Michael Eavis announces Glastonbury Festival tickets to go on sale early

Festival goers wanting tickets to Glastonbury Festival, which takes place from Friday 26th to Sunday 28th June 2009, with the site open from Wednesday 24th June, will be able to reserve their tickets six months earlier than normal for a £50 deposit, according to a news story, (here), on the BBC.

The article says that 100,000 tickets will be made available from October this year, for the event which will host more than 2,000 performances at 50 or so venues including music, cabaret, theatre, circus, and also has a fantastic Kidz area, poetry, green crafts and information and loads, loads more.

Organiser Michael Eavis said they were changing the ticketing system because of the confusion surrounding the sale of this year's tickets. The tickets will now go on sale ahead of other major music festivals in the hope this will avoid this year's slow sales.

Ticket buyers for the Festival which takes place at Worthy Farm, Pilton, Shepton Mallet, Somerset will then pay the full amount on Wednesday 1st April and if they decide not to go ahead with the purchase they will charged £10.

Michael Eavis expects there to be a high demand for next year's festival, "Everybody wants to come - everywhere I go people say 'oh we should've been there and we're so fed up about it' because it was so good."

"There was so much stuff going on - Trash City, Shangri-La, The Park - there's all these other things that are going on as well as the main stages and everywhere I go people are kicking themselves because they didn't go, so there really will be a big demand."

The farmer also said that the ticket price will increase to cover costs, which this year included an unexpected additional fuel cost of £160,000. The organiser continues, "We actually did it (this year's festival) cheap - we couldn't cover the costs at that price. It wasn't a loss but it wasn't as good as it should've been."

In the article Mr Eavis says that he still loves organising the festival, although the low ticket sales led to much more stress for the farmer, "I've never enjoyed it so much although I've had a lot of worries this year with the tickets not selling - I lost half a stone in weight at one point. I was so scared but it came through. So when you get so scared like that and then when it comes right in the end it's fantastic."

"It's completely different to how we were talking six months ago when we were saying 'oh no is this the end? It's on its way out because we didn't sell out straight away...' so we had all those stories about the demise of the festival and they were completely wrong. We completely changed it around."

Mr Eavis also hinted that there would be a more traditional bill of headlining acts in 2009, because he'd been approached by people wanting to play, "We'll probably be going for the more traditional headliner next year because there are more of them around and after this year everyone wants to come on board because it was such a good do."

The festival organiser is clearly pleased by the response to this year's event, adding "The thing is people are coming back."

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