The Glastonbury Festival 2024 headliners have been announced and with Shania Twain, Dua Lipa and Coldplay among headliners, festival goers are starting to get excited for the five-day summer extravaganza.
This year marks 54 years since the first ever Glastonbury and since then so many things have changed. For one, the mega-festival now hosts around 210,000 people and way back in 1970, the festival hosted just 1,500 people.
However, according to the BBC, it was 1971 which saw the real beginnings of the festival as we know it today as that was the year that the Pyramid Stage was introduced and around 12,000 people were in attendance.
Really quite the stark contrast to the festival that we know today.
How much did it cost to attend Glastonbury in 1971?
Well, the festival was then called Glastonbury Fayre and tickets, in contrast to this year’s £350 price tag were actually, uh, free.
According to Glastonbury Festival, this was because the festival had been planned by Andrew Kerr and Arabella Churchill who felt all other festivals at the time were over commercialised. It was paid for by the few who supported the ideal so the entrance was free and took a medieval tradition of music, dance, poetry, theatre, lights and spontaneous entertainment.
That year, David Bowie, Joan Baez and Hawkwind were among some of the performers and critics described it as a ‘hippie mecca’ full of people high on ‘love, peace and Lebanese gold’, according to The Guardian.
Despite this, reporter John Craven spoke highly of the event saying: “There had been pot and acid, that’s cannabis and LSD, but there have only been two arrests and police said they were quite surprised and pleased about the way the festival had gone on.”
Glastonbury Festival takes place between Wed, 26 June 2024 – Sun, 30 June 2024.