Emily Eavis

How would you describe them? [your parents]

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. 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.

Did you spend a lot of time with your parents on your own then? [as an almost only child]

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.

And how angry were people? I mean, what kind of criticism were you coming in for? [over the Jay-Z booking]

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. That is quite low for us. We normally sell out. We hadn't even announced Jay Z at this point. 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. And I didn't see it coming. 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 … 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 … Because it's very hard sometimes to tell what the public think. Because the noise of social media is really loud and really extreme. 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. and I could just see the whole field full. And I went down and I grabbed my dad, who was like, Do you think I should come watch? I say, Yeah. And we went up to the side of the stage and watched him come on. 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.