Yahoo News What was it like at the muddiest Glastonbury Festivals ever?
In recent years, there have been two Glasto summers which were as notable for the mud as the music.
As music fans descend on Somerset for Glastonbury Festival 2023, eyes are on the weather as much as the bands.
An estimated 210,000 music fans will descend on the 900-acre site to see the likes of Elton John, the Arctic Monkeys, Guns N' Roses, Lewis Capaldi and Lizzo perform at the UK's most famous festival.
Fortunately for those attending this year, forecasters have given a relatively good outlook for 2023, with rain and thunder at a minimum.
However, Glasto is not always known for sunshine – and in certain summers was remembered as much for the mud as the music.
For those who've attended since the mid-90s, two years stand out for the near biblical levels of mud caused by heavy rain before and during the three-day festival.
What was the weather like at Glastonbury in 1997?
In 1997, Oasis were the biggest band in the world and Britpop was at its peak, meaning Glastonbury was yet again the focus of a summer party to celebrate the best of British.
The Prodigy and Radiohead were the bands music-lovers were coming to see headline the Pyramid stage – but in six out of the eight days leading up to the festival, it rained.
The downpours before the festival were so relentless that Glasto 1997 became known as ‘The Year of the Mud’, with 71.4mm of rainfall in total turning Worthy Farm into a sea of sludge.
One attendee that year was picture editor Jon Mills, then a 21-year-old photographer working what became “one of the hardest photo assignments I’ve ever done”.
He told Yahoo News UK: “If you work Glastonbury you’re going to walk 25-30,000 steps around the site. Doing that in the sheer amount of mud is difficult. They’re is nowhere to sit down, nowhere to put your camera down.”
“In places the mud was shin deep and just getting around was an effort. People who had wellies weren't well prepared enough – you needed to put your legs in bin liners and then the wellies over the top as a minimum.“
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Mills said he and other photographers would watch to see who from the crowd would “be drunk enough” to throw themselves into mud pits next to stage.
He recalled: “There was one young woman who was throwing herself in. It looked like loads of fun but when she stopped, she had mud everywhere – in her eyes, in her nose, in her ears. You just think, ‘there’s no showers, it’s Friday!’”
Glastonbury 2007: The wettest Glasto ever
The rain would of course return to Glastonbury but it wasn’t until 10 years later – in 2007 – when things got even wetter for the attendees.
Officially the wettest Glastonbury ever, the weekend weather in Somerset started pleasant enough, before 60.1mm of rain fell on the Friday and the wet weather stuck around for the whole weekend.
The Worthy Farm site became such a swamp that one guest discovered that mud came in many forms.
Emma Sikking, a charity worker who was 23 when attended in 2007, said: “By day two we’d had a month’s rainfall in a matter of hours and by day five I had identified around seven kinds of Glasto mud.”
But while the mud might have made watching weekend headliners Arctic Monkeys, The Killers and The Who something of a challenge, it was by no means a miserable experience for everyone.
Ryan Butcher, 35, was 19 that year and he told Yahoo News UK that he “wouldn’t have wanted it any other way” for his first time at the legendary festival.
He said: “Watching Bjork shin-deep in mud in white plimsoles (because I didn’t take wellies) while eating a donut is one of my fondest memories.“
Tom Butler, Yahoo’s UK entertainment editor, recalled how the “biblical” rain had fallen “from the moment we set up camp on the Wednesday until we caught our coach home on the Monday”.
Butler, who was 25 when he attended the festival for the first time in 2007, said he and his friends had prepared well after seeing the rain fall in previous years.
Plastic bags were a “saviour” as they would tape them over socks before putting on their wellies, while Butler confessed that his group would go to the toilet in hedges or in jugs and they camped on higher ground. But not everyone was as wise.
He recalled: “As the weekend progressed and we explored the site, you could see the tents pitched near to paths gradually getting caked in mud as the ground turned liquid, while some corners of the camping fields became completely submerged, with tents appearing to have been completely flooded.”
Butler said he witnessed a “steady steam of people” basically giving up and leaving the festival early all weekend.
Going to the toilets is never pleasant at festivals but that year it was particularly bad as getting anywhere quickly was “simply impossible” in the mud.
The final night was spent trying to sleep in a camping chair, waiting for the morning to get the coach back home, something Butler says was a “miserable” experience.
But when the time came to escape, spirits were high.
He said: “Trudging back to the coaches seemed to take forever, but there was a real sense of Blitz spirit among the festival goers on their way out, and when we finally got on our coach, we all just collapsed into a deep sleep.”
Despite this experience, Butler says he will always look back at Glasto 2007 “fondly” and enjoyed “exploring weird corners of the greatest festival on Earth”.
