Tim Hughes is daunted by the sheer weight of talent - and madness - on offer at the Glastonbury Festival

  • Glastonbury Festival
  • Worthy Farm, Somerset

IT’s the greatest live music event on earth; a three-day spectacular covering everything under the sun.

Even those who hate music know about Glastonbury Festival. To be precise, it is not even a music festival. Dairy farmer Michael Eavis’s annual get-together in the Vale of Avalon, describes itself as a Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, and it is possible to spend a packed weekend there without seeing a single band - instead soaking up performances by the world’s best circus artists, comedians and poets and enjoying the random art installations and ephemera which make each field such an assault on the senses.

But, inevitably, it is the musical line-up which dominates proceedings. With a bill boasting the world’s most famous rock and roll band and practically every other artist you have heard of, it’s impossible not to be drawn to its iconic Pyramid Stage, the far-cooler Other Stage, the indie offerings at the tented John Peel stage - or one of the other 100-odd other performance spaces.

For Oxford music fans, Glastonbury is always a key date in the diary, hosting, as it does, many of the city’s best established and up-and-coming acts. Among those flying the Ox flag last weekend were North Oxford’s Foals, who ripped up The Other Stage on Friday evening. Like supporting a football team, it’s easy to be biased when it comes to favourite local bands, but Yannis Philippakis and his sidekicks smashed it with a set leaning heavily on latest album Holy Fire, but peaking with a emotionally-drenched Spanish Sahara. A measure of the respect with which the band are held was obvious not just by the immense crowd, but by the volume of singing; everyone knew the words.

Endearingly, people also knew the words to much of the back catalogue of that other great Oxford breakthrough act, Stornoway. The Sunday afternoon crowd smiled and laughed along to frontman Brian Briggs’s banter and sang-along to songs, almost all of which he claimed to be about seabirds - a good number of which were circling the stage. “The seagulls are getting braver,” he observed, before remarking “soon they’ll soon be feeding on the corpses”.

He also generously, invited the crowd to come up and recharge their dead phones - though the prospect of a leap across a pit of burly-looking bouncers was enough to stem a surge of takers.

The biggest sing-along was, of course, reserved for Zorbing - to the obvious delight of the band.

Highlights were again too numerous to mention, but including a sultry, heart-wrenching set by Bristolian trip-hoppers Portishead; the rock & roll attitude-soaked Primal Scream; dance act The XX - who seemed genuinely moved to have been given the honour of closing the festival on The Other stage (and by the response from the enthusiastic crowd to their moody and atmoshpheric electronica); and Smashing Pumpkins, who’s furious Sunday night set erupted into crowd surfing and the festival’s best-ever moshpit.

West London country-rockers also impressed, winning many new fans at Williams Green with a scorching set of folky-blues-rock which sounded straight out of Los Angeles's Laurel Canyon, rather than the lower Thames valley. Frontman Reid Morrison is the consumate frontman, and looked glacially-cool while throwing himself and his acoustic guitar across the stage, striking a preternatural synergy with his partner in crime Sam Beard.

Imagine Neil Young jamming with Crosby, Stills and Nash in the desert sun after a Berocca and tequila overdose and you might be half-way there. Last time round, Treetop Flyers opened The Other Stage... if they are not leading the charge on one of the big stages next time, there is no justice (or judgment) out there. This weekend, however, it was just nice to have them play this lovely, and intimate stage on a hot sunny afternoon.

If you are curious, later this month the lads play Oxford's own Truck Festival - a spot which has become something of a spiritual home. And they are worth the ticket price alone.

It was The Rolling Stones, however, which dominated the festival and all media coverage, indeed one could be forgiven for thinking they were the only band there.

They played a blinder, of course, the band, with an average age of 69, carried by some well-picked session musicians and by frontman Mick Jagger, who confounded even the critics by throwing himself into a strutting set of raucous, crowd-pleasing rock and roll, delivering all their best hits - Gimme Shelter, Paintit Black, Honky Tony Woman, Wild Horses, You Can't Always Get What You Want, the suitably spacy 2,000 Light Years from Home, and, inevitably, Satisfaction... and even a new one: the slightly cringe-worthy, yet (for Sir Mick) suitably sexist Glastonbury Girl (a re-working of factory Girl, and name checking Primal Scream, who had warmed up the crowd before them... as if they needed it). The song, which referred to his meanderings around the site, showed that even this most senior of Glasto virgins had been bitten by the bug.

Heck, he nearly had as good a time as we did.