Glastonbury 2015 interview

Glastonbury 2015 interview: Emily Eavis on 'selling out' and a trio of secretive 'baby spiders'
Emily Eavis has been running the Glastonbury festival with her father Michael since 1999. She talks to Jamie Merrill about running the biggest music event in the world and why it has lost none of its soul
With only a few days before the gates open on the Glastonbury festival, Emily Eavis is pleased to see that the fields and hedgerows of her little corner of Somerset have been bathing in sunshine. The sky is deep, clear blue and the woman who holds the power at Worthy Farm can feel the excitement building. But with most of the setting up on the vast 1,000-acre site complete, Worthy Farm looks oddly naked. The 1,300 eco-friendly composting lavatories and the dozens of temporary stages are all in place, but the Vale of Avalon is still awaiting the sea of tents and 135,000 soon-to-be sunburned (or mud-caked) ticket holders, who will descend upon it from tomorrow morning.
"I certainly wouldn't call this moment the calm before the storm or anything like that," says Eavis, who has run the world-famous festival with her father, Michael, since 1999. "But we are nearly there with it. It's just the finishing touches now." Those finishing touches mean that a fleet of Land Rovers is constantly scurrying back and forth across the site and an army of workers are painting the last of the festival's trademark decorated bins and erecting the banners. On Friday, it also meant that Eavis, along with her husband, Nick Dewey, who helps her to run the day-to-day business of booking bands and supervise the construction of a temporary city the size of Oxford, had some last-minute "rejigging" of the Friday night line-up to oversee.
The Independent arrived at Worthy Farm – now complete with offices for 20 full-time staff – just as Eavis and Dewey were discussing the changes they need to make now that Florence and the Machine have stepped up to the headline slot, replacing the Foo Fighters after frontman Dave Grohl broke his leg. "We are probably just going to do a rejigging of what we've already got," she says, as Dewey leaves the room, phone in hand. "But it's going to be great. I'm so excited about Florence. The fact is that when we sell our tickets in October people don't know who is playing as we don't announce it until the spring. They had a window to return their tickets [in April], but this year very fewer people than last year took us up on that, which was amazing."
There's also the fact, she is quick to add, that "Florence is massive" and well deserving of her new headliner slot. "I think personally that when she walks on the stage she'll be the biggest star in the world. She's amazing live. She has all the right ingredients."
"We book bands here on those reasons, on the ingredients of a great performance, not on their record sales. But as it happens, Florence has been number one across the Atlantic and here. She's an amazing star and a massive performer. We've had much more risky headliners." Florence is also a female headliner, a species that is in short supply this summer as Britain's festivals have been attacked for failing to represent the female domination of the charts. "It's definitely a positive by-product," adds Eavis. "It's true that there are very few women headlining festivals this summer, and this helps that, I suppose. It's great."
For Eavis, though, Glastonbury is about more than the "headliners and band, bands, bands, bands". It has a turnover of more than £35m and a seasonal crew of 50,000, enabling her and her father to donate £2m to charity each year. Then there's the farm itself, which this year was voted Britain's best dairy farm by the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers. In fact, the team around Emily and Michael still insist that Steve Kearle, the long-serving farm manager, not Michael or Emily, is the most important person on the site.
"I obviously get excited about the bands, because we work on those all year and we have fantastic headliners. But in all honesty, I get just as excited about the other performers and fantastic visual installations and sculpture by artists like Joe Rush," she says. "To me, the music is part of a massive picture, and that picture involves amazing circus, ballet, theatre, comedy and visual art. The artistic side is amazing here. You could go easily the entire festival without seeing a band."
This year, that less mainstream side of Glastonbury has grown even stronger. There are 1,500 performances in the Theatre and Circus field alone, says Eavis and a trio of secretive "baby spiders" will join the giant fire-breathing mechanical spider in the late-night area Arcadia. Arcadia is already loved by festival goers who flock to its dystopian avenues in the early hours of the morning, but she is coy about the spiders, only saying the "triplet" will be part of a "phenomenal" new nightly show.
