Simon Honywill: Sound designing Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage & Worthy Farm challenges

FOH engineer and system designer Simon Honywill has spoken to Headliner about designing the audio system for the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury – as well as three of its other stages – and how the Martin Audio system at their core continues to defy what many deem possible in the world of festival sound.

A veteran of the live production market, Honywill has applied his signature touch to a wide range of tours and events down the years. To date he has served in FOH capacities for the likes of Chris Rea, Goldfrapp, Katherine Jenkins and Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds to name a mere few, while his role as chief audio system designer at Glastonbury is one that he has held for more than a decade now. In addition to the Pyramid Stage, his remit also extends to the West Holts stage and two of Block 9’s dance stages.

At the time of our conversation, he is working at Henley-on-Thames at the annual Henley Festival, where he has kindly retired to his car to join us via Zoom for a chat about all things Glastonbury. And while Worthy Farm may well be in the rear-view mirror, he’s currently feeling the impact of a jam-packed summer season.

“I’m knackered,” he exhales when asked how he’s bearing up. “I’ve been doing this festival since 1993. The site is highly aesthetic with lots of structure and art, there is a stage built in a river, we’ve had Westlife, Chic, Rag N’ Bone Man, and we have a bunch of other stages that are smaller, but it’s a really eclectic mix of stuff going on, from dance music to an emerging talent stage, which has been really interesting.”

Like most festivals, however, it pales next to the seemingly endless expanse that is Glastonbury. Drawing over 200,000 festival goers, it appeared, as it seems to be every year, to be a record-breaking outing, with regard to both audiences in the Pilton countryside and those enjoying the festivities from the comfort of their sofas.

Festival closer Elton John, headlining the Pyramid Stage on Sunday night, attracted what certainly appeared to be one of, if not the biggest Pyramid Stage crowds the festival has ever seen, as he marked his last ever UK performance with a set for the ages. You can read our review of his set and the 2023 festival as a whole here. 

Fellow Glastonbury headliners Arctic Monkeys and Guns N’ Roses, as well as a raft of other stellar acts including the likes of Foo Fighters aka ‘The ChurnUps’, Royal Blood, Lizzo, Lewis Capaldi, Queens of the Stone Age, Rick Astley, Blondie, The Pretenders, Cat Stevens, Young Fathers, Hot Chip, Lana Del Rey, and many more also ensured highest ever viewing figures across the BBC’s live coverage and on demand content via iPlayer and the BBC Sounds app.

Indeed, Glastonbury 2023 shattered previous digital audience records for viewing and listening on the BBC - with content streamed a record 50.3m times across BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds to date – up 47% on 2022.

On BBC iPlayer, viewers streamed sets and Glastonbury programming from Worthy Farm a record 47.5 million times, up 49% on the year before. And on BBC Sounds, listeners played Glastonbury content 2.8m times, up 26% on the previous year.

“It was a pretty epic year; it has to be said,” reflects Honywill, as he provides a walkthrough of his core duties at this year’s festival. “I was responsible for the system design across four stages – the Pyramid Stage, West Holts, and two dance stages in Block 9. Of course, the one everyone wants to know about is the Pyramid Stage. The festival must like the Pyramid Stage design because they’ve gone as far as giving us permanent infrastructure to cable it with, which is something that the farm crew absolutely hate but the festival crew love! I was spending time across all four stages, but primarily I was working alongside Martin Connolly, the system engineer on the Pyramid Stage. The other stages, once we’ve gone in and established them and everyone is happy, tend to look after themselves. It’s all about the quality of the crew.”

So, what is it about the system design for the Pyramid Stage that works so well?

Primarily it’s about finding a system topography that fits the slightly unusual shape of the field,” Honywill explains. “It’s almost like a rhombus with the stage at one end. Whilst that is fine for loudspeakers covering the first part, it then gets narrow at the top. So, the system has evolved from back in 2008 when we first used Martin Audio Longbow. It’s 350m from the downstage centre to the tip of the field at the back.

“One of the biggest considerations is how far away you can put a delay position with its primary source still being effective and the delay being able to take over seamlessly. And it’s also been approached with the advantage of using MLA and WP (Wavefront Precision) systems from Martin Audio, which are massively effective at being able to deliver coverage that other systems can’t, as well as being able to control what spills out the back of the arena.”

For Honywill, the Martin Audio systems have been pivotal in delivering the best possible audio to the Pyramid.

“The fundamental thing is that the MLA technology is all about what’s arriving at the audience’s ears, not what’s coming out of the loudspeaker,” he elaborates. “When you combine that with Martin Audio’s approach to design you have something really special. So we are able to manipulate very precisely the sound pressure level across the coverage of an array and use that to knit the whole system together. And we can use the patented Hard Avoid technology to control the audio in ways some people don’t realise is possible.

“The system was four hangs of MLA across the stage and then four delays on the first ring, which were MLA and MLA Compacts, and the last row of delays was WPL. We were actually switching the Hard Avoid on and off on the back set of delays, and we could see the offsite metering changing by about four or five dB in real time, so this is something that actually works and is really powerful. It’s why the system is so successful in these situations, and it also sounds amazing.

“Like any system, it has its quirks, but knowing what’s achievable and that it does what it’s supposed to do is great, and it’s something which no other system does,” he concludes. “And it sounds great, it’s so fantastically musical. In this day and age that gets forgotten about. I want to express myself and my work, and I know I can achieve results with Martin Audio that I can’t achieve with any other system. That still interests and excites me.”

You can read our interview with some of the BBC's top presenters about how the bring Glastonbury to the masses here. 

Martin Audio also provided sound reinforcement one again for this year's British Summer Time (BST) Hyde Park Concert Series, featuring performances from the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Take That, Guns N' Roses, Pink, and Billy Joel. You can read the Headliner review here.