On Friday morning my wife got dressed up like Worzel Gummidge, put some bog roll in a bag and roared off in her Aston Martin to watch a bunch of useless teenagers singing in the rain at Glastonbury.

I think she may have gone mad. And she’s not alone. Helicopter companies all over the southwest have reported a booming demand for charters. Everyone in the de luxe tenting business is now on a beach in Barbados and all last week Brixton was doubtless awash with hedge fund managers and BBC programme controllers trying to buy drugs.

And getting the wrong sort. “Yeah, man. You gotta try some of this horse tranquilliser. It’ll even you out.” Honestly, I bet that this morning Glastonbury is full to overflowing with your accountant calling all the policemen pigs and trying to reverse onto a selection of other men, having ingested six gallons of crystal meth.

I understand the mentality, of course. You’re middle aged. You have children. Your life is so boring you actually look forward to the arrival of the milkman. And you fancy, for just one weekend, the idea of transporting yourself from the humdrum and into the fetid sleeping bag of your youth.

BACKGROUND

• Glastonbury squelches to life

• Big Brother comes to Glastonbury

• Police on watch as Glastonbury fills up

• 'Mudbath ahoy' for Glastonbury

• Stella's vests set to rock Glastonbury

Going down a storm at Glasto

Kicking off our Glastonbury special, the Killers tell Sophie Heawood how a Venice tornado prepared them for Worthy Farm

Glastonbury 2007

One wonders if a cull of career-conscious indie rock bands such as The Killers might benefit future line-ups

• Glastonbury festival: our essential guide

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I have no problem with that. I’m not going to spend the next foot of newsprint berating you for not acting your age and laughing at you as you try to remember how to roll a joint. But I do have a problem with Glastonbury.

Rock music is ours. By which I mean it belongs to anyone born between 1950 and 1971. We invented it, and we made the rules. You sit in a darkened room, in headphones, listening to Dark Side of the Moon, trying to work out whether it’s about hope, death or despair. And not just a lot of nonsense from five blokes who were out of their heads.

For us, concerts were all about spectacle and volume. Jimmy Page strapped a laser to his violin bow and split the sky with a noise so huge that today it would not be allowed through the amps without a hi-vis jacket and half a dozen warning notices.

The Who rocked up at Wembley one year with a laser and hologram show of such immensity that officials were genuinely scared that it might bring down airliners on their final approach into Heathrow. You watched that while Daltrey belted his way through a rendition of “Listening to you, I get the music” and it made the hairs on your lungs swell up.

These are the sensations my wife is hoping to relive this weekend. She wants to be drunk, wet, deafened and assaulted by a blizzard of showmanship and spectacle. For one glorious weekend she wants to pretend she’s eight.

But what she’ll get is a bunch of reedy-voiced, stick-thin teenagers who’ve nicked what is rightfully ours and mangled it out of all recognition. A bunch of useless, talentless ne’er-do-wells who’d love to play you their next song but only after they’ve delivered a sermon on the evils of corporate America, global warming and how we should all club together to help some poor African kid with flies in his eyes. Oh, for God’s sake. Either turn on the lasers or eff off.

Of course there was a lot of peace and love and get the troops out of Vietnam at Woodstock, but that didn’t matter because the people on the stage were in tune with the people in the audience. At Glastonbury this weekend it’s all out of kilter.

It’s billed as a hippie festival and is, of course, sponsored by the newspaper of choice for those who like tie dye – The Guardian. So naturally visitors are urged to leave their tents behind so they can be shipped to the Third World. They are asked to try horse dung as an alternative to Disprin. And some will be encouraged to hunt down ley lines using a forked stick. “They’re how pigeons navigate, you know, man.”

But of the 177,000 people due to attend – at £145 a pop – only six will be druids called Merlin. The rest will have Volvos and Bell JetRangers. And we don’t need ley lines to navigate because we’re clever and rich and we have sat nav.

Does anyone really imagine for a moment that my wife gives two stuffs about global warming? She certainly didn’t appear to be all that bothered on Thursday evening when, during the great carbon-saving switch-off, I ran round the house furiously turning on every light, hair dryer, dishwasher and toaster.

She can’t like the music very much either. Certainly I’d rather spend the day listening to the score from Confessions of a Window Cleaner. And then Shirley Bassey will come on.

Sweet divine Jesus. What’s that all about? I would walk naked over a field of molten steel to avoid the shouty Welshster, but there she is, providing a respite for a bunch of delusional parents on a ley line in bloody Somerset. And I bet you a million pounds she gets the same rapturous reception afforded to Rolf Harris when he cropped up at Glastonbury a couple of years ago with his cardboard Aboriginal version of Stairway to Heaven. It’s all just too ridiculous.

I’m not proposing for a moment we ban festivals. There are some good ones, where old bands, who know what they’re doing, play old favourites to old people on rugs. But I do think the time has come for new bands to be banned from playing or performing rock music. It’s ours. They should go and invent their own plaything.

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