Rock Festivals

The Isle of Wight, earlier this month, wasn’t, technically speaking, my first festival. Last year I attended Hay as a guest of a corporate sponsor, was put up in a mansion, drove to the literary gathering in an Italian supercar I was test-driving for work and promptly proceeded to have a bad time because, among other things, it’s no fun, when it’s 30C, to spend an afternoon in a marquee listening to an economist talk about whether modern Britons work harder than medieval peasants.

Also last year, I was a writer in residence at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, a job that required talking on stage a bit and then spending five days lounging around a five-star hotel, an opportunity that I once again resolutely failed to enjoy, this time because hotels make me feel disconnected and existential.

The reason I regale you with this information is not to illustrate what a glamorous life I lead, but to demonstrate how little the idea of a rock festival appeals. Being pampered at a sedate literary gathering is bad enough, but add loud music, binge drinking, drugs, audience participation, mud, rain, overflowing toilets, trench foot, dehydration, hypothermia, detention-centre fencing and miaow-miaow-addled teenagers to the mix and you couldn’t pay me to do it. Given a choice between, say, losing a limb and going to a rock festival, I’d go to the rock festival, but reluctantly, and with a very heavy heart.

And yet, this month, that’s what I did. I packed a Hi Gear Go Outdoors tent and sleeping bag into a large wheelie suitcase, bought a £1.99 raincoat from WHSmith in Waterloo station and, looking more like an executive off on a business trip to Copenhagen than a raver heading off to the Isle of Wight Festival, I got on a train to join 55,000 people at Seaclose Park in Newport for a weekend of warm beer, open-air football screenings, face painting, late-night conversations with men in leprechaun outfits, and being woken up at dawn by Durham University students playing the bongos.

There was a simple reason behind this uncharacteristically life-embracing act. An editor suggested that it would be interesting, on Glastonbury weekend, to consider why festivals continue to grow in popularity when people only seem to come back with horror stories, and I agreed…

Read atThe Times