Buy Glasto tickets

Over half the 137,500 places have already been snapped up

06 October 2008 - Fans wanting to go to Glastonbury 2009 can buy their tickets now.

The rules have changed so you can either buy your full weekend ticket for £175 or you can put down a £50 deposit to reserve your place.

And more than half of the tickets for the festival next year were sold or reserved, after they went on sale yesterday (5 October) .

This is the first time tickets available so early, and organiser Michael Eavis says: "'There's such a rush on the 1st of April always and for the last ten years, for sort of two hours it's been panic and mayhem. 200,000 people were not able to get through the system because it was all log jammed, so we thought we'd fan it out a bit."

The usual mad dash to get tickets didn't happen in 2008; years of wet weather and the controversial headliner, Jay Z, were blamed on sluggish ticket sales. But Michael reckons there's also other reasons for poor ticket take up.

'We're competing with a lot more shows as well, so we're going on earlier, so that people have a chance to buy into Glastonbury early.

"There was all this who-ha about Jay Z, wasn't there? Which was hardly fair really. So that was going on for some time. But in the end, I mean Jay Z was absolutely brilliant," he told the BBC.

'So we've got a more conventional line up this year, I can assure you'.
Michael Eavis

2009 Line-up

We know that Franz Ferdinand and the Ting Tings have been confirmed for the 2009 line-up.

Michael says other names will be announced shortly: "My daughter Emily's in America now, actually, and she's just spinning around a few stuff and she's booking stuff. But I mean, we've got loads of stuff in the pipeline already, so it's going to be a superb line up. I guarantee it."

When asked whether there would be a big headliner for both the Friday and the Saturday and then an old favourite to headline the Sunday night, Michael said they've got many choices.

"There are lots of those around this summer, we've got about six of those to choose from, so we'll probably choose about three of them," Eavis explained.

There were rumours about the possibility of Barry Manilow taking the top spot.

When asked about it, Eavis laughed and said: "You've got to be joking. Come on. No, we've got three real toppers I'm going to settle for."

Chi Chi Izundu