As over 175,000 people try to convince themselves that risking pneumonia in the torrent, brushing their teeth in their neighbours shit and slipping repeatedly face first into a mud-cake iced with modern age detritus to a sound track of “in the name of love”; many of us are glad that this years weather at Glastonbury is as shit as the line-up.
But year-by-year as the Eavis’s journey further toward the middle of the road, there is also a growing number of hipsters that slag Glastonbury off simply as a way of pledging allegiance to ‘their’ chosen festival, with the competitiveness of a tattooed Millwall FC fan. This weekend especially they’ve felt the need to make the entire web aware that ‘their’ festival is ‘more underground’ and ‘more wild’ than Glasto.
But in order to appear to be a true member, you need the look - usually of strenuously organised, pretentiously executed dressing up. This literal fabrication of spontaneous fun is at the centre of what is becoming wrong with festivals. I already know what several (one is too many) of these people are ‘going as’, to a festival that doesn’t begin for six weeks (“mines a sort of burlesque wench/ rococo harlot, with an aborted gin baby strapped to my stockings”).
Nowadays all the mirth is programmed down onto timetables: Welly Throwing Contest at 3pm, Mud-pack Disco Poetry Slam at noon, Build Your Own Twiglet Dildo Race at 9:15am. And it is compulsory you take part, because often the festivals’ rep of carefully planned ‘wild fun’ is policed by bullying, shaming and naming those that don’t. At one such festival I saw a man scorn a young girl for declining his offer that she join in with his naked flash mob party. When she politely declined, he talked down to her (the repressed cancer of society that she clearly was) saying something along the lines of “Why not? Why can’t you just be free!?”
This man probably goes back to London and spends the next year in a suit reminding his bored office colleagues about the time when he dropped aciiid and got his kit off; when in reality he got ripped off and spent sixteen hours freaking out in his tent, while across the field a dreadlocked white band from Bristol rap about how “Jah don’t take coke”, while a tent packed full of rich kids agree wholeheartedly with cocaine induced enthusiasm.
With all this over-planning, mass pretention, and festival pariah bashing in mind: has something gone wrong with our idea of fun? Are we that centred on popularity and cliques that fun has to be controlled and policed until there are winners and losers? Are we that lost to ourselves that we don’t have a good time unless our Victorian trapeze act garter and fascinator combo looks genuine? Are we so over the welly line in capitalism that all this ‘fun’ needs to be documented and posted onto Facebook from our smartphones as it happens?
