Emily Eavis

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

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I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. This is an extended version of the original Radio 4 broadcast and, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

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My castaway this week is the co organiser of Glastonbury Festival, Emily Evis. She grew up on Worthy Farm in Somerset, just like the festival itself, which was founded by her parents, Jean and Michael, almost half a century ago.

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These days Glastonbury is the largest Greenfield Festival in the world. Once a year the site itself transforms from an ordinary dairy farm into a settlement the size of Oxford town centre, with the infrastructure to match.

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She hadn't initially intended to take on the family business. Emily had wanted to be a primary school teacher, but when her mother died in nineteen ninety nine she gave up her studies and returned home to help her father and ended up staying on.

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On her watch, Glastonbury has become a truly global event, reaching a broadcast audience of twenty one million and attracting some of the biggest stars on the planet. Much of the profits still go to charity three million pounds in twenty seventeen alone, and the iconic Pyramid Stage is built around a tree planted by her great great grandfather when he first bought the land.

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The biggest misconception, she says, is that my dad and I are sitting around the kitchen table with goggles and test tubes creating the ultimate concoction for each year just creating this mad experiment. It isn't true. We're just trying to make the best of what we've got. Emily Evis Welcome to Desert Island Discs.

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Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

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So Glastonbury 2019 is imminent. The numbers involved are mind-boggling. 200,000 people watching over 3,000 acts performing on more than 100 stages. For you, together with your dad, Michael, and your husband, Nick, it's a huge logistical task. I mean, tell me a little bit more about the scale of what it is that you're organising here. We're working all year really with hundreds of area organisers. It's a vast operation. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was really just one field.

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And now we work with we have ten bordering farms that are part of the site.

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There was a shot the other day from Space, which was just incredible, and you could see quite how large it is. We are kind of building a city, and we live right in the middle of it. You've been working on the festival for 20 years now. What are the moments that you'll never forget? It's quite an emotional thing to be a part of. Not only the fact that, you know, my family have been running it for such a long time, but also it means so much to people coming.

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And so every year there are real highs and some of these moments actually I've chosen today. But there are also difficult years. You know, some years have been just so wet. I mean, I always say when people say, what's your favourite moment? My probably ultimate Glastonbury moment was David Bowie in 2000. And what about the lows? I mean, you mentioned mud. I first went when I was a teenager, 1997, which was notoriously muddy. And me and my friends were supposed to be playing. Our band was supposed to be playing. And we ended up driving home just wearing bin bags and our pants. It can be brutal. Exactly. That's the same year that me and my dad drove around site and tried to persuade people who were walking out not to leave. I was saying, really, where are you going? I've got to go. I can't cope. It's too much. Really? We could just move your tent. Is there any chance you'll stay? No. There's normally a crisis, like every couple of minutes. We're dealing with all kinds of issues. We had the lightning strikes a few years ago, and so we had to shut down all the stages. And I was literally calling every stage manager to get every stage shut down. We only had about three minutes to do that. And it was quite dramatic. But we did it. You know, there were acts that were halfway through their sets. They had to just walk off stage. You're now raising a family in the house that you grew up in, the sixth generation of Evises on the farm. Once the festival starts, for you, is that you're on call 24 hours. Do you sleep? Do you eat? You know, what is your experience like? I don't really sleep much. In fact, the last 2016, when I just had my third child, a little girl, and I was just breastfeeding in bed, and it was about three in the morning.

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And I had a call the police saying it was basically like we need to deal with this emergency and I was feeding her and I was thinking, you know, it's quite a crazy situation to come into really.

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All these newborns. Three in a row. I mean, all born quite close to the festival. Exactly. Three in a row, April, May, June.

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So I've had a run of really busy festivals where I'm holding a newborn or feeding a baby whilst in some kind of crisis meeting. But it's quite hard to explain to them what's going on. And I try to spend time with them to try and introduce them to it. I really want them to love it. When I'm not working, I try to take them to the kids' field or I might take them to see some bands. And music obviously is a huge part of your life. How's it been choosing the tracks that you're going to share with us today? It's been really hard. You know, for me, I kind of have a way of remembering stuff, and each year has a different musical soundtrack. So it's really hard to pin it all down to eight tracks. It's been so challenging, but we got there in the end. So with that in mind, let's go to the music. What's your first disc and why have you chosen it? My first disc is Van Morrison, Madam George, which is on Astral Weeks. Astral Weeks is the Van Morrison album that I pretty much grew up listening to. My parents always playing it everywhere we went. He was the sort of one consistent artist, I think, through the 80s for us.

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An Elvis Costello as well.

