What next, no talking? This year's Glastonbury Festival, under pressure from meddling, no-fun, Tory-landowner locals, has been forced to introduce a truly awful concept that is known as a "Silent Disco". As you know, each year Michael Eavis has to jump through a number of hoops to obtain a licence for his fayre and each year, it seems, the locals keep upping the ante.
A few years ago, the truly disturbing vista of a giant wall being erected around the festival site was enough to wreck any lingering hippy buzz about the event.
This year, in order that the young people can continue dancing to their music after some ridiculous curfew hour, a set of headphones will be issued to everyone availing of the Dance Tent. The idea is that they control the headphones themselves - volume etc - and everyone will be listening to the same DJ set, but it will all be done in a surreal silence.
To ensure that nothing so dangerous as music should be emanating from any part of the festival site after the curfew hour (believed to be about 1am), squads of "noise patrols" will be policing proceedings.
Nothing to do with Michael or Emily (his daughter) Eavis, you understand, it's all in the name of shutting the locals up.
Here's the thing about this: having been at the Glastonbury Festival on numerous occasions, we're not talking about a built-up area. It's a bunch of massive big fields surrounded by other massive big fields. You have to walk (from memory - not great) for about a half an hour before you come across a local residence.
What a horrible bunch of ingrates they are. It's probably only because they don't make anything out of the festival. Glastonbury has its own economy and you have no need whatsoever (not that you'd want to anyway) to leave the site and take in whatever local attractions there are, as in: none.
The Silent Disco was ironically pioneered by Dutch ravers (wouldn't you know). In order to escape the attentions of meddling cops who would be alerted by the bangin' BPM's at their illegal gatherings, these Dutch subversives pioneered the technology that lies behind the Silent Disco.
Now that Glasto is going ahead with the Silent Disco, you just know that any old bag living within a 25-mile radius of someone playing an electric guitar in front of two or more people, is going to be getting on to the cops/MP/ whatever to force everyone to use these personal headphones.
There's also implications here for city-centre licensing laws. Clubs may be able to persuade courts to allow them to keep the party going on a bit past the present draconian closing time, if the Silent Disco idea is imported.
"We have to try and get around the noise limits," says Michael Eavis. "This is just our way of ensuring the party can go on later into the evening without infringing the noise curfew. It's a real first for us. It will be interesting."
Thin end of the wedge more like. Can we all - particularly the people who live miles away from the Glastonbury site but complain about everything all the time - get real here? This is the world's biggest and best outdoor rock'n'roll festival. It's not a bloody opera. A significant proportion of the people at the festival are aged between 18 and 30. It's their musical highlight of the year. What do you want them to do? Go to bed at 11pm?
As some indication of how important this truly magnificent festival is for people, consider that when the tickets for this year's bash went on sale last week, all 112,000 tickets sold out within an hour. Three million phone calls from people looking for tickets were registered in that first hour. And there were some 200 million redials.
Silent Disco? It's a thundering disgrace.
www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk
