Festivals are back, baby! It has been a few years. What even is a festival? That one’s easy: it is a collection of musical performances on a farm, during which you lose your phone and your friends and it rains. As we emerge from a pandemic in which strangers were viewed as a danger, in a time of political polarisation and fragmented micro-subcultures, are people still interested in coming together for events like this? What is a festival for, in the UK, these days?
To find out, I have decided to cross the country, taking in as diverse a festival experience as possible. I will be hitting six of them in one bank holiday weekend (which now I’ve written it down, seems like a mistake). There’ll be cowboys and punks and home counties teenagers in Adidas trackie tops. I’m going to eat terrible food, dance to music I don’t enjoy, and talk to as many people as I can. I want to know why they have sought out these fields of Britannia, and what they hope to find. I also want to know how much the beer costs, and if the toilets are the hellholes I remember. I do not want to get rained on.
