A Pessimistâs Guide to Music Festivals
Itâs the summer! Youâve somehow bagged tickets to your first festival. Youâve spend a small fortune for your right to sit in a muddy field for a weekend after having your ear attached to a hotline on redial for 5 hours. Congratulations. Youâre one of the chosen few (thousand). Youâve done a countdown on social media and made everyone secretly hate you and now the day has finally arrived. So Iâm sure youâre excited but letâs go over some basic festival realities before you begin imagining living out those wild, hedonistic urges you have planned for the weekend ahead.
Travelling to a festival is a bit like travelling to Mordor: A right epic pain in the arse. Firstly, you have tons of crap on you; rucksacks, sleeping bags, a tent, shopping bags full of snacks, a fold up chair, a floor mat, one ring to control them all and some really heavy booze. Secondly youâre travelling to a field. Trains donât go to fields, it turns out they go to stations nowhere near fields. Youâre going to have to walk three miles to get to the field. Fuck the stupid field, why canât it be in the middle of town the rural cockwomble. Youâre going to weigh up the option of getting a black cab and jizz away your festival money, so no, you take the âshort walkâ to the festival entrance instead, weighed down with a ton of shit, arriving more exhausted than that one time you played football with your mates on a full sized pitch.
Or you might want to avoid this insufferable Michael Portillo style train pilgrimage and actually drive. No crowds yeah? Except they cleverly put the car park as far away from the entrance as the railway station. And now youâre going to have to queue in traffic to get in, and queue in traffic for approximately a decade to get out on the Monday. So train or car. Itâs one or the other Iâm afraid. Choose your destiny.
So after Maoâs Long Walk youâre eventually in one of the multiple queues that get you through the festival gates. You and your mates feel excited, pumped. Only one sticking point, when you arrive they donât allow your booze in. U wot m8? Wrong container or some shit. Followed the instructions on the website? Tough, the rules have changed. If you want keep those 24 cans of Fosters youâve carted all the way from Northampton Tesco, youâll be forced to pour them all into these handy giant plastic bags with screw tops. No problem carrying around pillows of warm, flat beer with you for the rest of the weekend? Cool. Oh and that Bacardi bottle isnât allowed either. Sorry.
Youâre in! Fiiiiinally. Surprise: The entrance gate is a mile away from the campsite. Yeah yeah, youâve walked enough already, but shut up and WALK SOME MORE DAMMIT. It was you who wanted to get away from normal civilisation for a weekend, with its transport and labour savings devices. Welcome to the big time. Oh and when they said a mile away, they meant a mile to the campsite edge. Youâll be walking for double that in circles trying to find a spot to put up your tent that isnât in a river of piss or next to a walk way thatâs got slightly more footfall than Westfield Shopping Centre on New Yearâs Day. Which wonât happen. Or if it does itâll be a mile to the nearest toilet. Anyway, time will roll on and somehow you would have done it. Tent up, sleeping bags in, giant, shitty beer pillows and bags of cheap snacks secured in your impenetrable, nylon house. Youâve finally made it. What can go wrong?
Ah yes, that. After visiting, perhaps itâs a good thing the toilets are that far away. In a mere blink of an eye every Port-a-loo within a four mile radius is full to the brim with body fluids. Festival toilets are a bit like Boris Johnson speeches, half amusing, half terrifying and always full to the brim with fresh shit. Now youâre going to do your very best not to use them the whole weekend, but trying not to defecate after a day of 12 Strongbows and three chilli dogs is like trying not to retch after hearing a Manic Street Preachers song: Nigh on impossible.
On that topic, letâs talk food. Itâs going to be a mere matter of hours before everyone eats the food you brought with you. 4 multi pack bags of McCoys: Decimated. 12 Kit Kats: Destroyed. Tupperware sandwiches: Inedible after 7 hours sweating in their transparent cell. So now youâre stuck with the food stalls; essentially a vast array of the worst food available to mankind served to you on a paper plate with a plastic fork sticking out of it. Teeming with cheap meat and possible E. Coli, itâs depressingly the only form of food around. Curry tacos, cheesy chips, alarmingly yellow paella mountains and baked potatoes with various unidentifiable shit on top of them. Itâs all there for eye-watering prices. Want something healthy? You can have a thimble of a smoothie for a tenner if you like. Only a forty minute queue. A weekend of eating like this is going to make you feel like Boom! Shake the Room was written specifically about your lower intestine.
