The 'festival experience': Hot or Not?

Helen - giving the festival fervour some attitude

Are festivals all they’re cracked up to be? Instead of being a time for debauchery and reckless fun, have they become too establishment to be as cool as people seem to think?

I can’t help but feel that festivals have become the sort of thing that my parent’s generation think of as debauched. The people who remember the free milk at the first Glastonbury are a particularly irritating group, as they seem to imagine that festivals are still raucous fun.

I can’t help but feel that festivals have become the sort of thing that my parent’s generation think of as debauched.

They aren’t. Increasingly, the entire “festival experience” (please excuse the phrase) has become about how much money the promoters can extract. Glastonbury was not only extortionately expensive this year, but the red tape surrounding the entire application process was maddening. Then they dared to put images of the summer solstice on the website. Please don’t tell me that the friendly hippies they advertise will be logging on at 8.55 on the morning of the ticket sale, because that seems totally antithetical to the “free love” image they ham-fistedly market.

Glastonbury was not only extortionately expensive this year, but the red tape surrounding the entire application process was maddening.

However, despite all of this, there is a sort of reverence that everyone keeps aside for Glasto (despite this year’s abysmal line-up) and a sort of semi-loathing that has become fashionable to direct at Reading and Leeds: Home of Product Placement. Having lost Carling as the sponsors of this years’ event, perhaps festival-goers will be able to sup at something that isn’t… you guessed it, warm Carling. Perhaps. My suggestions for future sponsors include Rimmel (they could have the “Rimmel Tent,” which would, of course, be a drag and cabaret stage so the performers can wear lots of slap) and Marlboro. With Marlboro as sponsors, food would no longer be made available, but we would be able to assuage our hunger pangs by smoking fifty fags a day. It just seems ludicrous that the people who run the event have allowed the sponsors to shape the festival, rather than the other way round.

It just seems ludicrous that the people who run the event have allowed the sponsors to shape the festival, rather than the other way round.

Of the many horror stories I have amassed, one includes my friend being told off by her neighbours for smoking a joint at V Festival; this has basically come to sum up the Summer Festival for me. People who want to come and have fun in the sun and see “hip” “new” “bands” like, oooh, Snow Patrol, but don’t want the fun to get out of hand. This conjures up memories of not being able to bring your own booze inside the arena at Reading (everyone manages to get some in somehow, but that’s not the point), centre-spreads on “Festival Chic” in Grazia, and the type of person who is willing to pay (lots) to stay in a tipi at Glasto because “it’s just so authentic.” Last year at Bestival I was kept awake every night by drug dealers standing about a foot from where I was lying, desperately trying to palm disco biscuits off onto over-eager festival freshers.

We are now expected to look like Kate Moss...I always thought...that most of the fun was in looking like crap for three days

The festival freshers were, incidentally, more noisy and annoying than the dealers. And I’ll bet they’d bought special wellies as well. The explosion in festival fashion only serves to highlight what has gone wrong with the whole thing. They have become increasingly self-conscious affairs. We are now expected to look like Kate Moss, casually slinging on a (pristine) summer dress and pair of gladiator sandals. I always thought, as a child watching Glastonbury footage during the mid-nineties that most of the fun was in looking like crap for three days; thoughtlessly flinging yourself into a mud puddle just to see if you ended up on the nine o’clock news.

No longer. “Mate… mate… should I do it?” I once heard a fifteen year old saying to his chum, contemplating whether it was “the done thing” to dive into a Glasto bog. Oh, please.

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