No Fence, No Rules: The Lawless Mud-Bath of 90s Glastonbury

Modern Glastonbury is lovely. It has glamping and flushing toilets. Ed Tayler remembers when it was a humanitarian crisis set to music.

I watched the Glastonbury coverage on the BBC last year. It looked magnificent. The sun was shining. The grass was green. People were drinking Aperol Spritz out of actual glasses.

It looked like a holiday camp. It looked civilised. And frankly, it looked absolutely unrecognizable to anyone who went in the 1990s.

Because back then, Glastonbury wasn’t a festival. It was a temporary autonomous zone. It was a medieval city of 100,000 people (and another 50,000 who jumped the fence) living in squalor, listening to The Levellers, and praying they didn’t get trench foot.

The Great Fence Myth

The defining feature of 90s Glastonbury was the fence. Or rather, the suggestion of a fence.

Today, the site is surrounded by the “Super Fence”—a 12-foot steel fortress that looks like it belongs in Jurassic Park. You can’t get in unless you have a ticket with your face printed on it.

In 1994, the fence was a piece of corrugated iron that had fallen over. If you didn’t have a ticket, it didn’t matter. You dug a tunnel. You climbed a tree. You bribed a security guard with a warm can of Red Stripe. Or you just waited for a stampede and ran through the gap.

This created a unique atmosphere. The festival was wildly overcrowded. It was lawless. It felt like the last days of Rome, if the Romans wore combat trousers and smelled of patchouli oil. It was dangerous, yes. But it gave the festival an edge that the corporate, ticketed version will never have.

The Year of the Mud

We talk about mud now, but we don’t know the meaning of the word.

1997 and 1998 were the “Mud Years.” It rained so hard that the site didn’t just get wet; it liquified. The mud wasn’t just on the ground; it was waist-deep. It was a glue that sucked the boots off your feet.

I remember seeing a man stuck in the mud near the Pyramid Stage. He wasn’t panicking. He had simply accepted his fate. He was smoking a cigarette, sunk up to his thighs, waiting for summer to arrive.

We didn’t have “glamping.” We had a £20 tent from Argos that leaked the moment a cloud appeared. You woke up floating on an airbed in a puddle of brown sludge. And you loved it. It was a badge of honour. If you came home clean, you hadn’t been to Glastonbury; you’d been to a picnic.

The Long Drop of Doom

Then there were the toilets.

If you are eating, look away now. The “Long Drops” of the 90s were the stuff of nightmares. They were open-air metal structures with no doors, just a row of seats over a giant, festering pit.

Going to the toilet was a social activity. You sat there, next to a stranger, staring out across the fields, trying to dissociate from the horror beneath you. There was no hand sanitizer. There was no toilet paper. There was only the abyss.

It built character. If you can use a 90s Glastonbury toilet at 3am while tripping over a guy called “Spider,” you can survive anything life throws at you.

The Musical Anarchy

The lineup was almost secondary to the chaos, but it was spectacular.

This was the era when Britpop collided with Dance culture. You could see Oasis or Pulp on the main stage, delivering generation-defining sets. Then you could wander into the Dance Tent and see Orbital wearing torch-glasses, turning a field of muddy punters into a raving mass.

And if you got bored? You went to the Green Fields. There were no schedules there. Just a man juggling fire and a band playing folk-punk on bongos for 12 hours straight.

You didn’t use an app to plan your day. You lost your friends on Friday morning and didn’t see them again until Monday. You made new friends. Usually with people you would cross the street to avoid in the real world.

The End of an Era

The Super Fence arrived in 2002, and the anarchy ended. The criminals left. The middle classes arrived. The food got better (we used to survive on “meat-sludge” burgers; now they have vegan sushi).

It is safer now. It is sustainable. It is undoubtedly “better” on paper.

But part of me misses the danger. I miss the feeling that the whole thing could collapse at any moment. I miss the smell of woodsmoke and anarchy. 90s Glastonbury wasn’t comfortable. It was an endurance test. And we passed.