Elsewhere on the site, Eavis says she is looking forward to performances from the Danza de los Voladores, a troupe of Mexican dancers who will help open the festival at King's Meadow tomorrow night. From the top of their 30ft poles they will perform a Mexican ritual ceremony that Eavis says will "wow" festival goers. There is also a new Tor View Lookout by the circus tent, and a new Temple in the Park viewing platform and real ale bar on the site's highest point above the Park Stage.
For Eavis these new sites are a reward for the festival's hardcore and most loyal fans who return every year to a new discovery. In recent years they have "embraced" the festival like never before, she says. By Thursday lunchtime, as many as 90 per cent of ticket holders will have already arrived, a full day before the music actually starts. This loyalty doesn't stop the yearly controversies, though, including a tax protest against U2 in 2011. This year the inevitable saga has been a 130,000-signature petition to prevent rapper Kanye West from performing at the festival. "We try not to feed the [online] frenzy," she says carefully. "That petition was started by a guy called Neil who had never been to Glastonbury. He's coming now. I'm not going to meet him, but he's very welcome and he can make a decision after the show. I think Kanye is going to be fantastic."
It's clear Eavis is somewhat bored of the faux outrage every time she and Dewey book a group that isn't four white men with guitars. "Complaining about Kanye at Glastonbury is like going to London as saying you are appalled that Miss Saigon is playing," she says. "In that case, go to Les Misérables instead… or the thousands of other shows."
There's also the question of Kanye West's lyrics, which are hardly what you'd describe as feminist-friendly. "Oh God," says Eavis. "If we censored the lyrics and views of people who performed we wouldn't have anyone. We wouldn't have had the Rolling Stones, or pretty much any of the headliners from the last 20 years." Not everyone will agree, but Eavis says she and her husband don't take a band's politics or lyrics into account. "It's rock and roll," she says. "The important thing is that they deliver the goods by making the crowd feel like they are part of something really spectacularly special."
Glastonbury is certainly a special experience, but each year some complain that with its vast security fence, celebrities in Hunter wellies and colonies of expensive yurts, it has lost some of its soul, the so-called Glastonbury spirit. This year the latest (unofficial) wheeze is a private jet service offering rides to the festival for £600, a development that Eavis says she would find funny if it didn't threaten to drown out Glastonbury's real message.
"I hadn't even heard about that," she responds. "It's like that hammering board game my boys have got. Things like this are popping up all the time, they have nothing to do with us and we try to knock them down. Corporations and business people keep coming up with these things, but we are not interested in them in the slightest."
In truth, the festival does have corporate tie-ins with the BBC, The Guardian and mobile firm EE, which provides 4G data coverage and charging facilities across the site, but Eavis says deals only get the "go ahead" if they help fund Glastonbury's donations to Water Aid, Oxfam and Greenpeace. "We give as close to £2m to charity as we can every year. That is our upmost priority," she says.
Eavis has been helping her father run the festival since she came home from university when her mother died in 1999. In reality, though, she's had "full control" of the reins for a decade and her father, Michael, is taking an increasingly small role. "Dad leaves Nick and I to handle most things now, so it doesn't feel like there is going to be dramatic handover moment or anything like that, because in a way it has already happened," she says. "A lot has changed for him. He didn't have these constant corporate approaches to deal with 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, where we have media and corporate brands trying to cling on. He just doesn't understand it."
Earlier this year, Michael said his daughter was "cunning" in how she runs the festival, and keeps it true to its founding ethos. She laughs at this, but as if to prove her father's take on her, she quickly confirms that all three headliners for Glastonbury 2016 are already booked.
Are they guitar bands? "I can't answer that. It would give it away," she laughs. "Everybody has a band or guitars anyway, or nearly everybody." She's right to be secretive; the last thing she wants this weekend is another online petition on her hands.

