Britain’s Glastonbury rock music festival is famous for its eccentricities, and this year will unveil yet another cultural innovation — the silent disco.
Party-goers at the annual three-day extravaganza, held every June in the rolling countryside of Somerset, southwest England, will be invited to dance the night away wearing specially-issued headphones, a report said.
The move follows complaints from neighbours that thumping music lasting throughout the night during previous events proved an irritation, The Times newspaper said in its Tuesday edition.
This year, after the live music stages fall silent in the late evening, a “volume management strategy” will come into force, designed to reduce noise pollution from the festival site, the dairy farm of organiser Michael Eavis.
Chief among this will be the replacement of the usual thumping all-night dance marquee with a venue that will reverberate to the noise of dancers’ feet moving in unison to a beat only they can hear.
People will be issued with headphones when they enter the dance arena, which will transmit the DJs’ selection of music direct to their eardrums at a volume of their choice, the report said, adding that the concept originated in the Netherlands.
“We’re trying to find a new way of keeping people going after hours and this would seem to be it,” co-organiser Emily Eavis, the daughter of Michael Eavis, told the newspaper.
“It is by all accounts hilarious. Just imagine 2Â 000 people dancing with geeky headsets. It’s very Glastonbury.”
This year’s event will see 125Â 000 participants converge on Worthy Farm in the tiny village of Pilton from June 24-26 to see acts expected to include Brian Wilson (from the Beach Boys) and The White Stripes.
First organised in 1970, Glastonbury has grown to become perhaps the world’s best-know popular music festival.
Its sheer size has caused problems with neighbours in the past. No festival was held in 2001 following chaos the previous year, when huge numbers of people gaining entry to the site without paying caused overcrowding and a crime wave. — AFP