, especially as I'm told she was amazing. What I am suggesting is that, maybe, just maybe, Glastonbury needs to attract bigger bands. Instead of The Pipettes on the Pyramid Stage during the day, improve the line-up so much that Snow Patrol find themselves relishing in that slot. That's a near perfect outcome I know but you see what I'm getting at.

Clearly Glastonbury is intended to be the most diverse festival on the face of the planet and it really is. Nowhere else will you see Arctic Monkeys and The Marley Brothers on the same stage while a jazz world stage blasts out tropical tunes that are so fresh to everyone you are pulled to experience it. Throwing more and more mainstream acts into the mix simply won't work. The festival is perfect as it is...please don't bring in Marilyn Manson...Smashing Pumpkins yes, Manson no!


3. Acid fried the hippies...and that's why they dead!

Eavis has got to realise that he will not be welcoming the travellers back with open arms. Hippies, like the potential younger audience, can't afford the price tag to attend the sometime annual event. This is a unattainable goal if this is indeed really what organisers are hoping. What additional joy and youth would these fence hoppers bring to the festival anyway? Free love now costs stis (or stds) however you want to say it, and the festival costs an extra couple of decimals of debt.

All this doesn't really drag many conclusions. What we can take away is that the festival must only see minimal changes. A big band here, a younger act there, while still staying true to the charitable nature of the event, if that means refusing to pay Jagger and his band of pirates a million pounds then fuck 'em.

Making more tickets available through the phone lines will not mean that more younger people will attend. Many of the people the festival want to attract know the internet like the flatplan of Kerrang and more have broadband. They'd rather sit at a computer hitting refresh instead of holding a warming carcinogenic device up to their temples only to keep hitting redial.

Improve the headliners, attract the bigger acts and the audience demographic might just change but the Glastonbury Festival's cultural identity is so stubborn and leftfield that it won't stand for any efforts to force change...not even from it's Father.

Words: Dean Samways

Image: Google