Dior & I: behind the scenes at the legendary atelier

Frédéric Tcheng is the director of Dior & I, a documentary about creative director Raf Simons’ first collection for the storied Parisian house, which is in cinemas 27 March. Here is what he learned about the rarefied world of couture during filming.

Simons is notoriously private – but Tcheng won him over in the end

“Raf said no [to the documentary] initially, which I can understand. He didn’t want to engage in the image-driven world of publicity, and it’s not an easy thing to have cameras pointed at you in one of the most challenging periods of your career. But we convinced him to allow us in for a trial period of one week, and once he appreciated that we were not going to focus on just him but on the atelier, that seemed to reassure him.”

Raf Simons takes inspiration from a 1950s gown from the Christian Dior archive Photograph: Dior & I

Not everyone was so shy, however...

“One woman in the atelier, Lulu, who was in charge of sourcing buttons and zippers and mannequins, really wanted to be on camera – so much so that she had a fight with another seamstress about it.”

The Dior atelier is run on Coke Zero

“I have never seen people drink so much Coke Zero. They are literally obsessed with it. One day I saw a crate of hundreds of cans that had been delivered to the office, and the next day they had all gone, and another came. Every day there were the same conversations: where are the cold cokes? People would fetch them from different fridges.”

John Galliano ended up on the cutting room floor

“There was a version which included some of the news reports about Galliano, [Simons’ predecessor at Dior, who left after he was caught an antisemitic rant in a bar in Paris] but in the end I felt that didn’t make sense in the film. Everything that happened before Raf arrived, with the Galliano scandal, had been covered a lot and it felt as though it belonged to the news cycle, not in the reality of the present. It also became clear that Raf was digging into the first 10 years of the house – that’s what he was having a dialogue with, so it made sense to focus on that.”

Christian Dior played an important part in the film – from beyond the grave

“While researching the film, I found a tiny little grey Christian Dior autobiography, with such an emotional depiction of work as designer, with every step described in such fascinating detail. I would read it at night, after a long day shooting [at the atelier] and would feel I was reading what I had seen that same day. There was a very interesting relationship between the past and the present. A sense that history repeats itself but it’s a brand new journey for the people going through it.”

Simons’ assistant, Pieter Mulier, right, helps take up a hem. Photograph: Dior & I

Simons’ assistant, Pieter Mulier, is the atelier’s unofficial boss

“Pieter is an incredible force to be reckoned with. He manages to get so much done with a smile. He was pivotal – he held so many keys – he was our ‘go to’ person. He was always so charming. He charmed everyone.”

Raf Simons meets his new team at Dior. Photograph: Dior & I

Raf’s wardrobe was laden with meaning – particularly his shorts

“Raf has a uniform – his clothes are bordering on clerical, although with completely outrageous shoes. I also loved his shorts. Psychologically, when he showed up in shorts to the office, it marked a turning point in collection. The sun is out and Raf feels comfortable enough to show up in shorts at Dior.”

Simons likes his music loud

“Raf is a fan of Plastikman and Nine Inch Nails, which he plays at volume, which was kind of a nightmare for us as it meant we couldn’t use some of what we were filming. He would turn the music up and sing the lyrics very loudly. His team found it endearing but [it made it] hard [for them] to focus.”

Hard work at the atelier. Photograph: Dior & I

Everyone in the atelier had creative input

“The seamstresses referred to the dresses they were making as their babies – they put a lot of themselves into their work. They have an inner life and are engaged and involved in their work. I hope that the film showed fashion in a different light – that it’s a collaborative art form, not just a one man show, as the media portrays it.”

The atelier workers choose a dress from the collection to sew. Photograph: Dior & I

Simons stayed away during the edit

“After the premier, Raf called me and explained that he had kept his distance until then because he did not want to influence my decisions while making the film. I thought it was remarkable that he would be thoughtful like that.”

Polly Samson: ‘It’s the most gleeful sort of writing there is’

