Online Glastonbury festival 2021: Live at Worthy Farm – catch Coldplay, Wolf Alice and George Ezra on May 23
- There will be no crowds, no mud and no queues for the toilet when the Glastonbury Festival kicks off on May 23
- A live-stream of musical acts performing will include a tour of the site with commentary from the stars and founder Michael Eavis
Summer is coming, which in the more temperate regions of the northern hemisphere means festival season. But while a rip to one of the biggest multiday events has long been an annual highlight for many, right now the idea of gathering together with a huge group of other people, many of them quite possibly a little worse for wear, sounds downright alarming – and is, in many places, still entirely illegal.
The result is Live at Worthy Farm, a festival for the socially distanced era. Taking its name from the site in southwest England that has hosted Glastonbury since its first outing in 1970, it features roughly the sort of line-up you’d expect over a day on the physical festival’s main Pyramid Stage: perennial indie rockers Coldplay; Blur and Gorillaz musical polymath Damon Albarn; indie-folk-blues legend PJ Harvey; former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker; rootsy folk-rocker George Ezra; pop rock sister act Haim; grime legend Kano; folk rock singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka; post-punk hard rockers Idles; soul-tinged singer-songwriter Jorja Smith; and indie-folk rockers Wolf Alice; plus DJ Honey Dijon, accompanied by electropop artist Róisín Murphy, and some promised surprise guests.
They’ll be performing at some of the more famous locations around the Glastonbury venue, their sets interspersed with a film that will take viewers on a tour of the site. It is being produced by BBC Studios Productions and live-streaming company Driift, and directed by prolific music documentary and concert movie maker Paul Dugdale.
The film will be narrated by the likes of Harvey, Cocker and Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis. A trailer released by the festival organisers offers a few clues as to how it might look and sound – the clip is filled with moody music and atmospheric photography, and features a whole lot of stone circles, plus one pointed shot of a puddle of mud.
The event takes place on May 23, and is scheduled to last between five and six hours, with four streams running at different times. The one aimed at Asia runs from Sunday at 5pm, but anyone can sign up for any of them; should you wish to witness it all as early as possible, the first stream starts at 2am. Tickets cost US$27.50 (about HK$214).
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Live at Worthy Farm will support Glastonbury’s usual charitable partners Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid. It will also, the event’s organisers suggest, help the physical festival to happen again in the future, although we’re not entirely convinced they’d be starving without it. They’re also releasing a limited edition line-up poster, with proceeds going to British live production welfare and benevolent fund Stagehand.
The Glastonbury site will be opening up for family-friendly, low-intensity camping in August, albeit with strictly limited numbers, an 11pm curfew and a ban on live music. But let’s face it, we can’t go. While Live at Worthy Farm will not replace the full Glastonbury experience, even if we could easily travel there, no longer having to get from the airport to the obscurely located Glastonbury site is a definite plus.
In fact, to replicate the full Glastonbury experience at home, all you really need to do is move a big mound of extremely sticky mud into your living room, set up a tent in the middle of it, and sit in it watching the stream while drinking far too much cheap cider (or, if you like, gasoline with a couple of apples bobbing in it, which approximates the same flavour). Some kind of falafel or vegan curry is probably also in order.
Then just ask your neighbours to play, say, loud techno music all night, and you’re good to go.