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We used to go and pick him up from Castle Kerry train station. I remember like, you know, oh, Van's coming and we'd go and pick him up and on the way back always discuss the set list. And you would be in the back of the car listing. Chipping in.

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You don't say they're making all the stops.

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A kid stand in the street collecting bubble tops.

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Go on for cigarettes and matches in the shops

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Happy Teke and Madam J

Emily Eavis6:47

Uh

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Okay.

Emily Eavis6:51

Oh, that's when you're falling.

Emily Eavis6:56

Well done, well done.

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Van Morrison and Madam George. Emily Evers, you were born in nineteen seventy nine, your parents' youngest daughter, and you once said of Jean and Michael, I wanted my parents to be straight, wear chinos, play golf, drive a saloon car and listen to Phil Collins. Now that is very much not what they were about. How would you describe them? I mean, our life was all about the festival. You know, they were obviously farming as well. And

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And every morning, you know, they'd get up at, you know, five or four in the morning and just go and kind of manage that side and then take me to school. We didn't have an office and the phone just was right next to the kitchen. So the phone would ring and it was just always a crisis. And I wasn't that into the festival in the eighties. I wasn't that keen on it.

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It's pretty scary at times, and it's not at all what it's like now. It was all-encompassing, and you know what it's like when you're at school, you kind of see other kids, and you're like, God, you haven't got this whole thing of just inviting all these people into your garden once a year. And the way people looked when they walk on site, I mean, they still have it a little bit, but in the 80s, it was like, We own this, we're going to set up camp and we're going to live here. And I didn't really understand the concept that they might go. I just felt like, oh, God, this is quite intense.

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Is it permanent? Yeah. And, you know, your parents' reaction to that, they're very kind of open-minded, relaxed people. Yeah, very relaxed. I mean, my mum was just like the kind of anchor to the whole family, really. She looked after the home and she looked after me, and she always made me feel very safe. So there were times where it kind of felt quite unsafe during like some of the riots in the later 80s. My dad was great fun and he loved the risk, you know. So he'd be like running around dealing with villagers who were turning up at the door and kind of feeling cross about something or travellers or you know bands. And so he was really, you know, living it. You know, we'd all sit down for dinner and then he'd just jump up and run out and be dealing with something. And so my mum kind of kept it very steady. But my parents had an amazing relationship, you know, to be working together and to be so kind of in love and happy. Later on, now I really see that that was just so unusual. And I think I felt really, yeah, I just felt very happy. I mean, you were a part of Glastonbury history from the moment that you were born. 1979 was named Year of the Child, which can't have been a coincidence. And you performed on stage, I think, just a few years later. Was it on the pyramid stage? It was. Yeah, that was kind of an accidental thing. I was playing my violin at home in the kitchen, and someone walked through, some sight crew member, and said, Oh, you should get on stage. I mean, I could only really play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. So I went on and did it, and I didn't even know the feeling of nerves because I was five. But I said, Mummy, my legs feel like jelly. And I stood out there and played this song. You could hear the stage manager going, Dim the lights, dim the lights, so she can't see.

Emily Eavis10:04

In the

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'Cause the style council were about to go on and they were huge. And they just kept giving me encores. I'm sure I did it about ten times. Must have been awful. And quite weird.

Emily Eavis10:14

Uh

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And quite wicked.

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You're performing.

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I've never met anyone who

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Far from my parents.

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And what kind of little girl were you? If we'd have met you back then, what would we have found? Uh, quite shy, quite quiet really, and quite creative. I just used to love to make things and paint, and I was definitely a bit dreamy.

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You've described yourself, I think, as an almost only child. So you've got seven siblings, but there are 14 years between you and your closest sibling. Yeah. Did you spend a lot of time with your parents on your own then? I think so. I was always on a hip. I was always in the car with them. I was attached to them for years. And probably for my older siblings, but they were kind of in their teens in the 80s. Whereas I grew up with my teens in the 90s, and the festival kind of almost grew as I did. So we went through our teenage years together in a way.

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It's time to go to the music. This is your second disc. Why have you chosen it?

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So this is Radiohead Paranoid Android. It kind of captures my teenage years. So Radiohead played the festival in nineteen ninety four and they came back in nineteen ninety seven and it was really wet.

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And the music kind of takes on a different meaning in those conditions. You could just see the sheets and sheets of rain falling in front of the white lights of their set. And they played this song, and it was just one of those incredible moments.

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And also being a teenager, I was like, yeah, this is great. This is good now. I was really enjoying it.

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That's it's a young cracker skin You just screaming The young pleasure never killed

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God loves his children, God loves his children.

