Glastonbury the Movie review – thirty years on, the sunset of a hippy dream in all its glory

Coinciding with a fallow year for the festival, these scenes filmed in 1993 record a youth culture innocent of camera phones and low on corporate hype

With Glastonbury in a fallow year, anyone missing their dose of West Country bacchanalia will have to settle for this handsome documentary, remastered in 4K and rereleased for its 30th anniversary. Shot at the 1993 festival, it serves as a heady curative to today’s digital saturation: no mobile phones, no corporate logos, just tens of thousands of people unselfconsciously having it large in one of those blessed years when the sun god smiled on the Glastonbury populace. If the film wasn’t time-stamped enough by the copious tie-dye, white-boy dreads and acid jazz on display, a youthful Dexter Fletcher seems to feature in approximately 18% of the footage.

The film is less purposefully structured than Julien Temple’s 2006 tribute Glastonbury, whose multi-decade collage was corralled into thematic sections. Directors William Beaton, Robin Mahoney and Matthew Salkeld simply ride it out with the punters on a chronological three-day stint, alternating meanderings through the camp with choice excerpts from the stage. There are welcome reunions with acts unlikely to have bothered your Spotify feed of late: an imperial rendition by Stereo MCs of their big hit Connected, a lithe, pre-fame Verve slinking through Gravity Grave, and a cavorting Porno for Pyros. With the cacophony bottled in frequently used split-screen, eavesdropped snatches of conversation float over the soundtrack. One Monty Python-drunk wag hawks imaginary wares to passersby: “Lark’s vomit! Pig’s bladders!”
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