Have festivals gone middle-aged?

Tag: Pig Suede There’s a problem here, what the Americans call a category error. I was going to write a piece about what music festivals this year are, uh, cool. But the thing is, if I think they’re cool, then almost by definition they are not.I’m 47 years old. The trouble with rock festivals these days is people like me, middle-aged adolescents with guts that stretch from the botulo-burger tent to the mobile lavatories. And, of course, our partners - our babes, our chicks - who dig festivals for the vibe, but would rather stay in a nice B&B than slum it in a noisome tent. Middle-aged, middle-class couples with hampers and the kids in tow, anxious to see some band we’ve all heard on that latest building-society ad. But also that section of our younger population, with gelled hair and 52 cans of lager, who will, during the set by Kaiser Chiefs, hurl cartons of piss towards the stage.Those two groups never used to go to rock festivals. The kidults would have felt it outré or beneath them, and in any case hated the music; the younger brethren (who hated the music too) would have waited around near the festival gates to kick in the heads of the unwashed, druggy hippies in their tie-dye and tassels. Now, though, everyone is on drugs, everyone likes rock music - or, at least, is unable to avoid its relentless, bland, monotonous fugue.Last year, Charles Moore, the tweed-jacketed Tory former editor of The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph attended his first rock festival, that one put on by the young princes to honour their dead mum. Charles Moore at a rock festival: this isn’t merely the crossing of the Rubicon, it’s the paving-over of the Rubicon and turning it into a nice piazza. That good old leftie word “alternative” has long since become its antonym.Back in 1970, the first Glastonbury festival kicked off with a band called Stackridge - English psychedelia infused with a rather wearing wackiness. If, back in that era, you listened to John Peel in the small hours of the morning, or tuned into late-night television, you might just catch a brief burst of Stackridge, maybe three minutes across the whole of a year. Quintessence were on the bill, too, and you wouldn’t hear their idiosyncratic blend of jazz-raga-prog fusion broadcast ever, anywhere. Liking rock music took a certain amount of vigorous effort and dedication and tended to incur the suspicion of both one’s elders and a majority of peers.It is truly remarkable how rock has moved from this covert, minority pursuit into its present state of utter ubiquity. In 1970, a rock festival would be your only chance of hearing the likes of Quintessence, unless you bought their record on spec or via the recommendation of a review in the NME.Today, even Charles Moore probably has the latest Bloc Party release, while the prime minister pretends to like Arctic Monkeys. Rock music has become a sort of tyranny; once, if you liked it, you were considered a weirdo. Now you’re considered a weirdo if you don’t.As rock has become the incessant backdrop to our daily lives, so the music festivals no longer stress the “music” part, but try to sell you an “experience” instead.Check out the websites for some of the summer festivals and you will be surprised to find no mention of the bands playing, unless you click on a different link. The Sunrise festival, near Yeovil, for example, bills itself proudly as a celebration of “ancient wisdom, contemporary innovation, creativity and community”, and announces that it has had bestowed upon it the “Shelter Award for Social Responsibility”.I had already decided, on reading this, that I would rather boil my own penis than go anywhere near Sunrise this year - even before I discovered, via a link, that the Orb were topping the bill. Or there’s the most middle-class of all middle-class festivals, Latitude, in Britain’s most middle-class and middle-aged seaside town, Southwold, with its legions of poet sand writers and bloody jugglers and well-behaved family fun - and, sort of coincidentally, Sigur Ros and Franz Ferdinand.The average age of the main performers at most of the summer’s big festivals seems to be pushing 60. A year or so back, Michael Eavis, the boss of Glastonbury, bemoaned the fact that the festivals seemed to have been taken over by the older generation - perhaps remembering that youthful first Glasto he organised, with Stackridge and Quintessence and the then unheralded Marc Bolan topping the bill.While he was musing on this unwelcome development, his daughter, Emily, picked up the phone and booked Neil Diamond as the headline act for this year’s bash. Well, that should sort it out. The kids will come flocking. Diamond was irredeemably naff even in 1970, with his lumpen, middle-of-the-road shout-along hits Sweet Caroline and the inexplicable Cracklin’ Rosie (what does he mean, exactly, by “cracklin’” - that she’s like a roast pig?)Maybe Eavis remembered something else from that first sweet and innocent Glastonbury Fayre - that he lost £1,500 on the ticket sales, no small sum in those days. So, this year, come on down those cutting-edge musicians Neil Diamond, Jay-Z and the ever-youthful, laugh-a-minute, rock’n’rollin’ Leonard Cohen.To be fair, most of the other festivals have done similarly. The headline act at this year’s Isle of Wight festival is the Police; the equivalent booking for this famous festival, back in 1968, would have been Joe Loss and His Orchestra, or maybe Ray Conniff. Actually, I would rather listen to Joe Loss than the Police. Truth be told, I’d rather listen to the police than the Police.I suppose popular music, having lost its youthful exclusivity and aura of rebellious-ness, is no longer quite so compelling for young people. Fair enough.There are still one or two festivals around this year with bills that you could consider adventurous - for example, the Hop Farm festival, in Paddock Wood, near Tonbridge, Kent, where they want to get back to the early spirit of rock gatherings and have booked as headline act the 62-year-old Neil Young.That’s why I’m going, in my tasselled suede jacket and cuban heels and 33-year-old Tonight’s the Night tour T-shirt. But then, as I said, I’m 47; what do you expect?