Old people at festivals are so gross

[Uosdwis R Dewoh]

Do you, as someone presumably over the age of 21, still go to music festivals? The last time I went to Electric Picnic, I felt like I had crash landed in a re-enactment of Lord of the Flies, albeit with more drugs, broken spectacles, and pig sacrificing.

[WOM]

Old people at festivals are so gross

No. Everything's too damned crowded, hot, inconvenient, and there's never enough bogs. And if you go to them in the US, there's the 'personal space / volume' issue.

[MsD]

Old people at festivals are so gross

I do go, have been to two festivals in the last month, but I get VIP tickets if available, or go for just a couple of hours, because of the horrible toilet situation.

I'm younger, at 56, than many of the musicians so don't feel too old. I have fabulous wellies.

The younguns can be a bit annoying - at PJ Harvey a few weeks ago, lots of them were pushing to the front, then not even watching but chatting and playing with phones etc., taking the odd picture to show they were there, not getting into it at all.

I went to Rebel Salute in Jamaica a couple of years ago and it truly is all ages, they sell chairs at the entrance and there are pensioners sitting eating their sandwiches etc. and also dancing, no age bar. Several of the performers looked about 90 but there was also Damien Marley and other reasonably young artists.

[Gerontophile]

Old people at festivals are so gross

I've never been to one.

Loads of Pride concerts, but not specifically music orientated. (For all the times I saw NOMAD, EMF, Erasure, there were a million fucking Sonias.)

I would happily go to one in the US, as they seem to be a little less 'mental', than the UK versions. If T in the Park is anything to go by, and Altamont not included.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Old people at festivals are so gross

I love live music. I love gigs.

I have never been to a festival and I don't want to. Apart from Bloodstock this year, because Anthrax are playing, but I'd stay for them and Slayer then hightail it the fuck outta Dodge.

[treibeis]

Old people at festivals are so gross

A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation on the train involving young people who were obviously attending this year's Hurricane Festival down south in Scheeßel. One of them said, "I rang up my health-insurance company to get some tips about festival-going and they were really informative and helpful."

Now, either Herr Claußen at the AOK knows his shit about where you get to hop over the fence without paying or health-insurance companies really do offer tips on how to, I don't know, avoid getting dysentery in a waterlogged field or on how put on a condom before you have sex in a puddle.

[Benjm]

Old people at festivals are so gross

I went to Reading for a day in 1989 to see New Order and have been to lots of multi-stage events for single days since but the camping and hippy shit has never remotely appealed.

[Calvert]

Old people at festivals are so gross

They're the very depths of hell. It's fine if you're working and removed from the flag-waving-shoulder-sitting fuckwads. Decent on-site workers' canteens and scope for good scavenging in performers' green rooms as well as ample opportunities for vengeance on mardy twats
I went to some shitefest in Naas a few years back on a whim with some mates who'd bought tickets. I called a buddy who was working it and he appeared on a golf buggy moments later with an AAA wristband. I walked in and listened to 5 mins of Supergrass and then it hit me - WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING HERE?
I left immediately and returned to the car park and got pished.

[WOM]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Those pictures that they show you of Glastonbury, with the rain and the mud two million people and that? That's how festivals feel to me, even when they're perfectly lovely and have seats.

[imp]

Old people at festivals are so gross

First festival was WOMAD, Reading, 1994. Perfect weather (hazy and warm with a slight breeze), stunning music (Gil Scott-Heron and Jah Wobble headlining), spanking new tent and cool box. It was the last one too - I decided it could never be that good again.

[Reed John]

Old people at festivals are so gross

I've never been and have no interest in going for all the reasons listed. In addition to the heat, the toilets, the crowds, the dehydration, and the mud, it's the cost.

I have enjoyed some shows I've been to at smaller clubs like 930 or Black Cat in DC, but I'm not really a live gig sort of person and I certainly have no interest in seeing a show in a venue larger than about 4,000. Even that might be stretching it. In my few experiences seeing bands in basketball gyms, if you're up close, it's crowded and uncomfortable, and if you're in the seats, you're so remote that you might as well be watching it on TV.

For me, rock and roll is a largely private experience - sitting in one's room at age 15, listening to it on a walkman at high volume, just to try to get some positive energy into one's depressed teenage brain. That was the formative experience of me and it shapes much of how I connect to music.

I understand the people who say music should be about the live experience, and that's fine for them, but I don't have to be them to "enjoy it properly."

[jwdd27]

Old people at festivals are so gross

My last would have been Glastonbury 1997, when I was 25. It was one of the muddy ones, but also one of the last ones where people could get in for nowt (or for a small payment to a friendly Scouser).
I was young enough and wrecked enough for none of the inconveniences to matter at the time, but since then the thought of a 6 hour car journey with people I don't know well, followed by 3 days camping in mud without sleep, where any possessions you leave in the tent get stolen, with thousands of idiots blocking your path at every step, doesn't appeal.