It is five years since Polly Samson published a book, and she wrote her new one, The Kindness, through what she calls “horrible times”. Two years ago her father, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who came to England on the Kindertransport as a boy in 1938, died in hospital in “utterly miserable” circumstances after a mistakenly prescribed double dose of antibiotics destroyed his liver.
The year before that, Samson’s friend, the journalist Cassandra Jardine, died of lung cancer. And the year before that, Samson’s eldest son Charlie went to prison after admitting “violent disorder” for his part in an attack on Topshop that followed the tuition fee protests of December 2010, during which he was pictured on the bonnet of Prince Charles’s car and hanging from a flag on the Cenotaph.
At times she found it difficult to focus on anything else. The first draft of the story that grew into The Kindness was framed by an account of a prison visit. Then there was a plan for an intriguing combination of novella and linked short stories. But over the course of the miles-long walks she takes from her house on a bustling corner of the sea front at Hove, Samson gathered her material together and stitched it into the densely plotted, dynamic domestic thriller – with an English idyll of ivy-covered house, meadow and hammock on the cover – that is sitting on the coffee table in front of us.
“It’s the most gleeful sort of writing there is,” she says from the large sofa where she is smoking roll-ups and looking out to sea. “For days I’d be thinking, how does this happen? How do the characters not know this information or how do we not know it? All those technical problems. That’s the thing about walking – or sleeping, it’s the same – it just solves them and then you can’t wait to get back to the top of the house.”
By coincidence, following the triumph of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk, The Kindness opens with a falconry scene, but swiftly moves indoors to trace the contours of grief. Julian has lost both partner Julia and daughter Mira, and is stuck in a country house with their ghosts, his overbearing mum and needy former girlfriend.
From empty picture frames and beds the novel moves backwards, to the couple’s ever-so-romantic beginnings, their grotty L-shaped flat, and the accidental pregnancy and miscarriage that preceded Mira. On a whim, we learn, Julian moved the family back to his picturesque childhood home, Firdaws. Then childhood cancer struck: blood tests, scans, tubes, “pale, curdy sick”.
The novel is contemporary but deeply indebted to the past. Samson’s grandmother used to say the family lost “just two aunts” in the Holocaust, but since her father’s death, and aided by a trunk of papers she inherited, Samson has become obsessed with piecing together the truth. In particular she is interested in her great-uncle Heino, who killed himself in the 1970s and whose black-and-white photograph of painter Mark Rothko sits behind her on a shelf. The feelings of living people mean she must be careful what she reveals, but she has drawn on family secrets in The Kindness and recently went to Paris to meet the woman Heino loved in later life.
“My father was from Hamburg and most of his family got out, but like a lot of people he didn’t want to talk about Germany, the war or the Holocaust,” she says. “It was sealed off, and when we went to live in Cornwall” – in 1970 when she was eight – “ties were pretty much severed with everyone except my grandmother. I had no access to my Jewish family at all but they did all the things I do – they wrote, they took pictures – and finding out about them has given me a much stronger sense of who I am.”
Samson’s husband is David Gilmour, the musician, best known for being in Pink Floyd, with whom she has two sons and a daughter. Gilmour, who is 16 years her senior, has four adult children from his first marriage and Samson’s son Charlie also comes from a previous relationship, though Gilmour adopted him. They are a modern blended family, but what is striking about Samson’s background is that this is nothing new. Second and third marriages and webs of siblings go back at least two generations to her grandmother, an East End chambermaid of Jewish or Romany origins who married the scion of a well-to-do Shanghai family but was sent back to England following the 1937 Japanese invasion, leaving her husband to start again.
Samson’s mother Esther was six at the time, and she and her brothers went first to a children’s home and then to what Samson calls “pretty scary foster parents”. She survived to fall in with a group of Spanish communist students, marry a Chinese-American war hero and smuggle herself to China. There, she found a set of half-siblings, though not her father, and stayed for 10 years, serving in the Red Army and working as an interpreter for journalists including the Daily Worker’s Alan Winnington, who became her second husband.
Samson’s parents met in East Berlin, when the British Communist party gave her father the job of trying to get Winnington out of China, where he was stuck without a passport. They fell in love and had Polly before marrying in 1969, but Winnington remained a long-distance member of the family, with his son and Esther’s child by her previous relationship brought up with Polly, who grew up calling her biological father “Lance” and Winnington “Daddy”.

Polly Samson with her husband David Gilmour. Photograph: Dave M Benett/Getty Images

Asked whether her first novel, Out of the Picture (2001), which she dedicated to Charlie and is all about a young woman’s attempts to reconnect with her absent artist-father, expressed the hope that Charlie might in some way reconnect with his own lost parent, the poet Heathcote Williams, Samson says she wonders if the book wasn’t more about herself. Contact with Winnington, the second father of her early years, suddenly stopped: “No one thought I might have a yearning and looking back now I think I did.” She later learned he had kept one of her baby shoes all his life.
Samson’s parents stuck with the Communist party through the Soviet invasion of Czechslovakia and gave up their membership quietly in the 1970s. Her father went from the Daily Worker (now the Morning Star) to the Packet group of local newspapers in Cornwall, where her half-Chinese mother became head of a village school.
“My parents very much enjoyed each other’s company and didn’t really need anyone else,” she says. “We lived in an old tin-mining village that even people in the next town had never heard of. They didn’t have a lot of friends or do much socialising. Maybe they just wanted a rest.”
Samson had virtually dropped out of school by 14, but at her grandmother’s urging she moved to London and got a secretarial job in publishing, from where she rose to become head publicist at Jonathan Cape. She began a relationship with Williams, moved back to Cornwall and in 1989 had their son. When Williams walked out, Samson returned to London in a “terrible state” and was offered a place to stay by Jardine, a virtual stranger who became a close friend.

