Glastonbury? No thanks, this festival sums up everything that’s wrong with modern culture

Faced with the grim prospect of more pictures of Jeremy Hunt eating (he’s certainly covered the waterfront, from chips to milkshakes to ice creams) or Boris posing, Mussolini-style, in front of a Union Jack, the media has gone mad for Glasto.

Every day this week we’ve been drip-fed breathless pap about the world’s biggest get-together, from news about a fire-spewing crane named Spider that’s powered with chip fat to the challenge facing sign language interpreters tasked with deciphering Stormzy.

Kylie is said to be ‘tearful’ about her return this Sunday, 14 years after she was diagnosed with breast cancer; the first wedding has already taken place, and Robert Smith of The Cure promises he won’t be playing “gloomy” music.

My agent has left town, and so has my hairdresser – in fashionable circles it’s social death not to be attending. Glasto is like Children in Need – criticise at your peril, it’s a national institution, a force for good. Once, pop festivals were places where you went to get away from your family. Now, organisers are laying on defibrillators, X-ray machines and extra emergency vehicles to deal with strokes and heart attacks (not caused by drugs, but the result of a huge increase in the number of ageing revellers). Last year, there were four heart attacks during the event, and who knows how many major incidents the 800 medical staff will have to cope with this time around.

I’m surprised that the BBC hasn’t written a whole episode of Casualty dealing with the fallout – the event has infiltrated into every other part of their schedule. For days, every junction between BBC programmes has been marked with breathless invocations to tune in and join this wonderful party, pleas that I find increasingly patronising. I would rather have my toenails pulled out (or spend an evening dining with Jeremy Hunt) than grace Glastonbury with my presence.

I know I won’t be missed, and you are entitled to call me a misery, but nothing could be further from the truth. 

Glasto has become a celebration of everything that’s superficial about modern culture: the perceived joy of hundreds of thousands of people all photographing and filming each other and every performer on their phones, living and recycling a musical experience through social media; the delight of sleeping in lines of tents which look not dissimilar to those set up in disaster zones; the strict enforcement of a pecking order and a strict class system, based on how much visitors are willing to pay to kip down in a field.

Organisers talk about “sustainability”, but 200,000 people eating fast food, pooing and weeing in the same space can never be sustainable. And what about the litter, the use of energy, the discarded tents and sleeping bags? Weather forecasters predict temperatures will soar above 30 degrees, which means that anyone urinating on the ground is far more likely to be polluting the local river system with toxic ammonia. Anxious organisers are urging everyone to use the portable lavatories on the site – but that’s not guaranteed after campers have consumed gallons of beer and vegan-friendly shakes.

I am lucky to have attended two seminal events in the history of pop festivals, after which most have proved a disappointment. In April 1967, the all-night Technicolour Dream took place at Alexandra Palace in north London, an extravagantly bonkers fundraiser for the counterculture newspaper International Times. Back then underground culture – from music and publishing to the arts – managed to provoke and enrage the establishment, instead of (like now) being something that politicians proudly sign up to. During that evening, Yoko Ono staged a happening in which the public were invited to cut off her clothes and Pink Floyd played a set as the sun rose at 5am: unforgettable.

In June 1970, I made the trek to the Showground at Shepton Mallet for the Bath Festival – it was utterly chaotic as the bands couldn’t get their equipment down the narrow country lanes which were choked with thousands of fans walking in to the site. We pushed through a hedge on the edge and encountered a dozen blokes relieving themselves as there weren’t enough toilets. The organisation might have been lacklustre, but what a fantastic line up – I saw Dr John and Led Zeppelin on the Sunday afternoon and evening. Later that year Michael Eavis held the first festival at Glastonbury. I don’t usually revel in nostalgia, but the excitement of those events remains blueprinted in my head, even though there were few recordings of any quality. I can conjure up memories of the dirt, the drugs, the truly tingling sensation of not knowing what was going to happen next.

Glastonbury is brilliantly organised. It’s safe, it’s clean, it’s family friendly and it’s utterly predictable. A festival which offers a suite in a pop-up hotel for £2,500 with a private chef and an antique-filled tented living room? No thanks. In the modern world, popular culture can only be validated if it’s experienced en masse, where the excitement of standing together eclipses the threadbare nature of the art on display.

I’d rather spend this weekend talking to my tomatoes, thanks very much.