Festival fatigue

The above is footage from Womud 2007 (where I'm going this year, eek, if it's anything like this I won't be). The below is a little opinion piece on festival saturation I penned for The End, as in the nightclub. You can find it in its original glory here. It's well worth checking out for interviews, footage of nights, music and all manner of clued up dance music 'content'.

FESTIVALS

It’s barely May and festival fatigue is upon us: you can’t flick through a freesheet, broadsheet, music weekly, style mag or scroll down a web ‘zine without a line up announcement or ad. And it’s going to be like this E V E R Y D A Y until September, festivals are like the summer version of Christmas – relentless, inescapable and exhausting.

This summer there are around 500 ‘festivals’ happening in the UK, which is quite staggering. On the one hand you can’t fault ‘consumer choice’: there really is a festival for everyone whether Download for punk rock moshers, Global Gathering for flouro ravers, folk festivals or Latitude for the polite, Port Eliot book festival for literary mash heads, humungous festivals (Glastonbury, V, Reading & Leeds), boutique festivals like the Big Chill for yummy mummies and their McLaren buggies, and family festivals with hardly any named bands (Shambala), but the event that confirms that no matter what your tribe there’s a festival for you, is a three day Jazz Festival for naturists in Kent.

On the other hand there’s little doubt we’re at saturation point – since when were festivals our new favourite summer pastime? Its all the more banal considering the one thing that all ‘festivals’ have in common is the great outdoors and the threat of dreaded rain. Can anyone even remember the last decent summer we had? Is there anything worse than being at a festival in the rain? Nothing dissolves festival cheer quicker than grey sky and the metronomic patter of raindrops on polyester. You can’t sit down, it’s literally a pain in the arse, thighs and calves to walk anywhere, you’re perennially damp, cold and never warm up, and you can’t chill outside with your mates. A wet festival is the ultimate test of British endurance and stoicism, where we forced to grin and bear it, like the Blitz, or get so high that we’re singing in the rain.

And after the wettest summer in living memory submerged half the country, we have the busiest festival season ever. Go figure, the country’s gone mad.

Festivals in 2008 seem an apt allegory for our times and microcosm of the state of the nation. The sheer bloatedness of our festival season seems to parallel the carefree spending, borrowing and ‘buy today pay whenever’ recklessness of the last few years. You have to be a hermit not to realise that payback time for this is upon us and compounded by a huge rise in the basic costs of living. In troubled times frivolities are the first things to go, and on that basis, there’s no way that 500 festivals can survive into next year.

Which maybe no bad thing: quality not quantity is a proverb for a reason. Let’s just hope it’s not the fat cat, corporate-funded festivals with the deepest pockets that survive, and kill off the little guys, especially not the ‘little’ guys at the naturist jazz festival.