Just a couple of weeks on from its latest instalment that saw secret sets from both Pulp and Radiohead as well as protests against U2 and a close friend of British prime minister David Cameron being found dead in a toilet, Glastonbury Festival organiser Michael Eavis believes the end is in sight for the massive Somerset event.
In an interview with The Times (via NME.com), Eavis suggest the festival is nearing the end of its time on the festival landscape, saying, “It’s on the way out. We’ve probably got another three or four years.”
He also expressed alarm at the precarious nature of the music festival industry, adding, “It is a very scary business. Womad and Latitude are not selling out. Partly it’s economics, but there is a feeling that people have seen it all before.”
Glastonbury began at Eavis’s farm in Pilton in 1970 with T.Rex headlining its inaugural event. The iconic festival has faced various hardships over the years, and on several occasions has skipped a year so the land can recover – there will be no festival in 2012 for this reason. In 2011, Glastonbury sold out before any acts had been confirmed, and was attended by 130,000 people.
Eavis went on to bemoan the fact that festival organisers are struggling to sell tickets unless they can secure major (and very expensive) headliners.
He said, “We sell out only because we get huge headliners…In the year Jay-Z played we nearly went bankrupt. I don’t see the market will be there in the future.”
