I won’t risk my safety by seeing Charli XCX at Glastonbury 2025

Having been eight times, I’d never felt unsafe at Glastonbury. 

Murmurs of crowds becoming claustrophobic and even potentially dangerous felt like a myth or unfortunate chaos that belonged in the past.

That was until I was in the crush to get to Sugababes.

In 2022, they were performing at the Avalon stage, a pop-friendly area with my name written all over it. It has seen some of the greatest artists from the Smash Hits era finally make it to Worthy Farm, when it would have been unthinkable to see them on the bill 20 years ago.

The Avalon stage has a capacity of around 3,000 people and Sugababes were playing in the early evening. They’ve had six number one singles, four platinum albums and headlined the 02 Arena this year – clearly a 3,000 capacity stage wasn’t going to accommodate one of the most successful artists on the Glastonbury bill.

But somehow we managed to make it into the stage. I couldn’t see Mutya, Keisha or Siobhan at any point but we made it in when thousands of others didn’t, and endured the fresh hell of being part of the stampede trying to get into the tent. 

The Astroworld crush, which killed 10 people during rapper Travis Scott’s gig, was just the year before and while Glastonbury would never let anything like that happen, it was still suffocating enough to cling onto friends and begin to panic. 

It was the first time I’ve ever been genuinely quite scared at Glastonbury and was sure I would never find myself in the same precarious situation again.

Jump two years and Sugababes were back at Glastonbury, this time bumped up to the West Holts Stage – a significant upgrade with a 30,000 capacity, but still, it was obviously going to be another health and safety nightmare.