Glastonbury Festival 1998 news

GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL organisers are assuring anyone who has booked with their telephone that they will receive their tickets, despite a delay in delivery.

The organisers had promised to deliver tickets within ten days of orders being placed but, due to problems with the automated ticketline, some deliveries have taken up to a month. A spokesman for the festival, which takes place from June 26-28, explained that this year 50,000 tickets (half the number available) have been bought through the ticketline, more than ever before, which had caused distribution problems.

He advised anyone still waiting for an ordered ticket to "hang in there" and said organisers would go to any lengths necessary to ensure customers got them in the end. "In previous years, we've driven to people's houses personally to deliver their tickets, or met them from the train when they got here to make sure they got them," he said.

He added that people who have still haven't received their tickets from the ticketline should ring 0117 988 4781. Anyone still wanting tickets should call 0839 668 898, an information line set up by Glastonbury organisers listing which UK outlets still have tickets available.

AMNESTY LAUNCHES UK RIGHTS ROADSHOW

Amnesty International today launches its first-ever roadshow to promote human rights awareness in the UK.

Over the next three months a mobile exhibition will travel to 20 cities and festivals throughout the country as part of campaign to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The roadshow, which will be in London's Trafalgar Square today, features three examples of human rights abuses in Tibet, Zambia and Croatia. The organisation has a policy not to become involved in cases in its own country.

David Bull, director of Amnesty International UK, said: "The Universal Declaration has been called the 'world's best secret' and this roadshow sets out to return a powerful set of human rights values to where they rightfully belong - absolutely at the centre of public life."

The roadshow will feature a video and exhibition of photographs and designs on human rights themes.

Visitors will be able to sign a petition supporting the Universal Declaration which is to be presented to the UN in Paris on International Human Rights Day in December.

Tomorrow it will be in Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, and over the next couple of months it will visit Cardiff, Belfast, Glasgow and Manchester. It will also be at the Glastonbury Festival, Notting Hill Carnival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and finish at the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool in September.

Glastonbury - Worthy Farm, Pilton, Somerset; Fri June 26-Sun 28; £80; 0870-607 7380

The only British rock festival to retain any degree of integrity, Glastonbury boasts a Pot Noodle-promotional-wagon-free environment, and the smaller stages and cabaret tents are booked with a haphazardness that defies corruption. There's also still a vast acreage of fields full of tepees and new-age sculptures of firebreathing dragons and blacksmith demonstrations and insane old hippies playing Van der Graaf Generator songs on pump organs, far away from the main arena where the multitudes will gather for Pulp and Blur. Still, don't miss Jon Spencer's sci-fi rockabilly, the honey-larynxed jazz folk genius Terry Callier, Nick Cave, the child-faced West Coast rock types the Montrose Avenue, Chicago eggheads Tortoise, art-rock veterans Sonic Youth, ambient space cadets Spiritualized, and Robbie Williams and his real dad, Tony Bennett. Also, there is no excuse not to go and see Bob Dylan, who should be viewed out of simple respect alone, just as one would visit a historic monument while on holiday in a foreign country, whatever its current state of neglect.