'Glastonbury' review

This documentary on the legendary music festival is full of performances but light on stories

By Zel McCarthy
Published: January 31st, 2007 | 10:35pm

Much like its American cousin, Coachella, a 2006 documentary about the annual California desert shindig, Glastonbury, Julien Temple's lengthy film about the legendary mud-caked English music festival, beguilingly finds itself without much of a story to tell. Unlike Coachella, however, which is young enough not to have much of a tale beyond "desert, sun, music, fun," Glastonbury has thirty years of community conflict and musical magic, not to mention thousands of years of history, to draw upon for what could have been an engaging insight into the mother of summer music festivals.

Instead, Temple, known for his 2000 doc on the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury, presents a movie that is short on facts and relies heavily on footage from other film makers, notably those who made other Glastonbury flicks in 1995 and 1972. One would assume that the intention was to make this Glastonbury a conclusive statement on the first thirty-odd years of the event. Instead, Temple focuses on the "travelers," transient counter-culture collectives that descend on the ancient polis for longer than its three-day annual concert, and founder Michael Eavis' efforts to keep them, the authorities, and other concert-goers happy. There's no timeline imbued upon the footage, a voiceover to connect it, or a sense of sequence of events here, just a sloppy visual presentation of an apparent situation.

The film's highlights are, as they should be, derived solely from the obligatory performance footage. There's a minute of Pulp doing "Common People" from their star-making mid-90s performance, the requisite clip of Blur (when Damon was young and oh-so-handsome), and a delightful look at a buoyant Bjork pogo-ing to "Human Behaviour." Glastonbury's long-heralded diversity of musicians is represented too, with everyone from Dr. John to Cypress Hill to the Chemical Brothers popping on screen for a few seconds. But these musical treasures are definitely afterthoughts to the meandering melange of a disconnected narrative. It's obvious, for instance, that the few seconds of Babyshambles' 2005 performance was merely an excuse to include three - yes, count 'em - three shots of Kate Moss watching from backstage. And why tease us by playing "Blue Monday" on the soundtrack if you're not going to show a clip of New Order performing it?

Go to a festival with thousands of attendees like this one and you're bound to hear thousands of different stories. Mud, inebriation, supermodels in Wellington boots - all worthy tales. It would have been nice if Glastonbury would have told at least one of them.