Glastonbury: a love affair

Glastonbury Fayre was once a few hippies serenading one another in a farmer's field. Three decades on, the Festival is awash with corporate cash, party animals and, of course, mud. Has it sold out, wonders Jonathan Romney - not a bit of it, says film-maker Julien Temple

Glastonbury is a two-hour portrait of the music festival hosted for over 30 years by West Country farmer Michael Eavis, from the early 1970s - when the Edgar Broughton Band and a silken-tressed folkie named David Bowie performed amid a smattering of tepees - to the heavily-branded, security-laden colossus of today, where the tepees come in multitudes, and so do the corporate logos. Temple's sprawling, even exhausting film is not a conventional concert doc by any means - the musical interludes are sporadic and fragmentary - but a massive collage about what the festival means to the faithful. Like key festival documentaries before it - whether it's the beatific Woodstock or the brutally disenchanted Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter - Glastonbury is most interesting as an anthropological document, a study of the multiple Tribes of Offstage.

Although his is not the first attempt to make a Glastonbury feature, Temple's film is uniquely exhaustive. Specially-shot material comprises perhaps a third of the film. The rest is footage that flowed in after Temple put out a public appeal: "900 hours that came in padded envelopes from garages and attics," he says. All this has been edited into a mosaic portrait of Britain's pop subcultures, coming together annually in a brief, luridly intense manifestation that Billy Bragg compares on screen to Brigadoon: it flares up, then vanishes. Temple admires the British documentarist Humphrey Jennings and the Mass Observation initiative that started in the 1930s, and Glastonbury is festival culture's own Listen to Britain, an oral/visual history of people's reasons for taking three days out of their lives to soak annually in music and mud.

Michael Eavis approached Temple to film the festival in 2002. It was the year that he had been prevailed on, following security problems, to surround the site with a steel fence to keep out gatecrashers: a far cry from the all-inclusive idyll of the event's free-fest inception as Glastonbury Fayre (although it must be said that on film, the fence looks magnificently silvery, like a Christo landscape installation). "Eavis asked me to shoot some film," Temple says, "because he thought that the fence might kill the whole thing off. I had 10 crews filming that year - we really got into all the dark corners and crannies of the place, and we shot about 250 hours."

The point, Temple says, was never to make a straight festival film. In any case, he's not that familiar with the genre and has never even watched Woodstock all the way through. "I don't see the point of just filming a festival - they're quite boring events. The idea was to use it as a spaceship going through three and a half decades and looking at this constant thing with people on it changing very radically over the years." Another aim was to convey the feel of a single festival's duration: the film, although it might not be immediately apparent, is structured to suggest a three-day cycle of sunrises, bacchanalian torch-waving nights, and woozy sunrises again. "I wanted it to be quite long," says Temple, "because I wanted you to feel you'd survived the event." Arduousness is essential to the Glastonbury experience, he says: "the mental thing of staying up three days, the exhilaration of being among all these people, and the hassle of having a piss and a shit. There are times when you just say, 'Get me out of here now' and then you realise it's going to take five hours to get out, so you might as well get back into it and enjoy it again."

Your sense of time blurs strangely as you watch the film: often, you don't know what decade you're in. Even with Afghan-coated types playing the proverbial congas in the dirt, neither the hair nor the film stock can be relied on to tell you whether you're seeing 1971 or 2001. That's deliberate, Temple says. In terms of clothes and accents, the disapproving Glastonbury burghers and W.I. types are considerably more time-specific than the punters. "I hate that 'I love 1977' idea," Temple says. "I like the idea that you have to work to figure out what year is what. What helped me make the film in the end was accepting the randomness of this event."

As far as music goes, there are some definite show-stoppers on film - notably Toots and the Maytals and Björk - while the quaintest archive footage is of ancient folk goddess Melanie airing her tofu-curdling high notes in 1971. Latter years give us the crowd-pleasing dance bombast of Faithless and the Chemical Brothers; the Levellers, those militant Halfway Sids (half Vicious, half Rumpo); even Coldplay's Chris Martin evincing a sense of humour as he sings, "Give me mud up to my knees". Temple's biggest regret was that financial considerations stopped him including his footage of the Bishop of Bath and Wells dancing to Johnny Cash's performance of "Ring of Fire". Instead, he's included certain performers who are anything but radical, but who have broadened the festival's constituency, for better or worse. To hear him narrate it, you'd think he'd put in dreary David Gray purely as an act of provocation.

"My real hope - I've had a flavour of this from screenings - is that the audience interacts. I knew people wouldn't like David Gray, so it's quite good that when he comes on, people start shouting." It reminds Temple of the flare-ups that greeted The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, such as a Paris audience uprooting the projector and playing the film on the ceiling, or the Sid impersonator who jumped up and fired blanks into the audience. "Those things excite me," Temple says, although people groaning at a Starbucks balladeer surely isn't quite in the same seditionary league.

