Glastonbury Festival

Glastonbury Festival is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place near Pilton, Somerset, England. In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums recorded at Glastonbury have been released, and the festival receives extensive television and newspaper coverage. Glastonbury is the largest greenfield festival in the world, and is now attended by around 175,000 people, requiring extensive infrastructure in terms of security, transport, water, and electricity supply. The majority of staff are volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for good causes.

Inspired by the ethos of the hippie, counterculture, and free festival movements, the festival retains vestiges of these traditions, such as the Green Fields area, which includes sections known as the Green Futures and Healing Fields. After the 1970s, the festival took place almost every year and grew in size, with the number of attendees sometimes being swollen by gate-crashers. Michael Eavis hosted the first festival, then called Pilton Festival, after seeing an open-air Led Zeppelin concert at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.

Glastonbury Festival 2014

The 2014 Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts was held between 25 to 29 June 2014.

Ticket sales

Initially a small selection of tickets were sold for people who wished to travel by coach. A few days later the standard tickets were released where ticket sales sold out in record time of one hour and 27 minutes.

Line-up

On 19 December 2013, it was announced that Arcade Fire would headline the Pyramid Stage on Friday 27 June 2014.Kasabian will headline on Sunday 29 June. In early March 2014, Glastonbury announced that Dolly Parton would perform at the festival via their Facebook page, although didn't confirm if she would be headlining. Other acts that self-confirmed were Disclosure (who will play the Other Stage on the Friday), Blondie, Lily Allen and Foxes. The artist headlining on Saturday was listed as special guests due to legal reasons. Metallica were later announced as the special guests.

As of 30 April 2014, the following artists have been announced to perform:

Glastonbury Festival 2009

The 2009 Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts was held from 24–29 June 2009.

Tickets

Registration

In a similar way to previous festivals, tickets for the 2009 event required pre-registration (of a photograph and personal details) through the festival website. Registration opened on 1 September 2008.

Sales

Tickets were able to be purchased via the See Tickets website or by telephone. A limited number of tickets were available by promotion through the Western Daily Press and competitions run by Greenpeace,eFestivals and The Guardian.

Ticket lines opened on the morning of 5 October 2008, and customers were able to place deposits for tickets (£50) or buy them in full (£175). Tickets required full payment by 1 February 2009.

On 22 January 2009, at Midem 2009, Michael Eavis announced that 90% of the event's 137,500 tickets had been sold. He also stated that although headliners had not been confirmed, he was awaiting confirmation from the acts he had approached.

Glastonbury Festival 2008

The 2008 Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts was held from 27 to 29 June 2008.

New features

Ticket sales

The ticket registration system that was established in 2007 continued in 2008 having won numerous awards, including Best Innovation at the 2007 UK Festival Awards. Registration was available throughout February, online and from Millets camping stores. It closed on 14 March, however due to tickets not selling out, registration for the festival was re-opened at 4 pm on Tuesday 8 April allowing those who hadn't previously registered to purchase tickets.

In July 2007 site owner and organiser Michael Eavis stated that 40 percent of tickets for the upcoming festival would be sold by telephone in order to attract more teenagers to the event. Eavis was quoted as saying that most sales being on-line during 2007 resulted in most festival-goers being "too middle aged and respectable". The logic of this reasoning seems questionable, however, as internet use is traditionally associated with youths, certainly more so than ownership of a phone line.

Glastonbury Festival (1914–25)

The first Glastonbury Festivals were a series of cultural events held in summer, from 1914 to 1926 in Glastonbury, Somerset, England. The festivals were founded by English socialist composer Rutland Boughton and his librettist Reginald Buckley. Apart from the founding of a national theatre, they envisaged a summer school and music festival based on utopian principles. With strong Arthurian connections and historic and prehistoric associations, Glastonbury was chosen to host the festivals. Among the supporters were Sir Edward Elgar and George Bernard Shaw, while financial support was received from the Clark family, shoemakers in nearby Street. The first festival included the premiere performance of Boughton's opera The Immortal Hour. By the time the festivals ended in 1926, 350 staged works had been performed, as well as a programme of chamber music, lectures and recitals. The festivals ended ignominiously when Boughton's backers withdrew funds following a scandalous production of his Nativity opera Bethlehem in London. In sympathy with the miners and the ongoing General Strike, the production had Jesus born in a miner's cottage with King Herod as a top-hatted capitalist and his soldiers in police uniforms.

Glastonbury

Coordinates: 51°08′55″N 2°42′50″W / 51.1485°N 2.7140°W / 51.1485; -2.7140

Glastonbury /ˈɡlæstənbri/ is a small town in Somerset, England, situated at a dry point on the low-lying Somerset Levels, 23 miles (37 km) south of Bristol. The town, which is in the Mendip district, had a population of 8,932 in the 2011 census. Glastonbury is less than 1 mile (2 km) across the River Brue from Street, which is now larger than Glastonbury.

Evidence from timber trackways such as the Sweet Track show that the town has been inhabited since Neolithic times. Glastonbury Lake Village was an Iron Age village, close to the old course of the River Brue and Sharpham Park approximately 2 miles (3 km) west of Glastonbury, that dates back to the Bronze Age. Centwine was the first Saxon patron of Glastonbury Abbey, which dominated the town for the next 700 years. One of the most important abbeys in England, it was the site of Edmund Ironside's coronation as King of England in 1016. Many of the oldest surviving buildings in the town, including the Tribunal, George Hotel and Pilgrims' Inn and the Somerset Rural Life Museum, which is based in an old tithe barn, are associated with the abbey. The Church of St John the Baptist dates from the 15th century.

Glastonbury, Connecticut

Glastonbury is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, formally founded in 1693 with settlers first arriving in 1636. The town was named after Glastonbury in Somerset, England. Glastonbury is located on the banks of the Connecticut River, 7 miles (11 km) southeast of Hartford. The town center is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as a census-designated place (CDP). The population was 34,427 at the 2010 census.

Geography and climate

According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 52.2 square miles (135.2 km²), of which 51.3 square miles (132.8 km²) is land and 0.93 square miles (2.4 km²), or 1.76%, is water. The Glastonbury Center CDP has a total area of 4.9 square miles (12.7 km²), of which 3.30% is water.

The town begins on the banks of the Connecticut River and extends up into foothills, many of which provide a view of Hartford's skyline. Some major developments in the town are built entirely on relatively steep hills, such as "Minnechaug Mountain", the major residential area developed from the 1970s until late '90s.