The Pop Corporation

The Glastonbury Festival (or Pilton Pop Festival to ageing locals) can be annoying, but that’s probably down to being so ubiquitous, right? That said, looking back at it’s history is a potted history of British counterculture, especially when you get back to the heady days of the early ’70s when the hippie dream was still in full flow and not yet ravaged by middlemen and smack.

With that, there’s a great book out called ‘In the Vale of Avalon: Glastonbury Festival 1971’ which gathers words and photos of the origin story of one of the most legendary music gatherings on the planet. ’71 was actually the second Glastonbury gathering, and it was still free entry, and importantly, the first of the festivals to feature the iconic Pyramid Stage.

Attending the event was movie director Nicolas Roeg who would film the show, and he invited Julie Christie and wanted someone to capture what was going on in still-form. That man was Christie’s driver, Paul Misso, who has compiled a beautiful book of a time long gone.

“After the festival, I selected about 160 slides into two Kodak Carousel trays from the 7000 pictures that I shot, and projected them for Nic Roeg and his producer at Nic’s house on his birthday in August. When the show was over, Nic looked at me with what appeared to be tears in his eyes and said quite emotionally: ‘Paul, you got it and I didn’t.’ This meant eventually that he dropped the film, so my pictures became obsolete, and ended up in a drawer for many years.” says Misso in the introduction to the book.

Now, you can see them for the first time.

Bill Harkin’s drawings for the pyramid stage (above): “I woke up having had an unusual dream. I was standing to the rear of an open air stage next to a drum riser, looking towards the audience that someone was addressing. There were two beams of light forming a pyramid in the sky… taking the morning off work, I started in the studio with the notes and the rough sketch.”

Also included in the book is the mission statement: “Glastonbury Fair will be held at Worthy Farm, Pilton near Shepton Mallet Somerset, from Sunday June 20th to Thursday June 24th 1971 over the period of the Summer Solstice. It will be a fair in the mediaeval tradition embodying the legends of the area with music, dance, poetry, theatre lights and the opportunity for spontaneous entertainment. There will be no monetary profit, it will be free.”

All in all, this looks like a really beautiful capsule of a time before the big sponsors got into the counterculture and, eagle eyed readers will have already spotted supermodel Jean Shrimpton, so all in all, if hippies and music are your bag, this looks like a beautiful thing to own.

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