You know, I know, your friends know, even Michael definitely-no-hurricane-yeah Fish knows, itâs going to piss it down. Constantly. Except on the day you leave.
So forget everything else. This is why youâre here. The music. Except the Sunday night headliner that you specifically booked the tickets for in the first place has already pulled out and been replaced by Deadmau5. Oh. Meanwhile youâve also missed two of the up and coming bands you wanted to catch because they got pushed down the bill in favour of a surprise Ocean Colour Scene reunion so went on in the morning instead of the afternoon. Never mind, time to catch that special act on the second stage youâve been looking forward to. Oh whatâs that, you didnât get there 3 hours early? Well you can always stand outside the stage tent getting rained on, peering in. Look, I swear thereâs the top of Yannisâs head. And some lights. Whyâs he have to be so short? Yeah, ok this is rubbish.
The new plan is to change all this misfortune by burying yourself deep in the crowd for the Saturday headliner, hours early. But wait, you do this only to find getting to the front is like a Tough Mudder challenge and whilst youâre loitering two thirds back in the crowd, youâre attracting all manner of shitcunts like moths to a flame. Youâre surrounded by rucksack wearing Goliaths, jocular, pissed up, bottle chuckers and that group of restless, half-baked mates who violently mosh to the interval music an hour before anyone is even thinking about coming on stage. When the big names do turn up (very late by the way), they look no bigger than a flyâs leg on your sunglasses and the wind is ensuring that theyâre playing directly to the small patch of the crowd at the most north eastern edge of the field. That piss youâve been holding in for half a day finally demands you give it up and walk back to your tent. Oh, thatâs a mile away, remember.
Forget seeing bands, thereâs always hanging out with your mates and getting off your face. It seems quite nice initially. Sitting round a campfire, chatting. Except youâre not allowed to start a fire and when you do, out of the darkness comes a bunch of uniformed men with stoney faces that blast the fire out with extinguishers. Peace and love, man. Still, someone somewhere has some shitty weed, you can smell it. You can trade a plastic, screw top pillow of Fosters for something half reasonable with the weed smoking people and everyone chats and bonds. Suddenly it all seems alright. And it is. The best bit of the festival is essentially pretending youâre not at a festival. Youâre doing with your mates what you do every weekend anyway and itâs enjoyable. Word to the wise, in Reading and Leeds at least, leave the grounds and spend the entire day in the pub if you like. Have access to a real toilet. Eat food that isnât made entirely from circus meat and drink from something made from actual glass. Ah, civilisation, why hast thou forsaken me?
Back to the festival. Sleep: Youâre not getting any. Youâre in a tent. Itâs about as soundproof as a Japanese paper house, only 400 times hotter in the morning. The tent is a ludicrous idea really, like sleeping in a balloon with zips. Worse still, youâre surrounded by people off their heads on drink and drugs that just wonât shut up, ever. Like ever ever, and all of them seemingly wear the same 4 band t-shirts. The noisy twats. Oh and itâs not until you get into the tent on your first night you realise someoneâs nicked your floor mat. Three nights. THREE NIGHTS OF THIS.
Finally. You get to go home. All that stands between you and your bed is a little more walking. Well a lot more walking actually. And queues. Lots of them too. You plan to leave at 10am and you actually get to the station at 2pm. If youâve had a good time, great, but this bullshit delay is the reality of tens of thousands of people all leaving the same field at the same time. Fucking idiot field.
So you get home, exhausted, full of shit (on every metaphorical and physical level) and youâll shower, sleep and suddenly believe it was the best experience ever. Youâll keep your manky cloth entrance wrist band on until it disintegrates, despite it cleary repulsing friends, loved ones and repelling possible future partners. Youâll needlessly show it off in the pub to your unimpressed mates whilst they listen to you banging on about Glasto â15 or whatever shithole it was you endured through gritted teeth to anyone whoâll listen, mythologising it like it was fucking Woodstock. And good for you. Everyone should do it. But the point is youâll forget about all the walking, all the letdowns, all the mediocrity, all the walking, the horror of waking up in a hot tent with a hangover, the walking, the upset stomach and the walking and in a haze of stupid, misleading nostalgia youâll mindlessly book tickets for next year. Well, festivals are ace mate, so why wouldnât you?
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