Yahoo News Glastonbury's Emily Eavis: ‘Booking a gender-equal line-up is easier than you might think'
An award-winner fighting the audience; a host battling sexist idiocy; calls to topple the music industry patriarchy; a well-behaved Courtney Love; the biggest artist in the world crowning rock’n’roll’s latest Godlike Genius 24 years after her dad was given the same accolade — this evening’s Brit Awards will have to go some way to top the storm in a pint glass that was last week’s NME Awards.
“It felt like the Nineties!” Emily Eavis, the aforesaid Godlike Genius, says approvingly. The daughter of Glastonbury Festival founder Michael was there when the pioneering Somerset farmer was honoured at the music magazine’s awards show in 1996. She was 16 and says, “Seeing my dad in the context of Goldie, Björk, Oasis, all these people blew my mind. I was so into that music, and he was like these artists’ peer.”
Of last year’s Glastonbury hit headliner booking, the festival co-organiser and mother of three says: “My kids do love Stormzy. But they’re a bit too young to appreciate [the connections].”
The award is a “huge honour”. But the down-to-earth 40-year-old acknowledges that it’s a “ridiculous title”, adding: “I’m not sure I quite deserve to be floating down through this godlike haze!”
Still, it wasn’t as ridiculous as Slowthai — the so-called NME Hero of the Year — getting all lascivious with the ceremony’s host Katherine Ryan, then diving into the audience at the O2 Academy Brixton to take issue with someone who called him “misogynistic”.
Nor, perhaps, as ridiculous as Eavis being handed her raised-middle-finger-shaped trophy by Taylor Swift, who was named Best Solo Act in the World at the event. Even if TayTay is capping off this summer’s 50th anniversary Glasto, witnessing Miss Americana (the title of her new Netflix doc) enjoying what she called the “craziest” time on the lager-coated floor of the Academy was far from expected.
“When NME said they wanted Taylor to present [to me], I said: ‘There’s no way! Good luck.’” But they booked her, and she came. “And she was really into it. And her and [co-presenter] Billy Bragg got on like a house on fire. There’s a newfound friendship there.”
Come the last weekend of June, might Bragg, the keeper of Glasto’s agit-folk flame, be able to drag Swift to his preferred Left Field tent for a BoJo-bashing acoustic set?
“You never know!” Eavis replies, eyes shining. “She is coming for the whole weekend, I think. That’s the best way to do it for these massive acts over from the States, especially if they’re playing on the Sunday. Experience it and see all corners of the site and get immersed. Then you can really know what you’re playing to.”
After the NME knees-up, Eavis is back on her family’s farm, the smell of spilt pints replaced by the aroma of cowpats. It’s a busy morning on Worthy Farm in Pilton. Half-term has just begun, and in the farmhouse the latest generation of Eavis kids, aged eight, six and three, are enjoying some breakfast telly. Meanwhile, Mum and Dad (Nick Dewey, who books the main stages alongside wife Emily) are busy building the world’s greatest music festival.
“There are a couple of slots left to book,” says Eavis, an energetic, smiley woman who shares her dad’s irrepressible enthusiasm. While the 84-year-old is more concerned with infrastructure — “He just loves being in a ditch, my dad” — his daughter is deep in negotiations to find “the positions for the last couple of artists”.
Two of the three Pyramid Stage headliners have been announced: Swift and Sir Paul McCartney. Diana Ross has been revealed as this year’s inhabitant of the Sunday teatime Legends slot, and last week Lana Del Rey was unveiled. Swift, though, has been in the bag for a while — negotiations began in advance of last year’s festival.
Much of those booking choices are being driven by a commitment towards Glastonbury having a 50/50 gender split in its performers. Equal female representation — or even something close to it — is where this evening’s Brit Awards nominee list has come up short, as has the recently announced line-up for the Reading and Leeds Festivals.
But Eavis has been a trailblazer, and she has been backed by The 1975’s Matt Healy, who has declared that the band will only book to play festivals with gender parity from now on.
Still, as Eavis points out, it shouldn’t be a big deal. “It’s one of those things that sounds quite dramatic when you say it, because it seems like you’re making a point that’s completely out there. But actually when you start booking like that, it becomes a little bit easier than you might think.”
She and her Glastonbury teams are having conversations about equal representation among featured artists. As to their likely success, it’s hard to give an overall figure, given that there are “thousands” of acts across multiple performance spaces. But she thinks that on the main stages — Pyramid, Other, John Peel, Park — the split will be “pretty much” 50/50.
Eavis is also putting the greening up of Glasto at the forefront of this year’s planning. Last year’s no single-use plastic bottles rule was a major success, and now they’re doubling down on recycling points across the 900-acre site. They’ll also be trialling reusable cups for hot drinks and more water points in the arenas to cater for some 200,000 attendees across the five-day event.
“Having tackled plastic, our next problem is diesel. We do use a lot of diesel in the generators,” acknowledges Eavis, exercised by any eco issues at a festival that supports — and donates heftily to — Greenpeace, Oxfam and WaterAid. “So we have to tackle that. Battery-powered stages are the way forward.”
Eavis leaps to her muddy-booted feet and reaches for a waterproof jacket. Next on her to-do list this morning: a meeting about water reservoirs, then another about routing and crowd management. “We have to balance that for 24 hours a day. The festival is akin to a city, like Oxford or somewhere, but it’s fenced, so we have to manage the movement of people at all times.”
Three of those people are at home a few metres away. The couple’s children go to the local school, have pals in the village and live the same rural life experienced by Mum (Eavis’s time studying teaching at Goldsmiths notwithstanding). “For a long time, the festival was a bit of an inconvenience for them. The fence goes up and closes their world in.
“So when it becomes like they’re living in the centre of New York for a week, it’s quite hard for them to understand. But it’s good,” beams this daughter of the soil. “It’s exactly like [what] I had — but bigger!”
And this year, Glastonbury is bigger than ever. Eavis admits to a pressure from booking a line-up that represents the five decades that followed her dad opening the farm gates with a promise of The Kinks and free milk.
“But when you have Paul McCartney that answers all your problems. There’s no greater person to have here. And I know that he’s planning something very special,” she adds with a twinkle. Watch this Pyramid-shaped space.
