Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson has vowed never to bring his band to Glastonbury Festival after dismissing it as “the most bourgeois thing on the planet”.

The heavy metal group’s frontman will not be following Metallica to a headline slot anytime soon because in Dickinson’s eyes, the Worthy Farm music extravaganza has become too mainstream.

“Personally I have no interest in going to Glastonbury,” he told the Daily Star. “In the days when Glasto was an alternative festival it was quite interesting, but anywhere Gwyneth Paltrow goes and you can live in an air-conditioned yurt is not for me.”

Dickinson does, however, enjoy performing at other rock festivals, but he claims that journalists care little for his kind of event.

Despite sending “thousands” of people to cover Glastonbury, the 55-year-old thinks the BBC simply “can’t be arsed to turn up to Sonisphere or Download with a camper van and a hand-held”.

The “Fear of the Dark” singer insisted that Iron Maiden will “leave the middle classes to do Glastonbury – and the great unwashed will decamp to Knebworth, drink a lot of beer and have fun”.


Iron Maiden are set to top the bill at Sonisphere the week after Glastonbury, along with Metallica. Dickinson will be staging and taking part in a dramatic First World War dogfight in the sky shortly before his band take to the stage.

Perhaps some of Dickinson’s claims are not too misplaced. Earlier this week it was revealed that Glastonbury organisers have spent £600,000 on stink-free “super loos”, while VIP areas are on offer once again.

Metallica’s booking has been a matter of controversy in recent months, heightened by news of frontman James Hetfield’s involvement in a pro-hunting documentary.

But Glastonbury boss Michael Eavis has defended the US rockers, describing them as the “keenest” band ever to play the festival and insisting that they will put on “the best set of their lives”.