Artist News Gigs & Festivals

Springsteen had never heard of Glasto

By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 28 May 2009

Everyone wants to play at the Glastonbury Festival at some point in their career, don’t they? Well, everyone except this year’s headliner Bruce Springsteen, it would seem, who apparently had never heard of Britain’s uber-fest. Or at least his agent hadn’t. Bloody Americans.

Glasto co-organiser Emily Eavis told 6Music: “It’s been our mission for quite a long time to get Bruce. I thought it was quite unlikely, especially when the agent said, ‘Glaston-what?’ We put together a document for him and spoke to his people a lot and they were really up for it. He’s never done a festival before so we didn’t expect him to know much about it. The pack included quotes from lots of different people, musicians who have played etc”.

Eavis added that another difficulty in securing the likes of Springsteen is the growth in big-budget one-off gigs that offer phenomenal sums of money to premiere league artists. Eavis says that these days “it’s quite hard to understand why you should play a festival for not much money when you’re being offered quite a lot to go elsewhere. We put together some information and said ‘This is what happens, this is all the money that goes to charity’. Pretty quickly he said: ‘Yes’. It’s amazing”.

Springsteen will headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on 27 Jun. Elsewhere in Glasto news, Eavis also revealed that one more “huge band” will play this year’s festival, but their involvement will be kept a secret until the day. She told the Beeb: “There’s a really top surprise on The Park which will definitely not come out because otherwise we’d have a health and safety issue. You can start guessing”.