Silver Hayes
Glastonbury Festival’s reborn Dance Village – home to several different Dance venues, all collectively grouped under the title of Silver Hayes.
As the original titled incarnation name suggests, it hosts mostly dance acts, to use the broadest term. This area alone is bigger than some other music festival’s whole “arena” area.
Silver Hayes feature six stages: Sonic, Wow, Gully, The Blues, Pussy Parlure and BBC Introducing. Continually innovating, expect the best music sourced from the four points of the globe. Sonic, being the headlining tent, is the largest tent in the area and known to hold a 7,000 people capacity, it also hosts a silent disco every night.
For many years, Glastonbury had one huge 6,000 capacity Dance Tent. This was the venue for historic sets by the likes of Fat Boy Slim, The Chemical Brothers and Scissor Sisters, and was also the scene of the infamous Toilet Truck incident in 1998 when one of the sludge gulper lorries was brought in to pump out mud and was accidentally set to blow instead of suck!
The history of Silver Hayes starts in 1995 with just one tent called the Dance Tent that had a capacity of 1,500 people. One of the most memorable events was the incredible Massive Attack takeover.
For the next 10 years the Dance Stage grew in size and capacity to a huge tent that held 15,000-20,000 people. One of the proudest moments was hosting Daft Punk back in 1997, a truly memorable and atmospheric experience.
In 2004 it was decided that the Dance tent could no longer cater for the many genres of dance music and so the Dance Village was created. This ran from 2005 to 2011. After the fallow year in 2012, along with new venues and new layout came a new name. In 2013 the newly revamped Dance Village was welcomed and Silver Hayes was born.
2017 will be the fifth instalment of Silver Hayes and it continues to build on the success of the Dance Village. Having had a change of name, more people have visited the area as the new audience explores the many genres of music available. Many acts within the Dance genre are featured across many of the venues as well as some of the best global acts. Malcolm is a great supporter of live bands, which is one of the reasons there are more acts than DJs on the Silver Hayes line-up.
