Cuttings

THE BUILDING OF A PEACE MOUNTAIN TIM JARVIS gets a lesson in farm economics from MICHAEL EAVIS—the man who built Glastonbury and is helping to make CND grow. "I SUPPOSE you want to talk about the convoy" says Michael Eavis wearily, at the end of hard day on the Glastonbury site. News bulletins are broadcasting rumours of hippies heading for Glastonbury. "What do you mean, rumours?" he asks incredulously. "They're already here." Sitting cosy on the phone in London I had images of Somerset farmland knee deep in Aduki burgers and joss-sticks with indigenous cows fighting to the death overthe last blade of grass. Eavis is a busy man. His festival has become a big musical fixture and has outgrown the trivialities of former days. It's now billed as "Europe's most effective anti-nuclear fundraiser" and earns more for CND in three days than anything else they do in a year. Throughout the '70s Eavis, a small-stock dairy far

GOODBYE TO GLASTONBURY? HELLO, READING... LAST WEEKEND'S Glastonbury Festival may have been the last, but the Reading rockfest is poised for a comeback. The Glastonbury promoter, Michael Eavis, said after the three-day event: "There are too many people, and too many problems". Eavis had a licence for 55,000 festival-goers, but gatecrashers and other unexpected arrivals put the attendance last weekend to closer to 100,000, which may have cost the festival its future. CND will be anxious, if this is the case, for the event raises more for the anti-nuclear organisation in three days than it can get in the rest of the year. News reports that the Reading Festival will be back in action this August after a two-year absence have been described by the festival's organisers as "premature". As NME closed for press, there was only a 50-50 chance that the event will return this year. The absence of Britain's longest-running rock festival was caused b