‘Health and safety wouldn’t allow it now’: the stories behind Glastonbury’s wildest stunts
Daily Telegraph
But forget publicity stunts. In 1990 there was a real stunt at Glastonbury that knocks all the preceding examples into a cocked druid’s hat. A Frenchman called Didier Pasquette walked to the pinnacle of the Pyramid stage on a tightrope. It was part of a death-defying display by theatre troupe Archaos, who remain the only circus act to ever perform on Glastonbury’s main stage. People involved can still scarcely believe what they saw. “You couldn’t do it now. You just couldn’t get it past health and safety. It’s a different world,” says Mark Borkowski, the PR veteran who looked after Archaos at the time. “More or less every performance with Archaos, somebody got injured.”
Pasquette didn’t. He was a world renowned tightrope walker who studied with Philippe Petit, who walked between the former Twin Towers in New York in 1974 (as immortalised in the 2008 film Man on Wire). And he stunned tens of thousands of fans waiting to see The Cure. “Anybody who saw it didn’t quite understand what was happening because it wasn’t billed, it was a big surprise. It was an art event in many ways,” says Borkowski. “The old Pyramid stage had a bit of a flat top to it. Didier walked up the side [on the wire], across the top and down the other side. He went to the pinnacle – there was lots of fire and explosions. And then The Cure came on.”
The event happened because Michael Eavis “was obsessed with Archaos, who between 1989 and 1992 were the most radical and life-changing act for many people, me included”, Borkowski says. Eavis has apparently said it was one of his favourite ever Glastonbury moments. “I don’t think they had any clothes on either,” recalled one witness, Polly Bradford, in 2004. It makes stencilling cows seem tame.