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Radiohead and Paranoid Android. So Emily Evas, we talked about the Glastonbury of the 80s, but of course you know the whole thing started back in the early 70s when your parents began the festival. Why did they do that? What was the original idea? Well 1970 I mean I think they met in the late 60s but they kind of got together and they'd fallen in love.

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And they went to a gig actually up the road. They went to the Bath Blues Festival and they were like, you know, I reckon we can do this and built a stage. September came and they invited a few people in. Free milk, hog roast. Pretty good deal. Pretty good deal.

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Uh

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Uh

Emily Eavis13:04

Sale?

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And you know, quite a few people turned up. The kinks were due to play, but then they all got laryngitis. So Mark Bolin came and played with T-Rex. And from what I hear about it, it just sounded lovely. And I think my dad was quite excited by the idea of something other than just farming. And the festival grew. You know, you mentioned riots earlier. That that would be the clashes between, you know, New Age travellers on site. And it was this open door policy. And you said I think you used the word scary. And I remember that edgy atmosphere on site myself. Tell me a little bit more about that.

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There'd been nothing like the festival in that area. You know, we live in Somerset in a really rural part of the country and it's a lovely, quiet, peaceful village. But the idea of putting a pot festival right on the edge of it probably was quite scary for a lot of the neighbours. And so there was quite a lot of conflict in the 80s. You know, we used to sometimes have people shouting at us as we just drove through the village. It's hard to imagine now because it's so sort of accepted. But at the time, it felt like we were part of something really controversial. And everyone had an opinion. And they used to just let us know. You'd be at a Christmas drinks party and someone would just come over and start shouting. And what is that like when you're just trying to work out who you are when you're just growing up?

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I was like, I just remember saying to my parents, like, Why? Like, why are you doing it?

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You know, like and I suppose that goes back to the like normal kid thing, but

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I mean, I could have taken anything pretty extreme as a kind of p parent job, but I was like, please not this.

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What did they say? Uh my dad was on a mission and he loved controversy and he loved it. It kind of deed him up and

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He met so many interesting people, and my mum did, and they just carried on. And I think every year they thought, We're not going to do it again. There's no way.

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And then they by January they think, Oh, we'll just apply for a licence and just see.

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And then April they'd get the license, and then it'd be a couple of months to put it together. Nothing like now, where you actually, you know, you work on it all year round. It's time for your next piece of music. This is your third to do. So, Bob Dylan, you're gonna make me lonesome when you go. Now, this is a song which is about my mum. I think growing up with parents in that kind of close relationship was.

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amazing and I feel very lucky to have had that. But when she died, it kind of shook us in just such a way, which was like, I don't think we're ever going to recover from this.

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Certainly the Festival's not going to recover, but I don't think I'm ever going to be able to pick up myself, and who on earth's going to look after my Dad?

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And um

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And I was teaching in Newham in a class of 40 kids and I loved it. Um but obviously as soon as I got the news that my mum wasn't well, I came home to look after her and it was just really a difficult time. You know, my parents were about to retire in two thousand and it was ninety nine, it was about a month before the festival um that she died and

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It was the only time I've ever seen my dad cry actually. I mean, I I couldn't stop crying.

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And the festival at that point became a real lifeline.

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It's weird, we looked around and it was the festival was pretty much happening.

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And all the crew were kind of putting it together.

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And I think the lyrics to this song were a life rough to me. I've just listened to so much Bob Dylan in my life, and this one was really significant at that time.

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You gonna make me wonder what I'm doing.

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Staying far behind without you

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You're gonna make me wonder what I'm saying!

Emily Eavis17:06

What I'm sorry.

Emily Eavis17:08

You're gonna make me give myself a good talking too. I look for

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You in old Honolulu, San Francisco or Ashtabula. You're gonna have to leave me now, I know.

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But I see you in the sky above in the tall grass

Emily Eavis17:25

That's in the one

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Is that no

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You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

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Bob Dylan, you're going to make me lonesome when you go. Em Levis, you were just twenty when you lost your mum Jean.

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How did you cope and how do you look back on that period now, you know, twenty years on again?

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I look back, when I was in that situation when it feels like you are in free fall, that's how I felt. And I was just clinging on for any kind of solid land. Because I look back and I think I was projecting that I was an adult. I was actually 19. And I look back and I'm like, I was such a child. I had no idea how to cope, really. And I was lucky to have some really good friends around. I mean, two days before my mum died, they just turned up. It was just amazing. It's quite hard to think about it now because I kind of go like, I just went through all of this.

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Pretty much just with my dad.

Emily Eavis18:32

Yeah.

