There are few things as special as those genuine lost-in-the-moment experiences at a music festival. The woozy rush from icy beers creeping up in the afternoon sun, the giddy delirium a sleep-deprived brain somehow manages to pump out, those blissful moments when you truly forget the outside world. From boozy teenage rites of passage using your sunken tent as a sleeping bag to 5am raves in mud pits, festivals supply key life experiences and have become ingrained in British culture. They can be wild, filthy, hilarious, sodden, blissful things to be enjoyed and endured alike.
However, looking at a number of 2023 UK festivals, there’s a creeping sense of uniformity. Not only are many of the medium-to-large festivals – the likes of Kendal Calling, Standon Calling, Y Not, Truck, Tramlines – offering only minor variations on one another’s lineups, but elsewhere music is beginning to look like an increasingly secondary, or perfunctory, addition. With fancy food and drink, talks, wellness, and a host of other curated experiences becoming the norm, many music festivals are feeling more akin to a lifestyle retreat, large-scale street food market, academic conference, or neighbourhood street party in a leafy affluent suburb.
Kite festival’s mix of music and ideas means you may bump into a post-debate Michael Gove or John Major on your way to Suede or Hot Chip. How the Light Gets In offers philosophy breakfasts, debates and talks alongside cabaret and performances from Groove Armada and Belle and Sebastian. At festivals such as Pub in the Park and Alex James’s Big Feastival, you can check out everyone from Judge Jules to Toploader and Craig David while you sample food, wines and cooking demos from the Hairy Bikers, Ainsley Harriott and DJ BBQ who has apparently coined the term “Catertainment”, “bringing food, fun and energy to his live cooking appearances.”
At Latitude this year you will find on-site sit-down restaurants with guest chefs that require reservations, along with morning paddleboard yoga sessions, while Lost Village offers up wood-fired hot tubs and Finnish saunas in their Energy Garden. Countless festival websites all now have sections called “experiences” or “extras” that, at places such as Wilderness festival, include wine tasting, cocktail masterclasses, outdoor pursuits and a “brand new bespoke show: The Cat’s Whiskers Cocktail and Cabaret Club.” Plus all of them offer countless VIP upgrades such as pamper stations or fancy camping that can cost a grand-plus for the weekend.
Many of these festivals seem tailored to a certain kind of middle-class lifestyle, to which music is merely the soundtrack. Whereas festivals once seemed to exist as a place to experience a sense of release from everyday life via music, many now appear intent on providing all the comforts, luxuries and indulgences of a very comfy home life. Even the rising focus on debates feels like bringing Twitter discourse to the stage rather than switching it off and leaving it behind.
The ultimate irony of this shift towards an all-encompassing lifestyle event is that it ends up mimicking what already exists everywhere else at the cost of a unique musical identity. Festival culture has already seeped into every crevice of our day-to-day lives. Towns and cities are inundated with overpriced street food and pop-ups – always complete with accompanying DJ or live act. Sitting on one of those cheap ubiquitous orange beer-garden tables and eating a couple of tacos and a pint of a major brewery pale ale masquerading as an independent for £20 has become increasingly standard, predictable fare. The vibe of an Instagram-friendly casual dinner party backed with a 6 Music-friendly playlist is not a once-a-year unique experience, it’s omnipresent.
The persistence of these events suggests a demand for festivals that look a bit like Sunday Brunch moved to a field. And it’s not all bad. Culture isn’t just music alone and the death of bad lager and greasy slop from a burger van being the only options for nutrition is dearly welcome. Offering more variety, some selective indulgences and creating a genuinely family-friendly environment makes sense – and many festivals do it superbly – but in an attempt to fancify, broaden and vary festivals, the music is starting to feel like an afterthought. You might reasonably respond: ignore the extra pomp, ditch the chanting circles, swerve the prosecco bar, and forget you might bump into Jonathan Pie, and just focus on the music all weekend. But what kind of vibe is there, both for punters and performers, when the crowd in attendance is as much there for debating with strangers or sharpening their recipe knowledge? These aren’t the foundations for life-shattering musical experiences.
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More importantly, festivals curated for middle-class, usually middle-aged, people with disposable income come with a price tag. Ticket prices, to be fair to festivals, are usually pretty reasonable in relation to what’s on offer. But with pints edging dangerously close to a tenner and food already locked in at restaurant prices, even going just to savour the basics can be prohibitively expensive. Every year we have the same discussions around gender splits on lineups. But it’s just as important to discuss the other ever-extending gulf created by festivals: class. Many festivals are being shaped to accommodate only certain people – which only adds to the inescapable feeling of sameness.
Of course I’m not advocating some kind of Camra-esque Campaign for Real Music Festivals – that would be as insufferable as anything Alex James could muster up. Maybe lifestyle festivals simply mirror the reality of the ageing music fan and ageing musical festival maturing in sync, and perhaps this is also reflective of something I wrote about last year: a strange indifference towards music that creeps up on many people on the cusp of midlife. But surely in between the music-focused festivals for teenagers to get clattered at (Parklife, Reading/Leeds, Wireless etc) and the increasingly standardised ones that seem squarely marketed at coined up Gen Xrs and their kids, there’s room for something else? A more stripped-back, music-centred festival where you can still have decent food and drink but that doesn’t feel like a cross between a spa and a gastropub?
The tide is already turning at the specialist end. Field Maneuvers offers a back-to-basics mini-rave festival; Sea Power run the no-frills Krakenhaus in the Lake District; while Supersonic in Birmingham has a perfectly good food court the size of a terrace house backyard, its focus is on a genuinely singular weekend of experimental music. Mainstays such as End of the Road and Green Man have perfected the balance of feeling music-first while also in beautiful settings with comfy offerings – but they’re starting to feel like an anomaly.
Just as there’s demand for the Question Time-on-the-farm type of festival, there’s clearly also appetite for these music-first events: just look at how many people flock overseas for them. Primavera may have the added draw of sunny Barcelona but it’s still just four days of artists and DJs without a celeb podcaster or Michelin star chef in sight. The eclectic Le Guess Who in Utrecht has also shaped up as a worthy replacement to the old All Tomorrow’s Parties weekenders. When staring down a summer of British events that feel like the pages of a weekend broadsheet supplement brought to life, it’s hard not to crave that kind of dazzlingly curated festival.
