Glastonbury Festival 1st – 4th July1978

My first time at Glastonbury Festival was in the Summer of 1978 when it was a Free Festival there had been a Festival there in the early 70’s but it wasn’t know like it is today. I was 17 years old and me and my friends were fans of Sphynx featuring Nik Turner from Hawkwind who released an album that year with parts of it recorded in the Giza Pyramid in Egypt. We saw them a few weeks beforehand at a Love In at the Roundhouse, Camden where we were handed a flyer for the Glastonbury Free Festival, so we decided to go.

We didn’t have a car and the only info we had was that it was at Worthy Farn so we headed for Glastonbury only to find that it was in Pilton which was 7 miles away, so we decided to walk and got a lift on the trailer of a blue tractor which pulled over and the driver asked if we were going to the Festival. Many years later I discovered on the Glastonbury Festival website that there was a picture of the Festival for that year which included the blue tractor which was driven by Michael Eaves who it turns out drove me to my first Glastonbury!

The Festival went on for a week and we were there for 4 days there were about 500 people in attendance, the weather was pretty awful. We did hear beforehand that the stage would be in the shape of a Pyramid based on the same dimensions as the Giza Pyramid, as it turned it was no bigger than a large marquee and very ramshackle, but was the foundation for the legendary stage to come.

According to my Gig Diary from that time as well as Sphynx other bands included Just a Band, Motivation and White Light as well as clowns and circus performers and was very chaotic. One band who came from Leicester broke down on the way and during their set there was a thunderstorm which blew out the generator losing all power to the stage.

Little did we know then that this small free festival with just a few hundred people would grow into the one of the biggest and most legendary Festivals in the World.