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Neither of us ever thought about what was going to happen next. We just did one year at a time. And he was always trying to encourage me to get back into my own life. I suppose I was at a kind of crossroads then. I was living in London and at Goldsmiths and in that world,

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But I could also see that I couldn't really leave him, and I also really wanted to help him with the festival. But I never once thought I would make it my life.

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Your mum died just weeks before the festival took place. As you say, when you raised your head, you know, in the middle of that huge storm, it just sort of seemed to be happening around you. And there were so many tributes to her on site that year. Do you remember them? There were some lovely tributes all over sight. And it was the first time that I really felt like the festival crew were like a kind of family. They were just amazing. And I remember we had this silence on the pyramid stage, and I was a bit late, and everybody was just stood outside of their tents, just completely silent. And I just looked around, like 360 of just people in silence.

Emily Eavis19:16

On the side.

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Amazing.

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And she's so much a part of it for me now, still, because it has come from such a sort of family thing. And she was always looking after people and

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you know, just lying people down in the garden. I just remember like just under the tree in the garden, people who got a bit lost or were a bit scared. Um so that element to it is really important to me, the welfare side.

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Let's go with the music. It's your fourth disc today. Why have you chosen this one? Bob Marley High Tide or Low Tide is a song really about friendship. And this, in fact, Bob Marley album was the first album I bought. I just really love this song. It's very sweet and it's very much about loyal friends. And I feel really lucky to have had a lot of supportive people around me. And I feel this song kind of captures the time for me.

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Uh

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Uh

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In high sense

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These are in love.

Emily Eavis20:46

I'm going.

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Uh

Emily Eavis20:47

Uh

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On it.

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Afraid.

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I'm gonna be your friend.

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Me

Emily Eavis21:02

I'll be by your side.

Emily Eavis21:08

I

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By yourself

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Bob Marley, high tide or low tide. So Emily Evis, you were still going back and forth between Somerset and London in the early noughties, and around that time you started putting on charity gigs in the capital. Why?

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I went on a trip with Oxfam to Haiti.

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And it was r a really significant trip for me. It changed everything. I mean, charity's always been such a fundamental part of the festival, but I had never seen any projects. And I went out with Otsfam and Chris Martin to Haiti. We were both quite young. We were twenty one, twenty two, and

Emily Eavis21:31

It was

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It was like nothing else we'd ever seen, you know, dropped in the middle of Port-au-Prince, meeting all these incredible people on the ground and going to coffee cooperatives and and got I just got really bitten by it. I was like, I want to do what I can to put some money back into this other than the festival. So I then went on a mission and just organised loads of gigs in London and that was the beginning of a whole new era.

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So this is when you would have been sharpening your skills, hitting the phones, trying to persuade people, as you still do, to either work for free or not for profit or to take a tiny little fee compared to the kinds of fees that they're used to taking.

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How difficult was it to learn how to do that?

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I remember saying to my dad, I really want to get REM to do this gig. And he just like laughed and went, good luck. That won't happen. Thanks for the help. I was like, I will make sure I get REM now. That is my motivating factor. And I was working with two friends and persuading people to do things for free is always hard. I turned up on people's doorsteps and I was like, I'm really determined to do this. We did a string of gigs and we raised loads of money and it went straight back into these projects. And it was quite good for me to kind of test out to see if I could actually put on a gig.

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'Cause I kinda had in the back of my mind that the festival was going on and maybe I MIGHT get involved.

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On a more permanent level, but I can't just do that without any proper experience.

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So that was how you met your husband Nick. He was managing the Chemical Brothers. What happened? Yeah, so I was trying to persuade the Chemical Brothers to donate a track for an Oxfam project and I rang up my husband's office and I ended up speaking to him. And what what should have been a pr like a five minute chat was probably like an hour long and then we arranged to meet and then quite quickly we got together and

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Probably like the luckiest thing that happened to me was meeting him because it's quite a hard thing to come into.

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And he gets it. And my dad goes, oh, thank God for Nick on a daily basis. So that was lucky.

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Let's have some more music. Tell us about your next disc.

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Fleetwood Mac Landslide live at Warner Brothers Studio. It was when I moved to London that I started listening to them.

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And I was just like, This is like the best band in the world.

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Nick and I listen to this quite a lot. I'm quite into the kind of passage of time and the kind of way in which the seasons change and

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I always yeah, I think this song has just really captures that. And we haven't yet had Fleetwood Mac.

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And they're the ones that we really want to get. Let's put that with Shay though.

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Took my love and I took it down

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At the end of the day.

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I'm the mountain and I turned around

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And I saw my reflection in

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Yeah.

