Glastonbury Festival celebrates 25 years, with help from the Amiga.

The Glastonbury Festival is 25 years old this year, and to celebrate quarter of a century of music, mud and malarkey, the organisers have put together a special souvenir magazine.

The images on these pages are from a video of the 1971 festival, shot by David Putnam, the director best known for Chariots Of Fire. The festival organisers asked Amiga Format to capture some of the images to use in the 25th anniversary mag, so armed with V-Lab, Photogenics, ImageFX 2 and Art Department Professional we set about reliving the 1971 Glastonbury experience.

Farmer Michael Eavis was inspired to stage the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970 after hedge-hopping his way into a 1969 event at the Shepton Mallet showground featuring Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and various other rock fuddy duddies. He contacted an agent and persuaded the likes of T-Rex and Melanie to play in one of his fields and, well, that was it.

But then a group of hippies decided they wanted to hold a festival in Somerset. The story goes that one of the hairy, happy folk was sitting on top of Glastonbury Tor one morning, communing with nature and wondering where to hold the festival, when he spotted a rainbow rising from Worthy Farm. Aha, he thought. Now there's a sign if ever I saw one. Man.

A more cynical explanation is that the hippy people knew that Eavis was amenable to holding another festival, so they persuaded him to let them do it for him.

The hippies rented the farm house, wandered about the place naked, made large vegetarian meals, tinkled those little Tibetan bell things, took huge amounts of drugs (allegedly) and generally did the things that hippies did before they became magazine publishers, High Court judges and Members Of Parliament.

Anyway, the second festival took place with the likes of Arthur Brown, Traffic, Hawkwind and The Pink Fairies strumming away on The Pyramid stage and it has been going strong ever since.

Here's how Nick Veitch did the business on a copy of a copy of a copy of David Putnam's Glastonbury Fayre

1. Using a decent video recorder (ie my own) and a copy of ADPro, individual frames were grabbed from the video using the V-Lab hardware and the V-Lab loader from ADPro.

2. Because we had ImageFX 2 in the office, I decided to use that to adjust colour balance, contrast and so on. Sort of image preprocessing if you like. The results were then saved out as JPEGs.

3. Because of the poor quality of the tape (not to mention the original film), I removed some glitches and interference using Photogenics. Some images were smooth-scaled for better print quality.