Festival Season 06 review

Global Gathering 2006

features

Festival season review

features, october 2006, COMMENTS

After a summer of sunshine, showers and celebration in the British countryside, VirtualFestivals.com editor Ross Purdie reflects on the highlights and low points of an action-packed festival season

The festival landscape is continually evolving and this year has been no exception. The most obvious fault line was the absence of Glastonbury and with organiser Michael Eavis giving his Somerset land its deserved twice-decade rest, the farm door was left open for several established rivals to flex their muscles and grab more of the limelight than usual. The festival’s absence also allowed for a number of new or smaller-scale events to spring up or develop and capture the imagination of grieving Glasto goers. It also boosted the appeal of foreign festivals for the more adventurous music fan.

Without the focal point of the world’s most famous festival this summer, it was left to the remaining big five - V Festival, T In The Park, Isle Of Wight Festival, the Carling Weekend (Reading and Leeds) and Download – to shared the spoils of the biggest touring names on the planet, slapping exclusive headline deals on Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, Muse and Guns’N’Roses respectively. Ultimately, and not surprisingly, the major festivals stuck to the tried and tested formula of ‘big bands in big fields’.

There have been a few new developments. V became the first UK festival to offer an instant live download, with Morrissey fans invited to buy a live track during his headline set. T In The Park sought to minimise its environmental impact by going ‘carbon neutral’ and offsetting its emissions with sustainable forest projects, while Mean Fiddler sought to prevent a repeat of recent troubles during the Carling Weekend at Reading and Leeds by expanding late night entertainment and embracing a ‘Love Not Riots’ campaign started by fans. Download further proved its commitment to both its fans and cutting edge media by launching Download TV, a website reminiscent of YouTube, where fans can upload their own videos from the Donnington mosh fest. On the flipside, the Isle Of Wight Festival failed on the fan-friendly stakes by refusing to screen England’s opening World Cup game, sparking chaos in surrounding towns.

With the majors happy to rely on the world’s biggest bands to help them sell out in record time once again, it was left to some of the smaller players to push the envelope creatively. Bestival on the Isle of Wight, now in its third year, proved another resounding success. While curator Rob Da Bank confided to Virtual Festivals his frustration at being blocked from booking some of his preferred acts due to exclusives contracts with the majors, he still secured two massive headliners in the form of The Pet Shop Boys and Scissor Sisters. Breaking the mould, Bestival has developed itself into an escapist’s dream and adult’s playground, with the emphasis firmly on having fun; most evident perhaps in the mass fancy dress party on Saturday. Fans were also invited to a Come Dancing session, to DJ in the ‘Stick It On’ tent or to get married in an inflatable church.

Many of Bestival’s ideas have been borrowed or developed from The Big Chill, which also had a good year. Both festivals work in tandem with their record labels, Sunday Best and Big Chill Recordings, which has helped give their programming a real identity and resulted in the two festivals developing close to their own individual genre bands, both on record and in the physical sense at their events. Putting on club nights during the rest of the year and, in The Big Chill’s case, running two bars in London, has given both festivals a dedicated following which has helped their development.
New festivals generally take a couple of years to establish themselves on the calendar so it was great to see Latitude, a long-time ambition of Mean Fiddler boss Melvin Benn, do so well in its inaugural outing. Mixing alternative music with poety, theatre, cabaret and literature, and influenced by the more relaxed European model of festival, the Suffolk weekender proved to be a hit with discerning fans demanding more than the norm.

While several other new festivals – End Of The Road, The Full Ponty, Electric Gardens, A Rum Do – cropped up and achieved admirable levels of success, perhaps due to their limited ambitions, others were not so lucky. Larger scale events designed to cash in on Glastonbury’s absence found the going a lot tougher than they ever imagined. Foundation Festival, Spike Island and Deeply Vale were all forced to cancel due to a variety of reasons, ranging from planning problems to a failure to attract big names. If 2006 proved anything, it was that it’s best to start off small.

The blurring of music genres proved another paradox. For years, major festivals have been accommodating all sorts of music tastes, a policy that has seen hip-hop at Reading and folk music at V Festival. However 2006 saw the first festival tailor-made for the ‘iPod generation’ when two heavyweight promoters, Mean Fiddler and Angel Music Group, teamed up for Hi:Fi. Evolved from the supposedly tired dance formula of Homelands, the duel-sited event aimed to combine dance music and indie bands on the same bill. However, ticket sales were poor and the two festivals in Winchester and Newcastle were seen by many as a failure.

Ironically, the more traditional dance festivals had hugely successful years. Global Gathering broke its own record to officially become the largest UK dance festival, with more than 40,000 attending, and Creamfields’ move to a new site in Cheshire proved a hit with punters and authorities. Glasto spin-off The Glade had another bumper year boasting a capacity increase and a sell out crowd.

Strangely enough, the festival most blatantly launched to fill in for Glastonbury was also a relative failure. Organised by Glasto regulars over the vacant June weekend and intended to build on the festival’s environmentally sound roots, the Sunrise Summer Solstice Celebration was unable to attract the bulk of the Glastonbury crowd due to a lack of marketing and a limited lineup. While it appealed to the Green Fields crowd it failed to harness any wide appeal and was accused of being too elitist and set in its ways.

2006 has proved that there’s no magical formula to a successful festival, however it did give away some clues. While the ‘hippy’ policy of Sunrise failed to capture the imagination, so did the overtly corporate nature of Wireless Festival in Hyde Park. With Glastonbury clearly the benchmark, tastes lie somewhere in the middle. Lovebox in London’s Victoria Park perhaps best demonstrated where things are headed – quirky, funky, vibrant and hedonistic – but you won’t have to eat rubbish food, wear wellies or sleep in a tent. It was a proper festival made easy, maybe too easy. Glastonbury can’t come back soon enough.

Words: Ross Purdie

From: October 2006 Issue

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