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Why does each band need a different drum kit? Why can’t they just share?
I’ve asked these and similar questions dozens of times over the years, never arriving at a satisfactory answer, often to the visible irritation of the person who invited me to a music festival. What was essential to the performance about this particular snare and cymbal arrangement, I ask. What about it justifies us waiting through a 20 minute switchover and sound check? Who benefits from all this duplication? Is it a work creation scheme for roadies? Why can’t professional musicians play on standard-issue kit?
Music festivals test a person’s ability to live in the moment. Psychologists call it dispositional mindfulness, the skill of being unreservedly present, and it’s something I’m very bad at. Chill out, I’ve been told more than once, but how can I chill out? How does a person lose themselves in music when they don’t know how many more drum kits remain backstage, queued up like trucks at the Dover ferry port?
A lot of what we choose to remember about music festivals is rooted in the myths of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Eulogies for youth counterculture have helped preserve beliefs formed long before, for smaller happenings, about how it’s never just about the music.
What matters is being there, in some mystical or traditional elsewhere, to feel the overarching sense of identity, the communality, the authenticity of the experience.
Such idealistic stuff was never easy to square with reality. It ought to be tricky to overlook, for example, that Woodstock ’69 was the venture capital project of a denture-putty Trustafarian and his golfing buddies. Authenticity back then was largely a byproduct of the organisers’ poor planning, as it has been ever since.
Sex, drugs, disorder and squalor are the essential ingredients, the historian Michael Clarke wrote in 1982. His book The Politics of Pop Festivals hardly mentions music but describes at prurient length the ways in which “weekend hippies” park their responsibilities and inhibitions in an atmosphere of orgiastic chaos.
How much this stereotype still holds true is arguable. Whether it was ever true is a personal matter between grandparents. What’s easier to rationalise is his early 1980s notion that all four things must come as a package. Typical headliners of the time were Van Halen, Iron Maiden and The Grateful Dead. Squalor and disorder were as integral to the scene as sex and drugs; organisational ineptitude meant punters only had to seek out the latter two.
Now that 40-something weekend hippies queue in the Snapchat street food village for CBD cola, it’s tempting to claim that festivals have been fully co-opted by commercialism. The better label is professionalism. Never shy about making money, the industry chose detox on reaching comfortable mid-life. Order was imposed. Squalor was minimised, or at least made avoidable for a surcharge.
But having sanitised and monetised all the traditional signals of excess, the only way left to create a scene was through literal excess. A typical Glastonbury now hosts more than 700 acts across 100 stages. It’s a Costco shopper’s concept of abundance as applied to fun, the paradox of choice on a geographical scale, and all it inspires in me is Fomo.
Hanging over every moment is a question of stick or twist. Should I accept the sunk-cost fallacy of staying in place, or give in to the suspicion that something better must be happening where I’m not? Is this experience the most authentic of all available experiences?
And when participation is meant to be life-affirming, is it my fault that I’m bored? Because honestly, for all the promises of intense Bacchanalia, there’s a lot of waiting around while roadies swap drum kits.
The hippies who stuck around to watch Jimi Hendrix play “Star Spangled Banner” at sunrise on a Monday morning first had to suffer through the Sha Na Na dance troupe’s covers of Duke of Earl and Blue Moon. They had no option, and maybe that’s the point. The miscellaneous excess of a modern festival, with its restless scheduling and perpetual Fomo, dilutes each individual moment by presenting them all as transcendent. Perhaps we just don’t have the tolerance any more to be genuinely, authentically bored.
Bryce Elder is the FT’s City Editor, Alphaville. Janan Ganesh is away
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