It's Glastonbury. Get your wallet out

As the sounds of thwacking balls and cash registers ring out over the All England club at Wimbledon, an alternative, though no less institutional, racket is going on at Glastonbury.

The set is all in place: the hideous bonfires of burning plastic and metres-high brand endorsements familiar to attendees of the Reading and Leeds festivals are not to be seen; supermodels in nighties and Hunter-branded wellies float like cocaine-powered will’o-the-wisps from mire to mire, and yesterday’s superstars will amble out of retirement to play under Greenpeace banners wafting in a guiltless breeze.

The transmogrification of Glastonbury from a small, farm-based enterprise to a fully automatic cash cow milking operation, inverting most of its core values along the way, has nowhere been better documented than by music writer Nick Crowe in the pages of Prospect.

See also David Goodhart’s report from last year’s festival, where “first impressions of Glasto were military: the tent encampments were like a medieval army, the duckboards through the mud brought to mind the trenches and everywhere people carried flags.” You can read the rest of his article, and leave a comment, here.