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Snow covered heel

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Uh

Emily Eavis25:05

Uh

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To the landscape

Emily Eavis25:07

I've broken it down.

Emily Eavis25:11

Oh mirror

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Or in the sky Uh

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What is love?

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Can the t

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God within my heart.

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Uh

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Rise above, can I sail through the changes?

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Fleetwood Mac and Landslide live at Warner Brothers studio. Emily Evis. I remember getting to know you round about the early noughties and you were going home to Glastonbury and then kind of living in London some of the time and I remember worrying about you and how much you had on your shoulders and the pressure of taking on this enormous thing at such a young age. How did you feel about it? I suppose it feels like another kind of limb or something. It's so deeply ingrained in my kind of DNA. So I was like, I feel I should do this and that I'm just going to follow my instincts. You know, it had its challenges. It doesn't help when you're the daughter as well. It's like, you know, come on.

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Were there a lot of people that you were now working with who'd kind of seen you as that little five-year-old with the violin on the pyramid stage? Yeah. There are still a few working on this year, but there are also lots of new crew as well. The live music world actually is so obviously so it has been so male-dominated. So I go to like meetings with just tables of men and and and some of them were great and some just refused to kind of accept that you know they had to deal with with me. I think it's quite hard to go from dealing with my dad and then to suddenly have to be dealing with me.

Presenter26:47

Yeah. But, you know, in now it's really good and we've definitely found a way for it to work. And how was it working with your dad at first? Ah, it was good. I think it was probably quite hard, you know, something that he created. It's sort of a different era. We haven't had an argument for ages.

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We used to have quite a lot of kind of dynamic, real arguments, but I think we've really found our groove now. We have quite a laugh and he's been great with me. He loves the fact that I'm there and Nick and the children, and he's really involved as a grandfather. He's very hands-on.

Presenter27:23

So it's safe to say that the days of the Wild West are long gone. You've got lots of safety measures that have been brought in now to ensure the health and safety of the thousands of people who attend. Tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, people will know about the fence, the fence that famously went up. You know, the kind of ID for tickets is now so detailed and specific. What else is going on? Yeah, the registration process. I mean, there's that happened and the fence has gone up. And that was in the early two thousands, really, that we had to change it because it became so dangerous in

Presenter27:55

2000 when they estimated there was about 250,000 people and the site was about a quarter of the size it is now. So it was incredibly unsafe and we had to put a proper big fence up, we had to get all kinds of systems in place to deal with the fact that it was really known as something, it was just free. You know, it was kind of Robin Hood mentality, you know, if you can pay for it, that's great.

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And that will help the people who can't. And then, if you can't, you just jump over. And we used to just go and collect them from outside the fence and put them in the back of the Landrover. We said, jump in.

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You know, otherwise you hurt yourself. And then they drive them in. But now it is a different time and we're living in a completely different era really in terms of health and safety. And so managing something that has so much detailed health and safety attached to it, you know, like every single ribbon has to be fire retardant. So it's a big job.

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And I love the idea that part of that is your mum's legacy, that looking after people. Yeah, I always think that'cause welfare's right next to the house.

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They look after people, people that are lost or a bit upset, who aren't medical.

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Who don't need medical facilities? They come into welfare and they're looked after by our team of incredible social workers and psychologists and psychiatrists. And they come and sit down and have a chat and a cup of tea. And they pick stuff from the garden and feed them up with kind of fruit and stuff. It's right next to the house, and there's something nice about that. And I'm under, I've always been under pressure. It's not safe to have, you know, this right next to you, but I'm like, it needs to be right next to us. We're all under the same roof. Something nice about it. It's time for your next piece of music, your sixth disc to do. Franks and Archer, that's life. Now, this is so relevant because after we booked Jay-Z, which is probably the most controversial booking that I've ever made, I was so happy with how it went that I walked up to the park, which is an area of the festival, and I.

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literally just lay down, collapsed on the grass.

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And a friend of mine was DJing and he played this song.

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And I have never been more exhausted and more relieved. And I lay there and I was like, this is amazing, so relevant. You know the lyrics, but I'll let you discover that when you play it.

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That's

Emily Eavis30:28

It's live.

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Uh

Emily Eavis30:30

That's what all the people say.

Emily Eavis30:35

You're riding high in April

Emily Eavis30:38

Shut down in May.

Emily Eavis30:40

But I know I'm gonna change that tune.

Emily Eavis30:47

When I'm back on top, back on top in June.

Emily Eavis30:52

I said that's life.

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And as funny as it may seem

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Some people get their kicks.

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Stopping on a dream.

