Glastonbury Goes In Record Time

The world-famous festival run by a septuagenarian west-country dairy farmer broke another record when the 137,500 tickets for this year’s Glastonbury sold out in a few hours.

In 2003 BBC News made much of it selling out in 18 hours, although the capacity was much smaller then, but the demand for the event is still increasing and the April 1 two-hour sellout beat the previous record of three hours set in 2005.

There wasn’t a Glastonbury in 2006 because Michael Eavis, who stages the festival on and around his 600-acre Worthy Farm near Pilton, decided the land and staff needed what farmers call a "fallow year."

Missing last year may well have increased the level of expectation for Glastonbury 2007. The box office opened at 9 a.m., when 400,000 pre-registered fans began the scramble to be among the lucky ones to get a ticket. It was all over a little after 10:45 a.m.

Given that technology has found much quicker ways to sell tickets since Glastonbury moved 112,000 in 18 hours in 2003, selling nearly 140,000 in less than two hours indicates demand for this year’s June 22-24 gathering is stronger than at any other time in its 37-year history.

The phone lines were swamped and the Internet jammed, but Eavis believes he has a ticket-buying system that’s as egalitarian as it gets.

It’s designed to battle touts and part of the pre-registration process involves the applicant submitting a photograph, thereby limiting the likelihood of anyone buying in quantity.

"Two to three years after we started trying to get rid of touts, we’ve achieved it," Eavis reported, as many secondary ticket agencies admitted they’d failed to find a way around the registration system.

When the tickets went on sale, no acts had been officially announced but several newspapers and music mags have said Dame Shirley Bassey, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, The Who, Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks, Kasabian, Damien Rice, and The Waterboys are likely to be on the bill.

After years of battling Mendip District Council over license applications, a process Eavis has described as "jumping through hoops," the festival and the local authority have found sounder ways of working together and the event was recently given the go-ahead for the next three years.

Eavis acknowledged that relations with the local Mendip authority improved when he cut a profit share deal with Mean Fiddler that included the services of Reading-Leeds Carling Weekend chief Melvin Benn to oversee the applications and present them.