"Queue here to complain that the festival isn't what it used to be", read the wry sign in the press tent at the Glastonbury Festival. Nope, things really aren't what they used to be: not a treacherously slippery path or flooded tent in sight. Instead, a double celebration: the pioneering event's 40th birthday, and the hottest in its history. Even the heir to the British throne, the Prince of Wales, paid a visit to the Somerset farmland, 100 miles west of London, to offer his best wishes on Thursday afternoon. Once widely viewed as a dangerous hotbed of anarchy, the event finally graduated to becoming part of the establishment.
Back in 1970, the day after Jimi Hendrix died, 1,500 people were on hand to enjoy a headline slot from the impish about-to-be-glam-rocker Marc Bolan, and be offered free milk from the cowshed. A crowd of 177,500 people each paid £185 to be in attendance this year, enjoying food from across the globe via 400 food stalls, and stoically queuing for one of 4,000 toilets. Actually, make that 177, 501 - a baby was born on site on Thursday evening and, after a hospital check-up, the mother was soon back to enjoy - well, attend - the remainder of the festival.
The lineup, as we shall see, was also rather larger than the debut year. First, though, meet Simon, one of the many thousand crew members who made it all happen. Thursday night he was shepherding MPs around the BBC's flagship political programme, Question Time. An hour after our conversation on Friday afternoon, he would be escorting the country legend, Willie Nelson, from the Pyramid Stage. His expression expressed a clear preference. "I love the way the music makes the earth move," he said of his Pyramid station.
Nelson's set opened up with him chording an acoustic with effects pedals set to Creedence. He addressed the mic weathered and pointy, a lank-haired, be-shaded lizard. This man had seen baking hot days before. And the rain. Oh, the rain. "How am I doing?" he asked casually, to massed whoops. "Well, I guess I'm doing fine." It's Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away, and the crowd were in the mood for teardrop delivery. Nelson allowed lines to just drift away, like so many former sweethearts.
There's no vocal lifting from backing singers, like so many performers of his venerable age, just his threadbare voice out there alone; if it's wearing and worn, that was kind of the point. Later the stage saw a fully blinged-up hip-hop tour-de-force from Snoop Dogg (diamond encrusted microphone and all), Dizzee Rascal's underground-gone-decidedly-overground pulsating grime beats, and last-minute replacement for an injured U2, Gorillaz. The latter brought forth a hip-hop based sound as broad as their extraordinary cast list, including a still-snooping Dogg, a wilfully atonal Lou Reed, half of The Clash (Jones and Simonon), and the hugely influential Manchester twosome Shaun 'Happy Mondays' Ryder and Mark E Smith of The Fall.
The Pyramid Stage, of course, is but the biggest piece of a mighty jigsaw. Fully 24 other stages were deemed large enough to be listed in the programme, playing host to 2,000 acts, and they didn't include the multifarious, more impromptu constructions assembled elsewhere. It was a slightly lesser light, The Park Stage, that hosted an unannounced acoustic show on Friday night from Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, whose 1997 Pyramid headline show catapulted them into the stratosphere and was subsequently voted the finest in the festival's history.
More telegraphed but equally welcome, Saturday night saw a perma-grinning Kylie Minogue join Scissor Sisters onstage, before Muse were joined by the U2 guitarist The Edge to blast the hills with the loudest set of the weekend. Meanwhile, over on West Holts Stage, George Clinton's Parliament were stirring up a mean brew of funk soup, while the Pet Shop Boys were busy reminding the Other Stage crowd just how deep runs their back catalogue of none-more-witty synth-pop.
Choices, choices ... Given the seemingly endless list of star performers (see also Femi Kuti, Florence & The Machine, Shakira, The Kinks' Ray Davies, Jackson Browne, and more), nothing spoke more eloquently of the event's pulling power than the fact that the biggest star of all was yet to come. Stevie Wonder's undoubted genius may have strayed a little in recent years, but was abundantly evident to a suitably agog Sunday night crowd partying to such career highs as Superstition, Higher Ground and Living For The City.
But yet ... there were many thousands among the attendees blissfully unaware of any such musical treasures. These were the people witnessing extraordinary acrobats in the further-flung Big Top, taking in comedy in the cabaret tent, debating politics with Billy Bragg in the Leftfield tent, or else heading further afield still. The Green Fields are generally acknowledged as the area best preserving the festival's "alternative" history. This is where we found New Age (for which read "ancient" and "purporting to be ancient") wellbeing treatment tents of every hue, ecology workshops, and the ubiquitous sound of - again, allegedly - shamanic drumming.
Near the Green Field's outermost limits stood the Craft Field, with skilled craftsmen applying traditional tools to wood turning, stonemasonry and metal forging. When I asked a worker called Tracey how things were going, as she helped children make papier-mâché hats, her answer neatly encapsulated just how fully this area lives in its own bubble: "What day is it?" It was Friday. She'd been there since setting up on Tuesday and had not visited the main arenas. "Everything I need is up here," she explained, embodying the view of many in this area who see the festival's expansion as excessively commercial and conformist.
Just up the hill, she told us, come sundown, a trail of glowing red lights would lead revellers into an extraordinary, tunnelled-just-yesterday underground bar. And beyond that, at the very top of the hill, was the stone circle, a modern -ish nod to the area's pagan heritage (think Stonehenge on a smaller scale). Perhaps the biggest crowd definer came on Sunday afternoon, as some tens of thousands gathered in front of two ad hoc giant screens to watch England take on arch rival Germany in the football World Cup. Well before full-time, with their team trailing 4-1, plenty drifted back into the main arena in a bid to forget all about it. They were in the right place, for tens of thousands more appeared wholly unaware the game had even happened.
The festival is so big it's often described as a city. Climb the overlooking hill at midnight, as a full yellow moon in a cloudless sky gazes on, and the illusion holds. Down in the valley, thousands of lights project blurred definition through a descending mist. Lasers pierce the upper reaches of the sky while illuminated - sometimes fire-breathing - sculptures and towers graze the lower. But for the city analogy to continue, you need to name another place where every last one of the inhabitants is up for the party of their lives, right now, with whoops and roars bleeding into the furious of furious beats crashing for miles.
That's the thing about this metropolis. The nearer it gets to bedtime, the greater the ferocity with which it's defied. A rave against the dying of the light.