She married Gilmour five years later, only deciding she believed in marriage as they arrived at Marylebone town hall. Today they preside over their “huge tribe of children” and the vast German shepherd she got from a rescue home at the height of her anxiety about Charlie’s incarceration. She has taken up smoking again, suffers from stage fright so acute that she takes beta-blockers before public appearances, and travels to London each week to see a psychotherapist.

A “really, really secret writer” for many years, Samson wrote her first novel in six weeks because she wanted it finished before her short stories came out and bad reviews crushed her confidence. In the event critics were enthusiastic: her new novel has received much advance praise and she has moved to a new publisher after a prolonged courtship. At Gilmour’s urging she also revealed herself as his lyricist, and lights up with excitement when she plays me rough versions of a couple of tracks on his forthcoming album. One was inspired by book two of Paradise Lost; another by a painting on the wall above the fireplace.
Samson suffered a pang about her own lack of education when she delivered her son Charlie to Cambridge. She struggled in her 20s, she says, when “everyone else had a gang from university”. Reading Paradise Lost, which features in her novel as well as Gilmour’s song, she thought: “I would love to be going to lectures. I would love someone to set me an essay on this.” When stuck with her writing she took to spending long days at the piano, having begun lessons to help her children before deciding to take the exams herself.
Her last book of short stories had the ironic title Perfect Lives. Since then Samson has had what she calls “about the most horrible experience of my life”, visiting her son in prison: “They make it about as unpleasant as they can. The glass is smeared with semen and you speak through a kind of box. I had one or two of my younger children with me and it was terrible for them.” She remains angry about what happened, and critical of legislation that meant Charlie was convicted of “violent disorder” although he didn’t attack anyone.
But as she sets out for her afternoon walk with songs to write rather than a plot twist to resolve – she is where she wants to be: “I feel like I’ve hit my lyrical stride,” she says. “I am so in the mood for this.”

Audrey Hepburn - A Distinctive Personality

Audrey Hepburn was a distinctive personality that has successfully charmed generation after generation. She won the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar for this picture and her popularity, along with her career, never looked back. During her film career she would receive four additional Best Actress nominations.

Funnyface, and Breakfast at Tiffany's. She was the every woman, beautiful, but not necessarily glamorous, sensual, but not overtly sexual, a woman whose naturalness appealed to both men and women. To say that Audrey Hepburn is a style icon is an understatement of epic proportions. For women that appreciate a classic look that will never fail, the look of Audrey Hepburn simply IS style.

In fact, to embody Audrey's style and make it ever so contemporary, you only need 7 signature wardrobe staples. But for many actresses back in the day, a pretty dress vis a vis Marilyn Monroe was simply that, just a pretty dress. Audrey's style on the other hand was one that showcased the importance of the investment pieces, the wardrobe staples, and the notion that less really is more. We remember Marilyn Monroe and the famous white dress, for Audrey, we remember style.

They stayed together until Tracy died, and although they would never admit their relationship publicly, the whole world appeared to know the truth. The occupation and lack of food during the latter part of the war left a lasting impression on the young Audrey. Her later involvement in humanitarian issues was partly inspired by her own experiences of suffering.

News About Oprah Winfrey

Born Oprah Gail Winfrey in 1954 on a farm in Mississippi, Oprah experienced hardships early in her life. At the age of 6, she was sexually abused and neglected when living with her mother in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Unlike so many other child abuse stories that end terribly, Oprah was able to leave the neglect behind and stay with her father, where she learned that life held so much more than the abuse she experienced. While Oprah excelled as a news anchor, her empathy towards the people in the news stories began to affect her emotionally to the point where she could not continue.

It was at this point that she became a co-host for a talk show called "People Are Talking." She became the first Black business woman to own a television network called "OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network." She also became a chairwoman of Harpo Productions Inc, which took over ownership of the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah Winfrey has excelled in the entertainment industry by being true to herself and to an audience that loves and admires her. With a mind for business and a humanitarian heart, Oprah Winfrey will continue to make a large impact within the entertainment and media industry.

Unlike other actors and stars who hit their big breaks but fizzle out due to their own mismanagement or the emotional strain of success taking a toll on their lives, Oprah Winfrey has excelled in the entertainment industry by being true to herself and to an audience that loves and admires her. With a mind for business and a humanitarian heart, She became the first woman and the first African American to own and produce her own talk show and entertainment production company.