Glastonbury film review

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GLASTONBURY

Anyone disappointed by the fact that there is no Glastonbury festival in 2006 can console themselves with Julien Temple's documentary, which is a bit like the event itself: long, a bit confusing, but rammed with some golden moments that can only occur when 100,000 people - some of them not on any form of mind-altering drug - gather in the rural idyll that is Michael Eavis' back garden.

Temple and his team searched through nearly 1,000 hours of archive footage to find the best bits, and then seemingly threw them all up in the air in order to decide where they should go in the film. The result is messy, and at times aimless, but as anyone who has been to a large scale festival will tell you, order is indeed the enemy of the day.

The result is an often fascinating look at the festival's history, full of odd isolated moments which are often hilarious. Eavis himself is at the centre of the film: with footage of him from the very first event, his commentary on the bad old days of the 1980s when the festival was overtaken by travelers, and his views on the growing commercialization of the last few years. His perseverance against all the odds (and the local council) has duly paid off to make it arguably the world's most famous event of its type.

But unless you know every key figure involved in the set-up of the festival, you're likely to be a bit confused: some titles explaining just who everyone is would have been a simple and effective idea. Temple's attempt at chronicling the affair would have been a lot more successful if he had decided to give it some order.

The biggest crime is the apparent fact that everyone involved in making the film seems to have forgotten that Glastonbury is amongst others things a music festival. The choice of music clips is little short of tragic, with very little from the 1970s and 80s, and most of the recent clips highlighting how bland popular music has become (there was loud booing when David Gray's appearance came on at the screening I attended). Only Pulp's classic rendition of Common People comes anywhere near showing how great the music has been.

Despite these drawbacks, there is still much to enjoy, especially the mind-boggling costumes, stalls and events that go on over this four-day weekend. The film is a decent enough companion piece to William Beaton's superior 1994 documentary Glastonbury: The Movie, and there are lots of times when you do feel that you are actually there munching on a cookie, man.