Music Sounds Better With EU

Beneath a hand painted sign that reads “together we can make change,” a security guard raises his megaphone. “I am sorry to announce that Britain has left the EU. I repeat, I am sorry to announce...” It’s 5:30 a.m. on a balmy Friday morning, and Glastonbury isn’t so much waking up to the bad news as going to bed on a nightmare. “I know why it happened,” says another security worker. “It’s just like everything: corruption, money. Things are getting privatized and taken away from the people. Now it’s underhanded games. It’s evil, it is.”

Up a muddy slick by the Sonic Stage, Liverpudlian students Tristan and Sophie look horrified when they hear the news and offer a surprisingly sharp critique (given that they’ve just tumbled out of the silent disco). “I think a lot of me friends will lose their jobs,” says Tristan. “The single market’s probably one of the greatest assets Europe’s got, and you take the advantages with the disadvantages.” He laughs in shock. “I feel sick about it.” An Australian thirtysomething named Turner has a different take, declaring that it’s a good thing, because the rest of Europe will see that they don’t have to pay money to Brussels “unnecessarily.” When pushed, he admits that he just heard that off “some fella” at the silent disco headphones return booth.

A few restless hours later, reality lurches sharply back into focus when a bloke in an adjoining tent declares, “Good morning, racist Britain.” Prime Minister David Cameron has now resigned, and everyone’s talking about the shambles in Westminster, though suggestions that the general festival mood is downbeat are overstated. It’s more that even the vaguest display of unity—of which there’s tons at Glastonbury—becomes painfully poignant: Walking past the Leftfield tent, Glastonbury’s center of political debate, Billy Bragg sings, “I’m not looking for a new England...”

Despite the festival’s left-wing credentials, it’s not too hard to find Leave voters. Outside the West Holts stage, Denise and Jane, both in their 50s, are split over the referendum. Jane voted out, as “a protest vote against the way the EU is run.” She doesn’t think that the likes of UKIP leader Nigel Farage and potential Tory leader Boris Johnson can run the country any better than the EU, but says she won’t be able to know whether she regrets her decision “for 20 years.” Denise voted in, mostly because she was “scared to leave” and thinks it should never have gone to a public vote: “How can anyone vote on a spectrum of yes or no?”