Glastonbury Report

Exclusive report from festival site

14 June 2008 - With only two weeks to go until the Glastonbury festival gets well underway, 6music have had exclusive access to the site.
 
Currently the ground is dry underfoot with no mud in sight.

Despite this however, tickets for Glastonbury are still not sold out.

Our reporters Julie Cullen and Matt Everitt, who visited the site, managed to catch up with Michael Eavis yesterday who gave his own verdict on why the event wasn't sold out:

"It's still a British thing that if something is big and successful then we start kicking it around a bit. So we've had some criticisms. Mainly about the mud, maybe slight overcrowding last year, not enough seats, the busses didn't seem to work as well as they should have done. But we have addressed all those things and we're working all the time to make it even better anyway."

Eavis made a controversial move to make tickets available over the counter at HMV stores in major cities up and down the country and they can still be purchased in this way. He told 6music how many are left:

"I think we've got about 7000 tickets left, that's all. With only 2 weeks left to go its forecast glorious sunshine and they are selling out all the time. So they should take about ten days to sell out."

"Next year I think the demand will go back to how it was." Michael Eavis

And whether Eavis will employ his tactic of selling tickets over the counter again, he wasn't so sure:

"Not necessarily. It depends really on the demand next year really," he said before adding:

"The whole thing of photos on tickets - we had a look at that again this year. Previously we had experienced a lot of touting and it annoyed me to think that people were paying 120 quid for a ticket and selling them on for £400. This year we didn't quite get to the point where we could sell them all with photos on because we were left with 10 000 at the end."

Despite the problems faced by the festival this year, Eavis is positive that next year its popularity will have returned:

"Next year I think the demand will go back to how it was. If we have a dry fine summer this year and people enjoy themselves as much as I think they're going to, then the demand will be how it was. If not, then we'll have to look at the whole ticket system again."

For a full report from the Glastonbury site, the view from the Pyramid Stage, the dryness of the ground and more from Michael and Emily Eavis, tune into the Music Week Programme with Matt and Julie from one o clock on Sunday (15 June).

Elizabeth Alker