page_title: Glastonbury Festival
section_title: 2000s
hierarchical_section_title: Glastonbury Festival / History / 2000s
context_page_description: Glastonbury Festival is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place in Pilton, Somerset, in England. In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums recorded at Glastonbury have been released, and the festival receives extensive television and newspaper coverage. Glastonbury is now attended by around 200,000 people, requiring extensive infrastructure in terms of security, transport, water, and electricity supply. The majority of staff are volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for charity organisations.
  Regarded as a major event in British culture, the festival is inspired by the ethos of the hippie, counterculture, and free festival movements. It retains vestiges of these traditions, such as the Green Fields area, which includes sections known as the Green Futures and Healing Fields. After the 1970s, the festival took place almost every year and grew in size, with the number of attendees sometimes being swollen by gatecrashers.
context_section_description: 2000 saw a new Pyramid Stage introduced as well as new features such as The Glade and The Leftfield. The festival was headlined by Chemical Brothers, Travis and David Bowie who played 30 years after his first appearance. The Pyramid Stage also hosted an unusual event on the Saturday morning, with the wedding of two festival-goers, who had written to the organisers asking for permission to get married there, taking place and conducted by actor Keith Allen in front of a small group of friends and any other festival-goers who still happened to be awake. This year also saw an estimated 250,000 people attend the festival (only 100,000 tickets were sold) due to gatecrashers. This led to public safety concerns and the local District Council refused any further licences until the problem was solved. The organisers took 2001 off to devise anti-gatecrashing measures and secure the future of the festival, after the Roskilde Festival 2000 accident (though this was also a scheduled break, one which took place every five years from 1991, the year after the battle of Yeoman's Bridge, until the 2012 Olympics extended the five-year sequence from the planned 2011 rest year). It was at this point that the Mean Fiddler Organisation was invited to help, which was seen by some as a "sell-out" to corporate culture.
  In 2002, the festival returned after its planned fallow year, with the controversial Mean Fiddler now handling the logistics and security — especially installing a substantial surrounding fence (dubbed the "superfence") that reduced numbers to the levels of a decade earlier. The lower attendance led to a much more relaxed atmosphere and massively reduced crime levels compared to previous years. There were some incidents outside the fence involving frustrated individuals who arrived at the festival assuming they would be able to simply jump the fence and not pay for the music and performances, but despite this the event was hailed as a great success by the media companies that had taken an interest in the festival. 2002 also saw Coldplay headline the Pyramid Stage for the first time while the show was closed by a set from Rod Stewart on the Sunday night.
  There were some criticisms of the 2002 festival that it lacked atmosphere, because of the reduced number of people, which reflected the smaller numbers jumping the fence. The number of tickets was increased to 150,000 for 2003 which sold out within one day of going on sale, in marked contrast to the two months it took to sell 140,000 in 2002. It was also the first year that tickets sold out before the full line-up was announced. This was also the year Radiohead returned to headline the Pyramid Stage. Revenue raised for good causes from ticket and commercial licence sales topped £1 million, half of which went to Oxfam, Greenpeace and Water Aid.
  In 2004, tickets sold out within 24 hours amid much controversy over the ticket ordering process, which left potential festival goers trying for hours to connect to the overloaded telephone and internet sites. The website got two million attempted connections within the first five minutes of the tickets going on sale and an average of 2,500 people on the phone lines every minute. The festival was not hit by extreme weather, but high winds on the Wednesday delayed entry, and steady rain throughout Saturday turned some areas of the site to mud. The festival ended with Muse headlining the Pyramid Stage on Sunday, after Oasis had headlined on Friday. Franz Ferdinand and Sir Paul McCartney also performed. In the British press publications appeared about the use of psychedelic drugs by festival visitors. The magazine NME pronounced that 2004 would be "the third summer of love" due to the resurgence of the "shroom" that was praised as a natural alternative to ecstasy, which was said to be declining in popularity (LSD fuelled the first summer of love in 1967; ecstasy and LSD the second in 1988).
  After the 2004 festival, Michael Eavis commented that 2006 would be a year off — in keeping with the previous history of taking one "fallow year" in every five
caption: The view from the stone circle on Thursday afternoon, 2004
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