Every so often a couple of photographs, taken 50 or so years apart, turn up alongside one another in print and on social media. The subjects are Bobbi and Nick Ercoline. The later image shows a couple, clearly still with great affection for one another, now in their 70s, retired from their respective professions as a school nurse and a carpenter. The older photograph, taken in August 1969 near to where they retired to in Upper New York State, is the kind of photograph described as ‘iconic’. It shows the couple standing bleary, cold and hungry, sharing a blanket, in the wake of the most famous rock festival of them all: Woodstock. ‘I was so much younger then, I’m older than that now,’ as Bob Dylan, who short-changed a massive crowd at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival with a 45-minute set, might have said.

Estimates vary, but around 400,000 young people – and they were almost exclusively young, and noticeably skinny – turned up that day on Max Yasgur’s farmland, with food running out, amid often appalling weather, and with almost no infrastructure. By and large, it all went off peacefully, despite a few acid casualties, to be celebrated in words and music by Joni Mitchell (who did not perform), deeming that generation ‘stardust’ and ‘golden’.

Woodstock, filmed brilliantly, with its rushes edited dynamically by the young Martin Scorsese, became the blueprint for all rock festivals, with acclaimed performances by the likes of Santana, Joe Cocker, and Sly and the Family Stone (Ten Years After, Sha Na Na etc, not so much). But the abiding impression remains the youthfulness of the crowd and the performers.

This year’s Glastonbury Festival offered a very different image when Rod Stewart (80), performing on the ‘legends’ stage, wheeled out the festival’s founder, Michael Eavis, now wheelchair-bound, to celebrate his upcoming 90th birthday. This year’s three-day event, filmed in microscopic, obsessive detail by the BBC, who have all but given up TV coverage of high culture, proved controversial. Kneecap, a Northern Irish trio who, though musically leaden, fire things up by using the imagery of Republican terrorists in their act (their name derives from a punishment used to cripple those deemed disloyal to the cause of a united Ireland), were judged to be too controversial to be broadcast live by the Beeb, who focused instead on Bob Vylan, a hitherto little known ‘punk’ duo from Ipswich fronted by Pascal Robinson-Foster, who came out with the kind of pro-Palestinian, ‘edgy’ politics of abuse – including chants of ‘Death to the IDF’ embraced with gusto by sections of the crowd – that appears to go down well in some student unions and, it seems, among some of those who staff the UK’s national broadcasters. The BBC decided to continue to stream the invective, widely viewed as racist, despite the presence of its Director General Tim Davie (58) at the festival. Politicians piled in. They could have followed the example of political giants of the 1970s such as Jim Callaghan and Roy Jenkins, who had literally nothing to say at all about the excesses of punk first time around.

It’s all a long way from Woodstock’s peace and love vibe.

It never was just that though. Despite the peace signs and pat slogans of togetherness and diversity, the rock festival, like the genre it celebrates, has, from its beginnings, had issues with ethical consistency. The first of the big US festivals, Monterey, held in June 1967, was organised by John Phillips, the ‘Wolfman of LA’, leader of the Mamas and the Papas, and one of the most hedonistic, abusive figures that rock music has created – and there has been no shortage of those. It didn’t take long for things to take a darker turn. The Altamont festival, held in December 1969, headlined by the Rolling Stones, ‘policed’ by Hells Angels, and witness to the racist murder of a young African American, took place to the backdrop of the brutalities of the Manson family, incubated in the California of the unthinking hippy dream.

Its protests – too much – of togetherness, love and peace cannot hide the fact that the rock music business, which massed for the first time at those pioneering festivals, is one of the most rapacious, exploitative enterprises of all time, a byword for individualist excess, narcissism, and hypocrisy, which has set the template for an age now unravelling.

Hypocrisy reigns. The beloved, gnomic figure wheeled out by Rod Stewart, has, according to The Times, ‘transferred most of his financial interest in the event [Glastonbury Festival] to his daughter and a family trust, potentially avoiding a huge inheritance tax bill. Sir Michael Eavis gave his entire shareholding in Glastonbury Festival Events Ltd, the operational company responsible for running the festival and selling tickets, to his daughter Emily in October.’

Estimates suggest that should save around £80 million in inheritance tax alone. Eavis, a self-styled socialist who admires Jeremy Corbyn – the far-left former leader of the Labour Party, and now an independent MP who spoke at this year’s festival, as he has done before – is a hugely successful businessman who looks after his interests. And there, the hypocrisy at the heart of ‘the people’s music’ is laid bare. Though the festival bangs on about ‘No Borders’, its security is tight and those who refuse to pay for the near-£400 tickets, can even be detained before being expelled from the vast grounds. Despite its constant appeals to diversity and inclusion, the crowd is predominantly white, privileged and wealthy. Though ageing, it imagines itself forever young. It lives – and prospers – on its hypocrisy. Unlike the Ercolines, who simply grew up.