There may be just over two weeks to go before the first act strikes up from the Pyramid Stage but thousands of tickets still remain unsold for this year's Glastonbury Festival.
The event, which saw a desperate scramble for the 177,000 weekend wristbands last year, has been hit by an unexpected decline in demand.
Today, up to 10,000 remaining wristbands costing £155 each will go on sale at HMV stores at seven cities across Britain. The festival's promoter, Emily Eavis, whose father Michael founded the summer institution 38 years ago at his Somerset farm, blamed quagmire conditions at recent festivals for poor sales.
"It's almost certainly down to bad weather," she said. "We've had three years of quite heavy conditions and people are kind of making their minds up according to the weather I think. You can really notice that when it's warm weather the tickets do go faster."
But Glastonbury has also been hit hard by negative publicity surrounding some of its headline acts – not least the rapper Jay-Z, the highly commercial star who recently signed a £75m promotion deal and who some critics say flies in the face of the festival's founding hippie ethos.
Glastonbury has also suffered from the increasing number of festivals across Britain, though other big events were yesterday reporting buoyant sales. Glastonbury staff were still hoping that a final burst of publicity would help shift the tickets. Potential festival-goers will still be required to bring photo ID to the HMV stores and at the gates to prevent passes falling into the hands of the touts.
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