http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/glastonbury/9957693/Rolling-Stones-at-Glaston...Rolling Stones at Glastonbury 2013: 'The Stones need this festival and it needs them'
As the Rolling Stones confirm they will headline Glastonbury for the first time in 2013, Neil McCormick looks at why it took them so long.
The Rolling Stones performing at O2 last year Photo: AP
By Neil McCormick7:03PM GMT 27 Mar 2013
The world’s greatest rock’n’roll band at the world’s greatest rock festival? It is an irresistible alliance of forces.
Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis has long coveted having the Rolling Stones as headliners, making many efforts to tempt them over the years, only to be constantly rebuffed. With the band members all hitting 70, he must have thought time was running out. But somehow, as the festival has become almost as venerable as the band, their interests have coincided. Glastonbury will deliver an audience of 135,000 dedicated music lovers intent on having the time of their lives. And the Rolling Stones will deliver a headline set that no one who sees it will ever forget.
The Stones are not really a festival band. And who can blame them? When they played Altamont in 1969, it was policed by Hells Angels on acid, and one hapless concert goer was savagely murdered. That event, often depicted as the bitter end to the idealistic sixties, took place just a year before Eavis launched the first Glastonbury on his dairy farm, trying to keep the hippy spirit of the free festival movement alive. T Rex were the headliners, and they have been followed onto the Pyramid stage by most of the greatest rock stars of their day, including David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, U2, REM, Oasis, Blur and Radiohead.
Of course, these days, Glastonbury is no longer free, which no doubt helped in negotiations with the Stones. Whatever the outlaw myths the band like to maintain, it has become clear over the decades that for Mick Jagger and company, money is the grease that keeps the Stones rolling. Glastonbury is already sold out. People rush to buy tickets before any acts are announced, just to participate in the spirit of the event, and in anticipation that the organisers will pull out all the stops to deliver big name headliners. And they don’t get any bigger than the Rolling Stones.
The real reason you don’t usually see the Stones at rock festivals is that they have no need of them. Festivals like Altamont convinced The Stones organisation that they needed to improve the standards of big concert staging, and they went on to pioneer the stadium rock event. Every Stones concert is on a festival scale, a dedicated audience in their tens of thousands drawn just to see them. Revenues don’t have to be split with hundreds of other bands.
Yet despite improbable rumours of a million-pound fee, for once it is probably fair to say the Stones are not doing this for the money. Well, not just for the money, anyway. They are doing it for the prestige, and they are doing it for history. To maintain their status as the ultimate rock and roll band it makes sense to play the ultimate rock and roll concert.
Since the early days of Eavis’s hippy dream, Glastonbury has become a smooth-running, multi-million-pound brand. Beneath the fields of Worthy farm, where cows graze all year round, there is enough wiring to power a small city. Yet, like the Stones, Glastonbury has somehow retained its counter-culture reputation.
It is viewed as almost a last bastion of a kind of rock idealism, the spiritual home of a music-loving community. Pretty much every great surviving rock and roll band has played there, except, arguably, the greatest of them all. In a way, the Stones need Glastonbury as much as Glastonbury needs them.
- Daily Telegraph
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