This column was completed in a tent on the borders of Dorset and Wiltshire, during the somewhat bleary morning that followed a brilliant Saturday night. I was among 17,000 people trying to hang on to the remains of summer in a set of fields, woodland and Victorian gardens, over four nights and three days of dizzyingly eclectic music that spanned an array of textures, genres and cultures.
As sometimes happens at such events, I regularly looked around and marvelled. Most of us worry about how much human beings directly interact with each other, and the way that social media has sown misery, division and mutual loathing. But here was something completely different: a temporary town where people happily chatted with strangers, and enjoyed themselves to the full while respecting the necessary rules. In the context of a toxic and often terrifying summer, such a peacefully joyous weekend felt almost utopian.
The End of the Road festival has been going since 2006, when it drew a crowd of 1,500. A few days before this year’s event opened, I interviewed Simon Taffe, the lifelong music obsessive who founded the festival when he was only 25, using some of the proceeds from selling his first house. “I didn’t realise how crazy and risky festivals were until I got into it,” he said, but he now speaks with the calm assurance of someone long immersed in a strange year-round working life centred on a few crucial days.
Since the pandemic, he told me, his costs have rocketed, as energy tariffs have increased and many of the businesses involved in outdoor events have continued to claw back money lost during the UK’s lockdowns. This year, 60 British festivals have been postponed or cancelled; since 2019, when there were 630 festivals across the country, nearly 200 have gone under.
As well as being the summer’s last musical hurrah, what distinguishes Taffe’s from much of the competition goes to the heart of what the festival experience should deliver. Many events now offer golden tickets guaranteeing access to special viewing platforms, food provided by “top chefs”, and even golf carts to ferry people around. When I mentioned all this, Taffe recoiled.
“That creates a hierarchy: a classism sort of feeling,” he said. “It’s just queue-jumping, really. Even that term, ‘very important person’ – it gives me the ick.” He and his team, he insists, charge the music industry for tickets. And “backstage” is just that: not some vast hospitality area populated by hedge-funders and film stars, but a clump of dressing rooms.
Festivals, almost by definition, ought to feel egalitarian and communal. A good event, in fact, should palpably hark back to an ancient variety of ritualised enjoyment. In her classic book Dancing in the Streets – straplined “a history of collective joy” – the US writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich distilled the ingredients down to “music, dancing, eating, drinking or indulging in other mind-altering drugs, costuming and/or various forms of self-decoration, such as face and body painting”, and pointed out that, across all the world’s cultures, these things are universal. We might think of the modern festival-goer – with a glittered face, fancy dress, a few pills and powders in their pockets and an ever-present can of booze – as a modern archetype. Clearly, it is actually the latest expression of a tradition that is global, and deeply rooted in humanity’s shared history.
At the risk of sounding like Tony Blair rhapsodising about Cool Britannia, the British are good at these things. Even though we now look like a country that cannot run the proverbial bath, our festivals highlight a deep seam of resourcefulness, entrepreneurialism and philanthropy. If you could extend those things to other parts of the economy, the results might be quite something.
For all their magic, there are also questions hanging over some of our summer rituals. Issues at some events with the safety of women and girls have been highlighted by news stories centred on the Reading and Leeds festivals that take place over the August bank holiday weekend: figures gathered by the campaigner Amy Sharrocks, which chime with miserably low national conviction and charging rates, show that of more than 100 reported sexual offences at the festivals since 2018, only four have so far resulted in prosecution.
The best festival organisers have made strides on glaring issues to do with waste (End of the Road sets great store by its meticulous recycling policy), but the fact that festival season annually generates tens of thousands of tonnes of it remains a huge problem. Even bigger questions about sustainability came to the fore only a week ago thanks to the daylong outdoor event staged by Massive Attack in Bristol, and the innovations it showcased – among them, giant batteries rather than diesel generators, and electric buses transporting people to and from the site. How many festivals will follow that example?
Such questions can’t be blithely batted away. Nonetheless, when everything coheres, a successful event will still highlight something both mundane and extraordinary: with the right ethics, organisational skills and consideration for your audience, you can still put thousands of people in the open air for a long weekend, and they will stay safe, and get on. Carefully select your music, moreover, and the resulting spirit of togetherness will fuse with what people see and hear to thrilling effect.
On Friday, I watched a brilliant, life-affirming performance by the Irish singer CMAT – known to her friends as Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – which took in a note-perfect rendition of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. The next day was scattered with revelations: the Lebanese band Sanam, who mix the best kind of experimental rock with Middle Eastern music and poetry, and Cerys Hafana, a Welsh harpist and composer who draws on hymns and folk songs from her home country’s past, and kept a 500-strong crowd in rapt silence.
That evening, I luxuriated in an hour-long set by Phosphorescent, the stage name of the Alabama-born musician Matthew Houck. The stage was flanked by trees. The crowd, which spanned senior citizens and families with toddlers, was about 3,000-strong. When dusk fell, it felt as if everything took on an emotional glow, made all the more intense by the shared knowledge that festival season was once again drawing to a close.
There were no phones to be seen. Houck looked out at his audience. “This thing you’ve got going on is lovely and inspiring,” he said. Anyone who has experienced the best festivals’ profoundly human wonderment will surely know exactly what that meant.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
