Freaky Festival Facts from Glastonbury 04

United Kingdom | | 30 June 2004

Girls peeing against walls, McCartney breaking the law, Joe Strummer fans making ten hour vigils, and pigeons blagging hospitality - just some of the bizzarre and new from this year's festival!

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When was the last time you packed so much into one weekend? The chances are you missed quite a lot, not that you'd change anything, would you?

Here goes then for a round-up of some of the things you might have missed, or didn't know ...

- The much-hyped Glastonbury She-Pee allowed women to 'go' standing up against a plastic wall, using carefully crafted carboard funnels - reactions to the revolutionary device varied, but the words, 'impossible', 'physics' and 'drip', were much mentioned.

- Goldie Lookin' Chain met their match when they got hammered (quite literally) in a drinking game with the Virtual Festivals crew. After squirting a variety of foil bags of wine down their throats, they started seeming concerned about the state they'd be in for their upcoming Dance Tent performance. Beaten? They knows it!

- 3 million gallons of water were drunk, 2,500 toilets were used, and 800,000 million gallons of human waste were collected - nice! But Bob St Barbe, Glastonbury's sanitation chief explained: "It's fun to work with shit! It's very creative."

- Paul McCartney was fined £1,000 by the local council for playing past the stipulated license cufew. Michael Eavis has promised to pay it, despite Macca earning a reported £175,000 for his Saturday night headline slot.

- More than a quarter of the 140,000 people on site were working - as either volunteers, security, performers, press, or crew. Over 1000 litter pickers sorted out all the mess, with half of those doing the dirty deed for a free ticket.

- One dedicated Joe Strummer fan sat by the late-Clash member's memorial stone for more than 10 hours because the person before him had made him promise to stay on vigil until someone else came to take over. It took a while!

- Michael Eavis' 350 cows, which graze on Worthy Farm for the other 51 weeks of the year, were moved to what the festival founder calls a "moo-tel". Apparently they are so well looked after that milk yields go up by 3-400 litres a day!