Presenter31:06

Frank Sinatra and That's Life. Emily Evis, as you said, every now and again a headline artist arouses a huge amount of press interest, sometimes controversy. Now we were talking about Jay Z in two thousand eight and his headline set. How do you look back on that moment now and the lead up to it?

Presenter31:26

I think I'll never forget that feeling of being completely part of just this tight. It just felt like an out of control storm that I was just never going to be able to get out of. Every story, every day, was just negative. And what was the issue? What was the controversy about? I don't know. I still don't really understand. I think it felt like a massive leap of change in what we'd had. Suddenly having a hip-hop headliner just seemed to be quite a strange idea. But also, we had had a really difficult year in 2007. It was really wet. We had loads of sound problems. And people were ready to vent their anger. And that's how it felt. And how angry were people? I mean, what kind of criticism were you coming in for?

Emily Eavis32:09

And how angry

Presenter32:13

Quite a lot of quite personal criticism, and people are always ready with something that's been going that long to say, That's it, it's over, you know, it's had its best years, it's all changed, etc. But I think the hardest part is that we'd sold 80,000 tickets on the day of our ticket sale.

Presenter32:33

And that is quite low for us.

Presenter32:36

We normally sell out. We hadn't even announced Jay Z at this point.

Presenter32:41

And then we announced Jay Z and people just took the kind of lack of popularity for that year and the fact that we'd booked a different headliner as being this kind of perfect storm of it's all over. You know, they didn't know they've lost their minds.

Presenter32:56

And I didn't see it coming.

Presenter32:59

I just thought we booked a really good artist. He's like one of the best lyricists in the world, who can come and do the best hip hop show. And then he came on and

Presenter33:11

Actually, it was incredible. And I kind of had that feeling just about five minutes before he came on when I saw the crowd and they were all chanting J Z J and I was like

Presenter33:25

Because it's very hard sometimes to tell what the public think.

Presenter33:28

Because the noise of social media is really loud and really extreme.

Presenter33:33

And the press have their own thing to say, their own story to tell. So it's really hard to tell what the actual public think.

Presenter33:40

and I could just see the whole field full.

Presenter33:43

And I went down and I grabbed my dad, who was like, Do you think I should come watch? I say, Yeah.

Presenter33:51

And we went up to the side of the stage and watched him come on.

Presenter33:55

And my dad, he'd just never seen anything. Like, he started laughing uncontrollably. And I started laughing, and we were just looking out at this enormous field. It was just like this real feeling of togetherness. And he was like he was going to battle. And all the crowd were like, we're behind you. And it was the perfect, perfect combination to make an incredible set. And he totally took it on, and it was amazing.

Presenter34:23

And as ever, everyone's going to be dissecting the headline performances at this year's festival. What do you think makes a good headliner?

Presenter34:30

I think what makes a good Glastonbury head learner is someone who who understands what they're coming into.

Presenter34:36

that it's not a stadium show. You know, quite often huge bands, they're used to doing these tours and they're used to being the center of everything. And quite often when people come,

Presenter34:47

They forget, you know, they can forget that it's not actually like a standard festival and so they kind of I think quite often now people read up about it and we send them a lot of information and we try and get them to understand why it's different and that they're kind of part of something and they're important, but everyone's important and we're all trying to make it the best gig. But it's not just about one person.

Presenter35:11

Let's go to the music. It's time for your seventh disc. So this is a song which we had as our first dance at our wedding. It was sung by a friend who has kindly recorded it for this because we didn't have a recording. We were totally disorganised in recording parts of our wedding. It's actually a Bob Dylan song. I could have filled the whole list with Bob Dylan songs. It's Guy Garvey and Pete Jobson singing Winter Lude.

Emily Eavis35:39

Winter Loon, Winter Loon, my little apple.

Emily Eavis35:43

When allured by the corn in the field

Emily Eavis35:48

Win a loot, let's go down to the chapel.

Emily Eavis35:52

Then Kumba Kum Koko Premier

Emily Eavis35:57

We'll come out when the skating rink glistens By the sun near the old crossroad sign

Emily Eavis36:06

The snow is so cold, but our love can be bold Winter Lew, don't be rude, please be mind.

Presenter36:14

Guy Garvey and Peter Jobson with their version of Dylan's Winterlude, especially recorded for your Desert Island discs, Emily Evis. So this year's Glastonbury line up then, it is forty two per cent female, Emily, not fifty fifty. Why not?

Presenter36:28

We're obviously working to get to fifty-fifty. Some years it's probably sixty-fourty.

