Glastonbury Festival 2025: From Joe Wicks to crowds, here are the best pictures from Worthy Farm
Jack Cullen, who lives in north-west London, embarked on the cycling trip from Edinburgh to the famous festival with his childhood friend George 'GK' Kershaw, 33, on May 30.
He said: 'It feels amazing and somewhat emotional in a way. I think these things are always, you forget what you're doing during it, and then you realise 'oh, we've just been doing this for the last month, and now we're here'.
'And it's kind of as simple as that. So it feels, overall, it just feels really, really, really good.'
Mr Cullen, 30, said the pair have faced 'horrendous wind and rain' in the past month, but joked that his Birkenstocks had held up.
Along the route, which took him through areas including the Lake District, Manchester and Liverpool, he performed in quirky venues, including a sauna, and also held an intimate gig for one of his most loyal fans.
He said: 'We went over to Liverpool, played a little gig, to one fan in particular actually, who always comes to my shows, drives down from Liverpool to London. So I cycled four hours to go meet him and play him some of the new tunes face to face. So that was a really, really special one.'
Mr Cullen is scheduled to perform at Glastonbury Festival on June 29 at 2.50pm on the Wishing Well stage.
Among the festival's other highlights is a giant boombox-shaped toilet, co-designed by Sir Rod Stewart.
WaterAid's Boombox Bog houses a toilet that sits behind the tape deck of a giant blue boombox decorated with leopard print, a pattern often worn by Sir Rod.
The veteran rockstar, 80, will perform in front of thousands of music fans on Sunday when he plays the coveted tea-time legends slot on the Pyramid Stage, which sits nearby to the toilet.
The Maggie May singer said: 'I've spent my life singing to packed arenas and festival crowds, but nothing hits a high note quite like clean water and a decent loo.
'They might not be sexy, but they're life-changing.
'That's why I've teamed up with WaterAid to bring our funky Boombox Bog to Glastonbury Festival and shine a light on the importance of these everyday essentials that millions still live without.
'Together, we're creating change that's gonna last forever.'
Here, The Scotsman selects some of the best images so far from this year's Glastonbury Festival.
1 . Revellers arrive at the Glastonbury Festival during a rain shower
Rain on Me | PA Photo Sales
2 . An aerial view of the Glastonbury Festival site has thousands of festival goers descend on Pilton, Somerset
Aerial view | Tom Wren / SWNS Photo Sales
3 . People work out during a fitness exercise session as Joe Wicks performs on the Gateway stage
In out in out shake it all about | PA Photo Sales
4 . People get their hair done in a double decker bus salon during the Glastonbury Festival
Haircut 100 | PA Photo Sales
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Scotsman
10 hours ago
- Scotsman
Covermounts: How a simple marketing tool led to the soundtracks of our lives
This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement. Whatever happened to those CDs we used to get on the front of magazines, and why did the marketing tool die out? Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... They were the means by which many music fans discovered what would become their favourite acts. The covermount, the CD on the front of magazines, saw a golden age in the '90s, yet digital technology once again affected a physical format. Benjamin Jackson looks back the the history of the marketing tool, and offers his 'holy bible' CD he's kept for nearly 30 years. It was the foremost way before digital technology that we ended up discovering our favourite new acts without sitting through commercial breaks on the radio and television. And for those of us who used to grab old cassette tapes and cover the holes at the top, it was one of the ways we could have our favourite songs without the start or end being interjected by a radio host. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Yeah, home taping was killing music, but having a DJ ask you to 'sing along' live on air before the drop to 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was a worse crime in our minds. The irony being you're piecing together a Queen album to replace the one you copied over with Bone Thugs -n-Harmony and Skee-Lo. That probably is just me on that occasion. Sorry, mum – didn't want you to find out this way. But I digress; covermounts are those CDs that you would find on the front of, well, every magazine in the '90s and early '00s, be it the best that the metal world had to offer or retrospectives on 'Cool Britannia' and the artists that influenced a newer generation of artists. They, ultimately, were a promotion tool, though in hindsight, at the time, some of us felt it was altruistic in our young age that record labels would give us music, for free, without commercial interruptions. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad They were a means to discover new music before file sharing came around; so what happened to the covermount CD and how popular was the format at its peak? | Canva/Discogs But it worked – those acts that graced the covers of the CDs on the covers of magazines did end up getting a lot more attention than, say, those within the back pages of the NME and the like. Some of us still own those very CDs that became a formative experience in a world of musical discovery, something cranks like me complain doesn't feel like that experience really exists anymore. Excuse me while I shake my fist at the sky. Now I'm in my 40s. So, how did the covermount first come to fruition? Why did it die out, and Benjii – what is the CD sampler that you still own from way back in 1998 that you considered your 'holy bible' when it came to the metal scene? Join me as we wade through the excessive amount of plastic and revisit the halcyon days of the covermount. That is, unless you had it taken from the front of the publication before even purchasing said item… Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad C86 and the dawn of covermount stars Though the boom of the covermount occurred much later, its roots can be traced back to the late '70s and early '80s, but at that stage, they weren't used for music. Instead, during the dawn of the home computer, magazines such as Your Sinclair or Amstrad Action would regularly provide covermounts that were vital for hobbyists and programmers. Though they were not compact discs, they were instead in the form of cassette tapes (remember loading those up on the Commodore 64?) and then later floppy disks. Unlike record labels, which often gave away samplers, publishers would offer full versions of games, applications, and utilities. Considering that learning programming like BASIC was often a tedious, trial-and-error approach, these covermounts served as a kind of guaranteed 'day-one' working version, a far cry from the patches and updates gamers expect today. The success of the early computer covermounts didn't go unnoticed, as the music press saw the potential in using a similar model to promote new and often obscure artists directly to their readers. The first iconic example of this was the C86 cassette, released by the British music magazine NME in 1986 - hence the 'punny' name. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad What started as a simple compilation of independent British bands became an accidental landmark; featuring 22 tracks including the likes of Primal Scream and The Wedding Present, it was meant to be a snapshot of the emerging underground guitar pop scene. Instead, it was a massive success, and the collection of jangly guitars, melodic hooks, and a distinctly DIY aesthetic became a defining moment for a new sound. It inadvertently gave a name to an entire subgenre: 'C86 indie pop'. However, unlike those found on the front of magazines in the future, readers instead had to order the cassette by mail, sending in a coupon and a small fee. 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They could be a tribute to an iconic artist, a "best of the year" roundup, or an introduction to a new wave of bands, giving readers a tangible snapshot of a moment in music history. For a generation of fans, a covermount CD from a trusted magazine was the fastest and most efficient way to discover a new favourite band or genre. This was a win-win for everyone involved. For publishers, a covermount could instantly boost sales—a Sunday newspaper once sold an extra half a million copies with a single Beach Boys compilation. For record labels, it was a low-cost, high-impact way to promote new acts and sell albums. And for us, the readers, it was a gateway to new musical worlds, a physical object that became a cherished part of our collections and, ultimately, the soundtrack to our lives. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad But the concept was not without its detractors; one of the biggest concerns was, as we all became environmentally conscious, the sheer volume of single-use plastic was seen as a wasteful burden, with the production of the CDs and their non-recyclable elements becoming difficult for consumers - and therefore publishers - to ignore. Some arguments giving away music merely 'devalued' it, and by bundling the hottest hits to come our way, music became 'throwaway' rather than the piece of art people paid for. This sentiment grew especially fierce as artists were hit by a double blow; while covermounts offered little in the way of royalties, the dawn of digital piracy in the late '00s was seen by some as an even greater threat than the practice of giving away music had only helped enable. In an age where people craved something new and shiny, covermounts just weren't cutting it anymore. The thrill of having a new album on a disc was quickly replaced by the even greater excitement of album leaks, which became more and more prominent. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad These weren't just new; they were incredibly "shiny"—unpolished files not yet fit for human consumption, a form of contraband that felt more valuable than the perfectly curated CD. The digital age and the decline of the Covermount The final nails in the covermount's coffin were logistical and technological. The production and distribution of millions of CDs became an increasingly expensive and cumbersome burden for publishers. As the convenience of digital downloads and eventually streaming services like Spotify took over, the sheer volume of single-use plastic became an unsustainable and wasteful burden that was difficult for both publishers and consumers to ignore. Magazines that would regularly feature covermounts, such as NME or Q Magazine, eventually stopped giving them away in the early 2010s. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Publishers, seeing that CDs had become a simple expense no longer tenable in a digital landscape, decided to shift their focus more toward digital platforms than print. After all, where would you mount a CD on a newsletter in your inbox? Answers on a postcard, please. While the golden age of the covermount is now a distant memory for most, it never truly died. For some, like those who still buy Classic Rock magazine, the practice lives on as a nostalgic nod to a bygone era, and there are still publications out there that offer covermounts, be it to celebrate a musical occasion or as part of a special edition of a publication. But for everyone else, it remains a memory of a time when the music you loved was delivered to your door or from a corner shop once a month, a physical object that served as a gateway to the soundtracks of our lives. What was on that covermount CD that made you keep it, Benjii? Thanks for making it all this way, and glad that you asked – though I'd have mentioned it anyway. Chekhov's covermount, am I right? Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The CD in question, though, would be Kerrang! 1998, from issue #728, which featured System of a Down, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Garbage... pretty much, all the bands I still listen to and love today. Check out the Deezer playlist above to get a feel for just how important that covermount was for me and other like-minded metalheads of the time
Scotsman
12 hours ago
- Scotsman
Edinburgh Book Festival round-up David Olusoga Anne Sabba Ta-Nehisi Coates Michelle de Kretser
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The day started with Auschwitz and ended with toxic lesbian vampires and on the way took in racism on at least two continents, Spinoza, the mythical Hindu Saraswati river and an experimental novel that gave a very gentle kicking to Virginia Woolf. Say what you like about the Edinburgh book festival - and its middle Saturday wasn't particularly star-studded - but if you spend a day there, you don't half come out knowing a lot more than when you went in. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad One of the less well known faces in the Celebrity Traitors Castle will be David Olusoga. The British-Nigerian historian is Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester and a BAFTA winning film-maker. He's a 12/1 longshot for the Celebrity Traitors title. | AFP via Getty Images Anne Sabba's book The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz lifted only a small corner on the horrors of that place, but even that was enough. Anti-semitism ran even within the orchestra itself, its Polish prisoners (for whom the camp was originally built) refusing to share the food parcels their relatives sent them with their Jewish fellow-musicians. Jewish music was banned, but so too was Beethoven, too gloriously German to be sullied by inferior races. The music they did play - cheery marches, mainly - was, as Sabba pointed out, a form of torture. It didn't help the prisoners, who were kicked (or worse) if they fell out of step, didn't soften the hearts of the guards, and the 50 or so musicians it helped keep alive were either shunned by survivors or consumed by guilt. Real music is different. Mahler's niece Alma Rosé, who died in Auschwitz, was lead violinist in the women's orchestra and died there. She only seems to have made one recording, of the Bach Double Violin concerto in D Minor, with her virtuoso father, in 1928. Sabba played an excerpt. It's on YouTube: a bit scratchy, but beautiful and, when you think of everything that Alma's future was to hold, heartbreaking. All the time she was writing the book, Sabba said, she was thinking what she'd have done facing such a cataclysm. That's exactly what I found myself thinking listening to acclaimed African-American cultural commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates, for whom the cataclysm is racism. America was built on it, he said: worse, it still is. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad So is there no hope? asked a woman in the audience. No, he replied. 'There IS a whole African-American tradition of hope and I respect that, but whatever I am, I am the descendant of people who have been enslaved for 250 years... I have debts to pay and that motivates me more than anything.' To Coates, America's racism is systemic and its dominant narratives fundamentally flawed, and he sees echoes of both in Israel's treatment of Palestinians. 'Everyone always told me this is such a complex historical problem, that you'd need a PhD to understand what's happening in Ramallah. No, you don't. Sometimes we hide behind our intellect. If we see someone beating their child, the reasons don't matter, it's nothing to do with right or wrong, you just want them to stop.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad That might sound obvious, even banal, but Coates was brought up in the Black Power/vindicationalist tradition, and in The Message he acknowledges how much of this is echoed in Zionism. So now, charting what he calls the latest genocidal atrocity in Gaza - the 'deliberate' killing of the al-Jazeera journalists - he sees the danger of such dreams. Although he didn't take that thought as far as he does in the book, this was a fascinating event, with a far younger audience than usual and so many hands raised for questions that if they'd all been answered, we'd all still be there. Coates was chaired by David Olusoga, Britain's best TV historian (though he himself would say that the honour belongs to Simon Schama) and who signed off his own event with the news that not only will his excellent BBC Two series A House In Time soon be back on our screens but it will be set in Edinburgh. Olusoga's fascination with history began, he said, when his mother told him that Yoruba soldiers from Nigeria (where he was born but left aged five) had fought in the Second World War. