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Emily Eavis is the co-organiser of Glastonbury Festival. The daughter of its founder, Michael Eavis, Emily was training to be a teacher until her mother’s sudden death brought her back home to help her dad. Her work as co-organiser has coincided with the festival’s first hip hop headliner, Jay-Z in 2008. Tickets for this year’s festival sold out in just over half an hour, and about 200,000 are expected to attend.

Here’s what we learned from her Desert Island Discs.

1. She 'wasn’t keen' on the festival as a child

Born in 1979, Emily is the youngest child of Michael and Jean Eavis and her entire childhood was dominated by the event her parents hosted on their Somerset Farm and organised from their kitchen. “I wasn’t that into the festival in the 1980s… it was all-encompassing and when you’re at school you see other kids and you’re like, ‘God, you haven’t got this thing where you invite all these other people into your garden!’”

2. She performed on the world-famous Pyramid Stage – aged five

Growing up on Worthy Farm, Emily is not short of a rock and roll anecdote: she recalls how her parents would pick up Van Morrison from the local station and she would chip in with set list suggestions from the back seat of the car. Emily has also taken to the Glastonbury stage herself: “I was playing my violin at home in the kitchen and someone walked through and said ‘you should get on stage!’. I could only really play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I went on and did it, I didn’t really know the feeling of nerves, because I was five, but I said ‘Mummy, my legs feel like jelly.’ They just kept giving me encores. I’m sure I did it about 10 times. It must have been awful and quite weird.”

3. The festival wasn’t always a national institution

Glastonbury is now considered a significant part of the British cultural calendar and a huge contributor to the economy in Somerset, but Emily explains that it wasn’t always treated with such affection: “There’d been nothing like the festival in that area… it’s a lovely quiet, peaceful village. The idea of putting a pop festival right on the edge of it was scary for a lot of the neighbours. There was quite a lot of conflict in the 80s. We used to have people shouting at us as we drove through the village. It’s hard to imagine now because it’s so accepted, but at the time it felt like we were part of something really controversial.”

4. Her mother’s death was a turning point that led her home

Emily didn’t plan on following in her parents’ footsteps. At 19 she was enjoying life as a student teacher in London when her mum died suddenly. She headed back to support her dad. “He was always trying to encourage me to get back into my own life. I couldn’t really leave him and I also really wanted to help him with the festival… but I never once thought that I would make it my life.” Emily deferred her studies and eventually returned to Worthy Farm permanently to help run the festival. Of her mum she says: “She’s so much a part of it for me now, still. It has come from such a family thing. She was always looking after people.”

5. Guy Garvey performed at her wedding

Emily met her husband, Nick, whilst he was the manager of The Chemical Brothers and she was asking them to donate a song to a charity project that she was working on. They married in 2009 with Elbow frontman Guy Garvey singing a cover of Bob Dylan’s Winterlude at the reception. Emily says: “We didn’t have a recording… we were totally disorganised in recording parts of our wedding.” Fortunately, Guy and [I Am Kloot’s] Pete Jobson very kindly recorded the song especially for Emily’s Desert Island Discs.

6. She battled to book Beyoncé – then paid to watch her on TV

Emily’s tenure at Glastonbury has led to some of its most talked-about headliners. In 2008 she was at the side of the stage with her dad as Jay-Z performed “like he was going into battle”, defying critics and the controversy that surrounded his appearance as the festival’s first hip hop headliner. Emily subsequently spent a lot of time persuading Beyoncé to perform on the Pyramid Stage, but was forced to watch the performance from a coin-operated TV. “My son was 10 days old and during the festival he got quite ill. Obviously nothing else mattered at that point. I just wanted him to be better. In the hospital there was this tiny TV that you could put coins into. I was putting coins in and it kept cutting out.” In recognition of the “enormous moment” she's helped create but then missed attending in person, Emily chooses Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love as one of her eight discs to remember the occasion and the “incredible moment for the people in that field.”

7. She’s working to bring gender equality to the Glastonbury line-up

In 2019, Glastonbury is set to have over 3,000 acts across 100 stages. Currently the line-up is 42% female, but Emily is committed to making this 50%. “It’s a challenge for us and I’m always totally conscious of the gender balance being right. Every day when I’m booking I’m thinking about that and cajoling stage bookers to be on board with it. We’re getting there.”

8. She tells us what she believes is the ‘Spirit of Glastonbury’

“For me it’s about creating a parallel universe where people can escape from the real world and be living in a completely different space. The heart of it really for me is probably the charity side. I think I grew up thinking that you’re doing something right if you’re enjoying it and not trying to make loads of money from it. Every day there are offers that come in and I’m like ‘no.’ Because we’ve got to keep giving the money away and at the heart of it is the fact that we’re not ever going to sell out.”