Presenter36:34

It's a challenge for us and we've really taken it on and I'm always totally conscious of the gender balance being right. And every day when I'm booking, I'm thinking about that and cajoling stage bookers to be on board with it.

Presenter36:48

Some of them have been here a long time, so you know it's a little bit of a

Presenter36:51

A kind of hustle, but you know, we're getting there. It's a paradigm shift that they've got to make. Yeah.

Presenter36:56

People talk about the spirit of Glastonbury. Everybody has their own version of it. What's yours?

Presenter37:02

For me, it's about kind of creating a parallel universe where people can escape from the real world.

Presenter37:09

and just be in living in a completely different space. And the heart of it really for me is probably the charity side. I think I grew up thinking that you're doing something right if you're enjoying it and not trying to make loads of money from it. And every day there are offers that come in from various people, from you know there's always the option there of yeah, but you could sell that to that, or you could do that to that, or you could turn that stage into that stage and you could join up with that partner. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, because we've got to keep giving the money away. And at the heart of it is the fact that we're not ever going to sell out.

Presenter37:49

It's time for your final disc. What have you chosen and why? I talked earlier about persuading people to do it, and Beyoncé is someone who I spend a lot of time trying to get.

Presenter37:58

And she agreed to it, but my son was ten days old and during the festival he got quite ill and um the paediatrician who was on site said, I'm really sorry, but you're gonna have to take him to hospital with suspected meningitis and I had to leave the site and I had him in my arms and obviously nothing else mattered at that point. All I wanted was for him to be better.

Presenter38:21

And in the hospital there was this tiny T V that you could put coins into and you could try and watch, you know, BBC Two coverage.

Presenter38:31

And I was putting coins in and it kept cutting out.

Presenter38:34

And that was a moment where we were like, we're in the best place because being looked after. But.

Presenter38:40

We're also missing this enormous moment that we've kind of created and I was so happy to see that she went down so well.

Presenter38:48

Beyoncé, Crazy in Love, was just an incredible moment for the people in that field.

Speaker 338:59

The last coming up is a party right

Speaker 339:02

Got me hoping you pay me right now It kids got me hope for you save me right now Looking so crazy in love, looking got me looking so crazy in love

Speaker 339:13

Uh

Presenter39:16

Up oh, up oh, up oh no Up oh up oh up oh oh no no When I talk to my friend so wily Who he think he is? Look at what you did to me Tell the shoes, I'm even need to buy a new dress If you ain't there, ain't nobody else to impress

Presenter39:32

Beyonce and crazy in love. So, Emily Evis, we are about to send you to the desert island. Just picture this. No site meetings, no booking agents to smooth talk, no weather forecast to keep an eye on.

Presenter39:44

How do you think you'll manage? I think I'll quite enjoy the piece. I'll really miss my kids and my husband and my dad.

Presenter39:51

Well, to keep you company on the island, we will of course give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You can also have a book of your own. What would you like? Uh, I want to put forward an argument for

Presenter40:02

The complete works of the Beatles as well, because that's really hard, isn't it? To not have a Beatles track. But I kind of feel like they're the Shakespeare.

Presenter40:11

Surely we should just have that. Can you add that? We'll have to refer that up. We will pass that request on and then return to you. Okay, so I'd probably go for Rizjard Kapyshinski's The Shadow of the Sun, which is a book that I read before I went away to Haiti.

Emily Eavis40:15

Okay.

Presenter40:27

Just the poetry of this book was incredible. It captures Africa in the most beautiful way. Then it's yours. What about your luxury item? I think I will go for a carpenter's tool kit.

Presenter40:40

Because I would quite like to build a veranda. Can we position it anywhere in particular? It's got to have a nice aspect. It's got to be close to the water. And I think a perfect spot to read and reflect. And I think if I've created it, then even better. It's yours. And if you had to choose just one disc of these eight wonderful choices, which would you save?

Presenter41:04

It would have to be Bob Dylan, you're gonna make me lonesome when you go.

Presenter41:07

Perfect.

Presenter41:08

Emily Vis, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you for having me.

Presenter41:24

I'm sure Emily will be fantasising about being on that veranda just about now. I hope you enjoyed hearing about her extraordinary life. The first ever Glastonbury Festival was back in 1970 and as Emily told me, Mark Bolan and T-Rex had headlined when the kinks pulled out. Emily's dad, Michael Evis, was cast away by Kirstie in 2008. She asked him how it all began.

Speaker 341:46

So, Michael, Evas, the leap then that you made between being a very hard working farmer and thinking that you could launch a music festival, how did all that begin for you and Jean?

