Glastonbury’s co-organiser Emily Eavis has confirmed that the festival will most likely take its next fallow year in 2026.
Traditionally the UK’s biggest music festival takes a year off roughly every five years; it is held on working dairy farm Worthy Farm, and the breaks allow the land time to recover from the huge number of visitors that come to the event each summer.
“We are due a fallow year,” Eavis told Nick Grimshaw and Annie Mac on their BBC podcast Sidetracked. “The fallow year is important because it gives the land a rest, it gives the cows a chance to be out for longer and reclaim their land. And I think it’s important it just gives everybody a little time to just switch off. And the public as well.”
Though Glastonbury’s last official fallow year was six years ago, the pandemic meant that the festival was cancelled for two years running in 2020 and 2021, giving the farm a break ahead of schedule.
She also revealed that the line-up for next year’s festival is already beginning to take shape.
“I have a vague idea of who might be headlining next year, and then we might do a fallow year after that,” Eavis said.
Elsewhere, Eavis revealed that Glastonbury almost closed down for good in the Nineties, and that her father Michael Eavis – who founded the iconic festival in 1970 – had initially planned on stopping the event when he retired.
“My parents were always like, ‘This is the last one’. Everyone thought it was some sort of stunt to sell tickets but it wasn’t,” Eavis said. “They were genuinely like, ‘Well, we probably won’t do another.’”
But when his wife Jean died in 1999, Eavis decided to keep going, with the help of his children.
“My dad was like, ‘Oh, I think I might need the festival now’. Because they were going to retire and go on long cruises and things like that. My dad was like, ‘Listen, let’s keep it going.’”
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll help you’. Never did I think I’d still be here a few decades on.”
