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If all of the world is a stage, then the world was watching
Glastonbury this weekend. At least it felt that way in the UK, where public
service broadcasters gave viewers and radio listeners wall-to-wall coverage of
the three-day festival.
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The Glasto vibe has always been strong (the event is hosted
on a farm near mystic ley lines, after all), but has been amped up in recent
years to successfully encompass a broad swathe of popular music, from jazz and
rap to metal and soul.
The demand for the communality of crowds has been back with
a vengeance this summer with artists like Harry Styles, The Rolling Stones,
Elton John, and Billie Eilish playing packed stadium gigs across the UK.
The zenith of this trend was the Glastonbury Festival, which
played host to more than 80 acts to 200,000 people live and millions more at
home.
Headline acts, including Billie Eilish and Paul McCartney,
agreed to play the festival for a fraction of the fee they could command
elsewhere. Emily Eavis, a co-organizer of the event, revealed that the
festival’s performers are typically paid less than 10% of what they’d usually
get elsewhere. At Coachella, for example, Beyonce was reputedly paid $4 million
to appear in 2018. Beyonce played Glasto in 2011.
BBC presenter and DJ Jo Whiley described the experience
to Variety’s Mark Sutherland: “Take Coachella, multiple it by a
thousand, add several different dimensions and put it in multi-color… Then you
might have a grasp of what Glastonbury is all about.”
Among the acts this year were Olivia Rodrigo, Diana Ross,
Lorde, and Pet Shop Boys, with appearances by Led Zeppelin frontman Robert
Plant and country and bluegrass star Alison Krauss. Dave Grohl and Bruce
Springsteen also duetted with Macca.
You’d like to think the stars do this because they want to
be part of a unique communal experience. There’s an element of that to be sure.
Another reason is the boost BBC coverage can give to future sales of tour dates
and streaming airplay.
“These days, artists sign up to be at Glastonbury with the
BBC coverage at the back of their minds,” Alison Howe, executive producer for
BBC Studios, says to Sutherland. “People want to be part of it.”
After the last pre-pandemic event in 2019, huge surges in
sales and streams followed for the likes of The Killers, The Cure, Lizzo and
Kylie Minogue.
Each year the broadcaster takes it upon itself to record or
live stream more of the show than ever before. This year, BBC produced live
coverage of the main Pyramid stage in 4K UHD HDR and a live stream of various
acts that were performing on different stages at the same time through its
iPlayer online service.
“We’re really hopeful that at night when you look out over
the crowd when the headline act is on, [the UHD] will really define a bit more
what people at the event are seeing,” explained Howe to Televisual’s Pippa
Considine. “Not just the detail on stage, but also the detail in the
environment.”
BBC plans for more stages to get the UHD treatment in
future. In 2017, the corporation and Glastonbury announced a broadcast deal
through 2022, with an announcement expected that this longstanding partnership
will be extended.
It’s not just performers using Glastonbury as a world stage.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and 19-year-old climate change activist
Greta Thunberg both addressed the televisual audience in unscheduled speeches,
while several other artists chose to vocalize their anger and defiance against
the US Supreme Court ruling on the right to abortion.
Kendrick Lamar, who headlined Sunday’s performance, was
perhaps the most striking. He signed off the end of his set repeating the
words, “They judge you, they judged Christ, Godspeed for women’s rights.”
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