Speaker 241:56

Gene and I actually went to the Bath Blues Festival and fell in love with the whole idea, really of a festival. I just could not believe that that could happen. You know, it just went three miles away from the farm. There was no fence, there were no gates, nothing, no people taking money or anything. And the Moody Booze were playing. Millions and millions of people there, and they were all lying about in the sun. But they look absolutely fantastic, I thought. So I fell in love with the whole concept straight away. And I said to Gene, I can't wait to get on the phone tomorrow to do my own show.

Speaker 342:28

Did she say what are you talking about?

Speaker 242:30

She thought I'd gone a bit dotty, I think. Yeah, I think she did, actually. So I got on the phone the next one the very next one. I couldn't wait when I finished milking to get on the phone in the Colston Hall at Bristol.

Speaker 242:41

And so how can I get the king? she said.

Speaker 342:44

You said you got on the phone the next day and said, How can I book the Kinks? I mean, you were aiming high. The Kinks were a huge group at the time.

Speaker 242:51

The kinks were sort of number one at the moment with the Lola, that's the thing.

Speaker 342:54

Yeah, but you used to plead to the cause.

Speaker 242:55

But that's

Speaker 242:56

So that's the track I was playing through my sound system to the cows while I was milking it.

Speaker 343:00

Tell me about the sign system that you have.

Speaker 243:02

The science system was a huge clay pipe, you know, sewer pipe, which is about eight feet long, and it had a speaker sort of strapped on to the end of it. Coming into the parlour from the outside, yeah.

Speaker 343:13

So the radio was strapped on one end outside the milking parlour and this huge clay pipe came in.

Speaker 243:15

Outside the milking parlour and a huge

Speaker 243:17

And it came into the parlor with an incredible bass sound to it.

Speaker 343:21

Did the cows like it?

Speaker 243:22

Whether they did or not, I'll tell you what, it sort of kept me going, I'll tell you. And of course Lola was such a hit at the time. Did it up their yield? Well, they say it does, don't they? I don't really know whether it's true or not.

Presenter43:29

Yeah.

Presenter43:33

I'm sure it does. The remarkable Michael Evis, Emily's dad, speaking to Kirstie Young. I've got one more treat for you from our archives. As Emily explained, Guy Garvey sang Dylan's Winter Lud at her wedding. Kirstie cast Guy away in twenty fourteen and asked him about Elbo's huge hit One Day Like This.

Emily Eavis43:51

It's such an enormous tune for us. It's changed our fortunes completely, but also.

Emily Eavis43:57

Thousands and thousands of people get married to it every year and it's become something we didn't realize it was going to be.

Speaker 344:03

To stand then in a stadium in front of how many people at Glastonbury did you play to the biggest?

Emily Eavis44:07

Yeah, don't know upwards of 80, 90,000.

Speaker 344:10

80,090,000 people are looking back at you and singing this song that you were sitting writing in your journal. Is there any way you can convey to us what that experience is like?

Emily Eavis44:14

You wish

Emily Eavis44:20

It's such a strange thing because the song belongs to the Five Boys, you know, it it belongs to the band as all our music does. I think that's part of being able to cope with

Speaker 344:26

Yeah.

Emily Eavis44:32

People singing your words back to you. My words are part of what I do with Elbow. I don't feel sole ownership of that song. So it's easy to share with people outside the band, as it is with all our music.

Presenter44:35

Okay.

Presenter44:42

The wonderful Guy Garvey, who also chose some excellent public enemy. I urge you to listen to the whole of Michael and Guy's programmes. Both are available on the Desert Island Discs website and on BBC Sounds. There are many musicians in our Desert Island Discs back catalogue, some of whom have appeared at the festival. Noel Gallagher, Annie Lennox, Bruce Springsteen, Lily Allen, Elvis Costello, Baba Mao and Fleetwood Max Christine McVie. Christine, if you're listening, you know what to do.

Presenter45:10

And if live music's your thing for the duration of this year's festival from Thursday, June the 27th, just hit the BBC Radio Glastonbury button in the Sounds app for four days of non-stop coverage from Worthy Farm. On Desert Island Discs next week, my castaway is the academic and author Jared Diamond. I do hope you'll join us.

Presenter45:43

Did you know that technology can make us kinder to one another? Did you hear about the diver who walked out of the sea onto a Portuguese beach, dragging the Internet behind him?

Presenter45:55

Did you realize that how you speak to the little robot helper in your house might cement age-old stereotypes for decades to come? I'm Alex Kratosky and those are just some of the stories that we've looked at in The Digital Human, the podcast that explores what it means to be human in the digital age. If you want to hear more, and I guarantee we will surprise you, come check us out exclusively on BBC Sounds.