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'At first I almost didn't believe her because I'd never heard anything about that. But I became fascinated with history because I felt there was a story being withheld from me.' It was. Take Captain Yavar Abbas, the 104-year-old who made Queen Camilla (and 'my brave king') cry at the service for the 80th anniversary of VJ Day last week. He was one of 2.5 million Indian soldiers to sign up. We don't hear too much about them. If the teaching of black history faces the kind of limits already being drawn up in America, he said, we might hear a lot less. The attacks on the National Trust 'which have been going on for the last five years by so-called patriots' may be a sign of things to come. Australian writer Michelle de Kretser has won all of her country's most glittering literary prizes, yet has a neat line in self-deprecation. Unlike her friend, novelist Deborah Levy, whose mind leaps like a chess knight, she said her own is predictable and purposeful, like a pawn. 'So here, I tried to do the leap.' 'Here' is her latest novel, Theory and Practice, 'my attempt to write a novel that reads like non-fiction', starting off like a conventional novel and morphing into an intriguing-sounding story of a mashup of memoir, essay, and a meditation on Virginia Woolf (and her casual racism to a Sri Lankan guest). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Canadian writer Madeleine Thien's The Book of Records, set in a fantastical, crumbling and placeless palace where 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza, eighth century Chinese poet Du Fu and American political theorist Hannah Arendt all help her young girl migrant protagonist. She did try introducing Virginia Woolf to the proceedings, she said, but it didn't work 'because she was double-booked in my friend Michelle's book'. British Indian writer Gurnaik Johal's debut novel Saraswati, which mixes myth, the politics of water and ecological collapse, is similarly ambitious. In it, the Indian government decides to bring a mythic river to life. For that, they to abrogate the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan – which is exactly what happened earlier this year. Prescient or what? Finally, as promised, to toxic lesbian vampires. The genre is new to me but VE Schwab is clearly its queen. Like Thien, she picks her three supernatural stars from across the centuries, but the baddest of them all is the oldest (500 years). Sabine is 'a mix of Lestat [from Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles] Villanelle [from Killing Eve] and Florence Welch from Florence and the Machine'. She dominates every space she enters, is unapologetic about her urges, 'and fulfils all my queer desire for villainy'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad For too long, Schwab said, lesbian fiction has concerned itself with likeability - in itself a form of self-censorship. She'd done that in her own life, when she started off as a young fantasy writer: 'I was a coward for such a long time, downplaying my sexuality because I wanted to succeed.' After 25 books, she's had enough of that: 'I'm in my Sabine era is what I'm saying.' Cue cheers from the audience - mainly female, mainly young, and clearly fans - as they charged off en masse to the signing tent and the mercifully vampire-free Edinburgh night. David Robinson
Scotsman
14 hours ago
- Scotsman
Will GTA 6 be delayed again? Take-Two CEO delivers verdict
GTA 6 is one of the most anticipated games of all-time 🎮 Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Grand Theft Auto VI is expected to release in 2026. Rockstar announced earlier this year it had pushed the game back. But will the highly anticipated title avoid further delays? It might not be hyperbole to say that Grand Theft Auto VI is the most highly anticipated game of all time. The long-awaited entry in the iconic franchise is due to arrive in 2026. Fans have been waiting for more than a decade since GTA V launched back on the Xbox 360 and PS3. During the wait since 2013 a lot has happened, including Rockstar releasing Red Dead Redemption 2 to massive acclaim. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad After being officially revealed in December 2023, following years of rumours and leaks, the game was due to land in 2025. Earlier in the year, however, it was delayed to May 2026, and fans might be worried about future delays. However, the CEO of Take-Two (the owners of Rockstar) has delivered a verdict. Here's all you need to know: Will GTA 6 be delayed again? Lucia is one of the main characters in Grand Theft Auto 6. | Rockstar Games Rockstar announced earlier in 2025 that it was pushing back the game to May 26, 2026 to allow further development. A second trailer followed and whet appetites for the game once again. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Grand Theft Auto VI is set to feature dual protagonists in the form of Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos. It will also return the action to Vice City, the site of 2002's GTA: Vice City, and the franchise's version of Florida: Leonida. Speaking about the chances of GTA 6 actually arriving on May 26, Take-Two's CEO delivered a 'confident' verdict. Strauss Zelnick also described it as an 'amazing game'. The Shortcut reports he said: 'My level of conviction is very, very high, obviously. We try not to pump expectations. 'Rockstar's whole stock and trade is to have these extraordinary expectations and still beat them. I know that's their goal. I know it's going to be an amazing game." Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad He continued: 'While I couldn't be more optimistic than I am, all of us have to do the work. We have to deliver something great to consumers and then the consumers are going to tell us just how great it is.' GTA 6 is set to launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. A PC release is expected at a further date.
