At Glastonbury Festival 1971 returns us the album with the lost photos taken by Paul Misso at the legendary music festival. On September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix died in London. The very next day Glastonbury Festival debuted with a two-day festival attended by only 1,500. The following year, organizers Andrew Kerr and Arabella Churchill transformed the humble festival into ‘Glastonbury Fair’, a five-day summer solstice celebration of creativity and community at Worthy Farm in the mystical Vale of Avalon.

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Glastonbury’s layering of stories mirrors the country’s fate. “It was here that St Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought his young nephew Jesus and later to have returned with the holy relics to found the first Christian church in Britain,” Kerr wrote in 1971. “It was here that King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are said to have begun their quest for the Holy Grail, it was here that the ancient druids were said to have been initiated into the mysteries of the universe. It’s a magical place.”

In 1971, David Bowie, Traffic, Hawkwind, Melanie, Fairport Convention and Quintessence took the stage, among others, playing to an audience of around 12,000. Among them was photographer Paul Misso, who was taking pictures for ‘Glastonbury Fayre’, a documentary by Nicolas Roeg. Over the course of 10 days, Misso took 7,000 photographs from which he and Roeg selected 160 for the film. But the documentary was shelved and the photos languished in a drawer… until the publication of the album ‘In the Vale of Avalon: Glastonbury Festival 1971’ by Idea Books.