MAY | FEATURE
S
erious Stages’s headquarters is nestled
in rural Somerset in the picturesque
city of Wells, with a vista taking in the
historic cathedral tower and Glastonbury
Tor. We sat down over tea and biscuits to
look fondly back at three and a half decades
of staging.
We also stopped by Worthy Farm itself,
where the first skins were being installed
onto the skeleton Pyramid stage that has
laid silent for nearly two years. En route, we
bumped into the man himself Michael Eavis,
who shared his accounts of Serious’s humble
beginnings and subsequent rise to success.
Our trip concluded at the Corfields’ farm
where they proudly displayed some of the
2,500 trees they have recently planted.
Like his close friend, Glastonbury founder
Michael Eavis, Serious Stages’s founder
Steven Corfield also hails from a farming
background. And, like Eavis, his life – and
his wife and business partner Holly – took
a dramatic twist when a humble event in
Somerset ballooned into the world’s most
famous gatherings and they entered the
world of event staging.
Serious now employs more than 100
employees and service more than 200 global
events annually, but I was keen to go back
to the beginning, when Serious Stages
(originally called Upfront) was one of the
pioneers of Glastonbury Festival’s iconic
Pyramid Stage. From that first stage, the
Building the
Pyramid
Access caught up with Serious Stages’s Steven and Holly
Corfield, who are celebrating 35 years of business, and an
Industry Legend award at the Event Production Awards
Photography: Plaster
company will install more than 50 stages
and site structures across the 2019 festival.
How did it all begin?
SC: I was farming in Pilton, and my now
great friend Michael Eavis was farming on
one side of the village, with me on the other.
He had a bigger farm, and when I came down
in 1975, the first few festivals had already
occurred. But, it really got going in 1981 in a
larger way, when Michael took it on himself.
HC: The original Pyramid Stage was
funded by one of the festival founders
Andrew Kerr, who had some money left
to him, and didn’t want to be encumbered
by assets, so he put on a party with a stage
built out of scaffolding and tin. The second
one, in 1982 had a wooden framework which
later burnt down in 1994, just a few weeks
before the festival. We got a call at 4am in
the morning to help, as they were clearing
burning embers. Of course we got the stage
– one of our Orbits - and crew in place and
the festival went ahead as planned. It was
all hands on deck with a “show must go on”
attitude.
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