The film also pays due lip service to the tradition of Glastonbury mysticism, with footage of druids and BBC soundbites about "congruence of the powerlines of the mind." "It's mumbo jumbo, isn't it?" Temple admits. Even so, he respects Glastonbury's hippie tradition despite his own roots in the Class of '76. "I was obviously involved in punk, but in perspective you see that they are stations on the same journey. I was impressed by those guys, I thought it was quite heroic, living in wigwams for 40 years. They were saying we should do something about the planet in 1970, so they were ahead of the game."

The film's more or less explicit proposition is that Glastonbury's assorted tribes - punks, hippies, rastas, travellers, weekending accountants, and all - embody an alternative sociology of Britain. Temple sees it as an essay on the UK's countercultures, their survival and mutation over four decades, including a sense of strengthened rationale during the Thatcher years. One shocking sequence - Glastonbury's answer to the horror of Gimme Shelter - shows a police attack on a traveller convoy at Stonehenge in 1985.

Such imagery is part of a warts-and-all portrait of Glastonbury that goes beyond the mud and iffy latrines. Another disturbing moment is a 2002 encounter between aggressive security patrols and people trying to get through the fence: the sequence creates "a sense of Paradise Lost", Temple feels. "It was very strange riding around with those Land Rover guys who were looking for people to beat up, basically. It felt like Iraq or something, they were all old Army guys." (Security arrangements have become more benign since then, Temple points out).

The film also highlights the crowd's ambivalent view of the shovel-bearded festival organiser Michael Eavis. He's at once revered as a benevolent Peel-like uncle, and mistrusted as an authority figure, a skinflint, a spoilsport or just generally "the Man". But Temple has nothing but admiration for him.

"Some people are very hard line about him and say that he's sold out. I don't see that - I see him as someone who's fought for what he belives in over a long period of time. On the other hand he's a Laughing Gnome and he walks around like Prince Charles, and he is King of the festival. But there's quite a steely determination to keep this space where people can do anything in his back garden."

Temple himself continues to walk his own line between the countercultural and the corporate. Since following his Pistols film with the misunderstood Soho musical Absolute Beginners (1986), he's continued to celebrate cultural dissidents, with fictional portraits of film-maker Jean Vigo (Vigo, 1998) and the English Romantics (Pandaemonium, 2000); he's also made countless music videos. His new project is a celebration of his late friend Joe Strummer, conceived around the Clash founder's stint as a DJ at the World Service.

Arguably, it's Strummer who steals the show in Glastonbury, onstage with his band the Mescalero, belligerently railing against BBC cameras. "The BBC didn't want us to use that footage, and we had to cobble together a compromise where we had Michael saying, 'Joe apologises for what he did.'"

While the festival itself takes a break this year, Glastonbury the film is on a mini-tour, accompanied by acoustic sets from festival acts. I know this from a flyer I picked up at the press screening, which plugs sponsorship from Orange, Sony Ericsson and Ben & Jerry's commemorative Glastonberry ice cream. The sound and taste, no doubt, of Paradise Lost.

'Glastonbury' is released on Friday

You had to be there: Some great festival and concert films

JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY

(Aram Avakian, Bert Stern, 1960)

Genre-defining record of the Newport Jazz Festival, with Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and Thelonious Monk among those upstaged by gospel legend Mahalia Jackson. The America's Cup yacht race provides an unlikely backdrop.

GIMME SHELTER

(Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin, 1970)

Decidedly free of anything resembling good vibes, Gimme Shelter documents the moment the hippie dream ended - the Rollling Stones' Altamont concert at which Hell's Angels "security" staff killed an audience member. Needless to say, Jefferson Airplane look a bit lost in this context.

WATTSTAX

(Mel Stuart, 1973)

Sometimes described as the black Woodstock, but more politically charged, this record of a soul marathon at the LA Coliseum features greats such as Isaac Hayes, the Staples Singers and Rufus Thomas, with Richard Pryor adding some incendiary fast talk.

THE LAST WALTZ

(Martin Scorsese, 1978)

Superfan Scorsese - who worked on the film of the Woodstock Festival - captures the elegiac farewell of The Band, with an all-star cast including Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan. But it's Van Morrison, looking like a leather- wrapped barrel, who steals the show with his barmy Irish lullaby.

DAVE CHAPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY

(Michel Gondry, 2005)

Hip US comic Chapelle hosts a freeform get-together in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood, featuring the likes of Kanye West, Erykah Badu, The Roots and the reunited Fugees. Coming to the UK soon? JR