Is anyone reading this? I only ask because it seems as if every left-liberal with an iPhone and an interest in composting toilets is at Glastonbury this weekend, and that group probably has a healthy crossover with “readers of the Observer”.
How do I know that so many middle-class people have headed west to stand in a muddy field and torture themselves over whether not liking Young Fathers makes them sound racist? Because they’re obsessively tweeting about it, of course. “Talking albatrosses, bats, hedgehogs and badgers with RSPB at #Glastonbury,” chirruped Green leader Natalie Bennett on Friday. Not to be outdone, Nic Seton of Greenpeace posted an anchor tattoo with the caption: “Supporting sustainable fishing is fashionable #glastonbury2015.”
And, in case anyone (probably the Daily Mail), might worry that festivals are an anarchic, drug-filled furnace of teenage insurrection, the Economist came along to play General Buzzkill. “This year music festivals like #Glastonbury have as many headliners aged over 70 as under 30,” the magazine tweeted, pointing out that the average age of a Glasto attendee is 33.
Still, there was at least one authentic young person there – One Direction’s Niall Horan, who posted a photograph of himself with bandmate Louis Tomlinson on Instagram. Underneath it, he appeared to have started an informal All-Comers Most Pointless Descriptive Hashtag Competition. “Glastonburyyyyyyy!” it began promisingly, before plunging onwards: “#festival #glasto #glasses #beer #lads #pyramid hahahaha twats”.
What am I saying? Those hashtags were useful: you don’t even need to see the picture to surmise that it showed Mr Horan at Glastonbury, wearing glasses, having partaken of beer, near the Pyramid stage. Like a twat.
Horan’s photo at least contained recognisable humans. Around 10% of the Glastonbury tag on Instagram featured the backs of peoples’ heads, along with three pixels in the middle distance that might or might not have been Mary J Blige. And because the social network now features adverts, we were treated to industry creatives’ most side-clutching riffs on the festival theme: the less said about the gif of the Pyramid stage being revealed to be a Toblerone, the better.
Hopefully, Horan stuck around at the stage to watch Florence + the Machine, who headlined on Friday night. Flo & crew replaced the Foo Fighters, whose frontman Dave Grohl broke a leg at a recent concert. Jokes aside – “terrifying moment at Glastonbury when Florence realised the Machine had become sentient & would soon seek revenge on its masters,” tweeted comedian Robin Ince – the set got a rapturous reception on social media. The moment Florence stripped to her bra during the encore, waving her shirt round her head like a 90s footballer, was rewarded with a Buzzfeed post all of its own.
The Libertines, who played a “surprise” set earlier in the evening, were not welcomed with such open arms. “The only thing worse than the idea of the Libertines is the reality of the Libertines,” said Twitter’s Bruce Daisley. “I wonder if the Libertines would get on better if they each had their own microphone,” mused @TheMediaTweets.
Let’s face it, most of us grumbling on Twitter are just grouchy because we hate music. And sunshine. And fun. Others on the Glastonbury Twitter hashtag had more serious complaints: namely, about the Dalai Lama’s attendance. “Dalai Lama is NOW anti-prayer – DESTROYING BUDDHISM,” asserted an account called @Dalai_Lama_Lies. Others complained that the spiritual leader wears baseball caps and flies on private jets. To prove their point, several of them posted those black and white pictures with long quotes on that people who are bad at the internet think count as memes.
It would be terribly wrong to suggest that any of these accounts were run by Chinese state trolls, hoping to discredit an inconvenient symbol of Tibet’s struggle for independence – particularly when they deny such accusations so vigorously if asked. But eventually, Times columnist Hugo Rifkind couldn’t help himself. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you’re really in Britain at all,” he told one prolific tweeter. “To clarify, please define ‘a cheeky Nandos’ ASAP.”
