Culture | Music The first time Emily Eavis ’s team contacted the New York artist and digital entrepreneur Jordan Watson – or Love Watts as he’s known to his 2 million Instagram followers – about a possible Glastonbury collaboration, he didn’t respond. “I’d heard of it,” he says of the festival, “but I had no idea what it was all about.” When they hit him up a second time, he rang his British manager, Posey Collis, and asked her: “Is this Glastonbury thing worth it?” The friendly and slickly-dressed 44-year old, with a tattoo of a prancing bull covering one side of his head, is sitting with me outside KXGym in Chelsea.
He thankfully ended up responding to Eavis’s call and is fresh from curating Glastonbury’s inaugural Terminal 1 installation, a life-size replica of Heathrow’s arrivals hall made up of four stacked shipping containers, complete with a check-in desk, security and passport checks. Separately he also created (in collaboration with designer and animator Tobias Lever) the on-site posters for Idris Elba’s charity, Don’t Stop Your Future. Eavis's focus for Terminal 1 was to tell the story of travel from an immigrant’s perspective; for attendees to experience first-hand how demeaning and tough the experience can be for anyone arriving from a third-world country.
Last Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury, I queued for an hour to get in. Word had quickly spread about Terminal 1 across the festival and people were turning up in droves. It was.