Are Glastonbury acts getting older?

Earlier today, Ben Judah tweeted this intriguing nugget of cultural criticism:

Paul McCartney headlining Glastonbury is so ridiculous it is like it was invented specifically to be the lede for an essay on how culture got stuck and exhausted.

— Ben Judah (@b_judah) June 27, 2022

There’s something of a trend at the moment to describe ‘our’ culture (whether that’s just British or broader) as being stuck in a rut, retreading the same old concepts which are themselves often many decades old. So it’s inevitable that some have picked up on McCartney’s Saturday night performance at Glastonbury as proof of this. Others have pushed back with the reasonable point that the other two headliners – Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar – are both fresh, young artists who are hardly trading on nostalgic pastiches.

One way of answering this question is to understand how far this is actually a trend, or whether Macca is something of an outlier. This is especially true given that the suggestion is usually that our supposed cultural recycling is relatively novel. With that in mind, I have looked at all the Glastonbury headliners from 1995 onwards to plot how the average of the career length of the three performers for each of these years has changed over time. Before I get into what the data shows, some explanations of how I’ve worked it out:

• I couldn’t find a list of ‘headliners’ per se – I’ve taken the top listed performers on the Pyramid Stage for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from this Wikipedia article.

• ‘Career length’ is the time in years between the year of the performance and the year when the artist appeared on the UK Official Charts for albums for the first time, as a proxy for when they first ‘made it’ to any significant degree. E.g. Pulp formed in 1978 and made three albums on small independent labels between 1983 and 1992, but they made their first commercially successful album His ‘n’ Hers in 1994. This approach slightly underestimates the longevity of older acts from a time when singles were more important, as well as non-UK artists like Bruce Springsteen who enjoyed success abroad before they charted in the UK, but it doesn’t change the overall picture.

• I’ve tried to count where solo artists have been in bands before their individual careers (so for McCartney, I count from the release of Please Please Me in 1963 rather than McCartney in 1970. Conversely, for performances by groups with members who had already enjoyed success with other collaborations or individually, I start the clock from the first chart appearance with the new ensemble.

• I’ve done all of this in about 45 minutes on the back of a fag packet, so there are bound to be mistakes.

So, with that in mind, what does the trend show?

2022 is something of an outlier, but it’s not the ‘oldest’ Glastonbury line-up – that honour goes to 2009 where the combination of Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Blur tipped the average career length to just over 30 years. The ‘youngest’ headliners were in 1997, where The Prodigy, Radiohead, and Ash all played (although Steve Winwood was originally booked to play the Sunday evening slot).

The overall trend between the mid-1990s and the 2020s is clear, with average career length having increased noticeably. However, as often with trends derived from somewhat noisy data, it’s challenging to tell whether this is a continuing slope upwards or, alternatively, whether the average career length increased steadily up to around 2010 where – 2022 aside – it has since stabilised at around 20 years (which often, but not always, is pushed upwards by one very well established act like The Cure or The Who). Insofar as looking to the most publicised acts at a single music festival can tell us anything about our wider culture, it seems that we will need to wait and see what the 2020s hold.

For my own part, I’m a little sceptical of Judah’s contention (which in fairness I don’t think he intends us to take entirely seriously). While it’s true that commercially successful films come from a smaller number of genres and are frequently retreading decades old intellectual property, the same can’t be said for music. As I said on Twitter, if Paul McCartney’s appearance at Glastonbury was a sign of being stuck in a musical rut then you would expect more broadly a dominance of the charts by groups of men with guitars, something which is in fact less true than ever. I’ll finish, then, by noting that the second ‘youngest’ line-up in my data set, from 1995, features the one group most commonly accused of imitating The Fab Four.