English Music Festivals

Music festivals have become a highlight of many people's year. Whether you like Indie, Heavy Metal, Jazz, Folk or Opera, somewhere in England there will be an English music festival playing the music you like.

Glastonbury is England's most famous music festival and the largest green field festival in the world.

Even though many modern festivals have based on the Glastonbury format, none can match it in terms of size and importance.

The line-up is usually spectacular: revellers could watch top performers like Bruce Springsteen, Muse, Paul Young, Lady Gaga, the Specials, Lily Allen, Crosby, Stills & Nash and numerous others.

As well as music, Glastonbury is also home to many performance artists and features a wide range of circus, comedy and dance as well as many other forms of art. As many as a hundred and eighty thousand music lovers and seven hundred artist have appeared at a single Glastonbury festival.

It was initiated by Michael Eavis, the owner of the site on which the festival takes place, in 1970. Back then it was known as the Piltdown Festival and was attended by 1500 people.

The town of Glastonbury had a reputation for putting on lectures, recitals and concerts since the early part of the twentieth century. Since then, many of the best artists in the world have appeared at the festival; some of them establishing careers as a result of their appearance at Glastonbury. It has also become one of the most sought after gigs for any performer in any genre.

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Opera fans will know all about the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, which takes place at the Glyndebourne Country House in Sussex and has been held almost without a break since 1934.

Famous for its productions of Mozart, the Christie family have established Glyndebourne as the home of many of the finest operas ever staged in the twentieth century.

The London Philharmonic orchestra is the main resident orchestra. And performances take place between mid May and the end of August.

In 2009, the performance schedule included Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Purcell's The Fairy Queen, Donizetti's L'elisir amore and Antonin Dvorak's romantic opera Rusalka.

Creamfields takes place on the August Bank Holiday in Daresbury, near Runcorn in Cheshire. It began in 1998 and features some of the world`s best dance acts and DJs.

Since that time, this English music festival has expanded across the globe and events have been held as far away as Spain, Uruguay, Portugal, Chile, Brazil and Poland. Many of the country`s festival goers regard Creamfields as the closing festival event of the Summer in the UK.

The Cheltenham Jazz Festival began in 1996. It attempts to challenge the boundaries set by many of the other jazz festivals, by bringing together a wide range of jazz styles ranging from Big Band Orchestras to some of the more pop based artists who may crossover into the Jazz genre.

It also encourages new artists and has a reputation for creativity and innovation, as well as staging some of the foremost artists of the genre.

If metal music is more your style, then you may find yourself making your way to Donnington Park for the Download Festival which is held at the end of spring. The event runs for three days, ending each day with a headline act.

Download started in 2003 and the aim was to replace the Monsters of Rock festival which had been held between 1980 and 1996 and which was only held for one day.

And if you'd rather listen to Folk, then you should add the Sidmouth Folk Festival to your calendar of English music festivals. Held during the first week of August, this year sees performances from Crucible, the Oysterband, Eliza Carthy, Pendragon, the Lark Rise Band and many others.

In addition to the main events of the summer, which include the Reading and Leeds Festivals, there are a whole range of smaller English music festivals which are held at various times in the year.

Some of the smaller events, which are nonetheless popular, include the Didmarton Bluegrass Festival which has seen some of the biggest names in Bluegrass music perform. The Didmarton Festival is held the weekend after the August Bank Holiday.

Such is the popularity of the festivals that it is advisable to book festival tickets well in advance, as they can sell out - as with Glastonbury - within a matter of hours.