newbie said:
that's because it's not about 'customer service' and I hope it never is. It's a festival built on the idea that participants bring what they seek to find.
The issue, if there is one, is not that the festival office isn't corporate enough, it's that too many people come with the expectation that they can be passive consumers, simply lapping up entertainment and spectacle, all laid on for them. Demanding to be a customer has been creeping in for the last decade or more, forcing the festival towards corporatism (it's not the only pressure, mind).
If you'd said customer service back in the day people would have thought you were barking: that mindset is what we were trying to get away from! It's not a coincidence that the Green Fields are seen as emblematic of the festival, they're the bit closest to how it was in those days of yore, and their focus is hardly on servicing customers.
I so much agree with pretty much all of this.
Like others I've posted before about the decline of the DIY/bring what you want to find Glasto culture in more recent times. The first Camp Urban, in 2002, tried to revive a bit of that and worked very well
but that was down to applied enthusiasm and energy from several old schoolers and to free spirit joining in full on, and helping us out ...
The Green Fields as you say retain many elements of disorganised sponteneity -- not nearly as much as once, but still enough for an old Glasto veteran fart like me to celebrate the fast that this behemoth called Glastonbury has not become totally corporate, not become an identikit festival, still remains a massive class apart from the fully branded mega fests ...
Dub once commented here on a past Glasto thread along the lines that the big names on the main stages, and the commercial, audience attracting, ticket pressure increasing appeal of those, and the corporate sponsorship creeping round the edges in the main market and main stage areas, was the price you paid for keeping the whole thing going.
Sometimes that price was hateful, like the prominence given to the now thankfully SACKED Budshiter. Sometimes the price was a lot more welcome anyway -- we all love the odd big name even if we tell ourselves it's all vibe not lineup. All this is the subsidy the Festival has accepted compromises for, the subsidy that allows the Green and 'alternative' and the 'what's going on in that little tent over there'-type areas to continue and thrive ....
Many might be unhappy with these compromises, but realism makes many old schoolers like pagan and me and newbie* and others, reluctantly accept that the Festival as it had become by 2000, was unsustainable without both the introduction of the Superfence (without which Glastonbury would never have had been granted a licence ever ever again!), AND the introduction of more money and better organisation to pay for/cover better safety, better facilities, less crime, etc.
*he isn't ...
Glastonbury is the biggest city in Somerset for well over a week in June, bigger than Bath. It's like no other city overall, but all the same, like other cities, it has bad bits and good bits and which bits are bad and which good will never be 100% agreed on from one festie goer to the next.
It's the city I know just about best in life, but the one in which I still find something new to see, hear, say, do and be, every time ...
So
bring it all the fuck on and have the most fun you can and the best week's holiday of 2007 whichever bit is your favourite bit
ETA in keeping with that last bit, I now appreciate I'm agreeing with both newbie and pagan who disagree with each other ... that's Glasto!!!
). That was a little while after the incident and saw shedloads of Police and Police tape etc., it was a nasty incident for sure, but about 45 minutes later I was up at some rave nearer the Green Fields round an old bus and had forgotten all about it ... 