I do have a friend who is at T in the Park this weekend, and who does Glastonbury, Bennecassim etc etc. But he is single, and quite wealthy, and does tend to book a hotel and have a week on holiday after them to recover.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Old people at festivals are so gross

I take in the Vancouver Folk Festival most years, which is a very broad church age-wise these days.

I think the first outdoor festival I went to was the Eighth National Jazz and Blues Festival at Kempton Park in 1968. Remember particularly The Nice, (who were everywhere that Summer it seemed), Deep Purple, (the only time I saw them, was more struck by their eye make-up than their music), Jethro Tull, (their first really big gig I think), Tyrannosaurus Rex, Chicken Shack, Incredible String Band, Traffic, Fairport Convention (my very favourite Brit band at the time), Joe Cocker and the Grease Band, (recently arrived from Sheffield), The Jeff Beck Group with Rod, and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. (whose act was interrupted by one of the stands collapsing.) It was a good'un.

[Cal Alamein]

Old people at festivals are so gross

What an amazing lineup AdC! Seriously great bands and artists young and ready to explode.

To me big time rock/pop festivals are a young person's game. Currently it is about 100 degrees here in ABQ and it would have to be a pretty damned special group of bands to make me suffer the heat for that long. More power to those that can handle it.

There's a big "Route 66 Albuquerque Summerfest" of many bands and three stages next Saturday but I will likely only check out Booker T Jones' Stax Soul Blues Revue as he rules and it is comfortably the last show in the evening.

[San Bernardhinault]

Old people at festivals are so gross

jwdidier27 wrote: My last would have been Glastonbury 1997, when I was 25. It was one of the muddy ones, but also one of the last ones where people could get in for nowt (or for a small payment to a friendly Scouser).

I suspect that was my second last festival. I went to three consecutive mid-90s Glastonburys waiting for a non-muddy one. Ironically, they got less muddy but got tangibly worse. Which might have been a feature of me getting older rather than of Glastonburys themselves.

My favourite was probably a Phoenix festival a year or two earlier, with Bowie, Neil Young, Prodigy, Manics, Cypress Hill, Beck, a reformed and terrible Sex Pistols, and lots and lots of Britpop that I was very briefly enamoured of.

[Various Artist]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Everything Reed wrote, but especially the last two paragraphs strike a huge chord (no pun intended) with me:

For me, rock and roll is a largely private experience - sitting in one's room at age 15, listening to it on a walkman at high volume, just to try to get some positive energy into one's depressed teenage brain. That was the formative experience of me and it shapes much of how I connect to music.
I understand the people who say music should be about the live experience, and that's fine for them, but I don't have to be them to "enjoy it properly."

I did break the habit of a lifetime and saw John Grant the other week in the Wales Millennium Centre, having been given a ticket for my birthday, and he was tremendous – that spectacular voice rumbled right through you on the real earth-quaking songs like Glacier – but I couldn't avoid thinking that, watching from the considerable distance and vertiginous height of the Upper Circle, I had a view of the actual man rather worse than what I'd get watching a YouTube video on my Samsung Galaxy Mini phone.

I've long rather cherished the idea of going to Glastonbury and just getting lost in a three-day hippy haze in some far grassy quadrant of that vast city-in-the-fields, but it seems to get ever less likely if anything as each one goes by. Aside from all the other inconveniences mentioned in this thread, I'm also finding my appetite for the actual music dwindling year on year as I give less and less of a stuff about what's new and contemporary, and my contempt for Calvert's "flag-waving shoulder-sitting fuckwads" increasingly commensurately, to the extent that I barely turned on the TV coverage this year. I've got (highlights of?) New Order's performance recorded to watch, but that's it.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Old people at festivals are so gross

I understand the people who say music should be about the live experience, and that's fine for them, but I don't have to be them to "enjoy it properly."

Sure. Being prescriptive about how others "should" listen to music, or look at pictures is presumptuous and condescending. But there are a variety of ways an individual can do those things. I'd listen to lots of stuff alone too, usually things no one else I knew could stand — like the first Velvets album, or maybe Jansch/Harper intimate acoustic stuff.

Festivals had a different vibe. First I was usually very stoned, mostly hash sometimes psychedelics. I kinda wanted to be a mad dancer but either never had the bottle, or had the wrong drugs, or something. So I'd just sit in the rain, or sun, and listen and look. In some ways I was just as alone as I was in my room. Everything washed over me. I felt part of it but rarely within it. I was the pebble in the stream, never the water. These days flashes of those events are vivid and the aura is strong, though almost entirely visual. Some people can recall entire set-lists, I'm lucky if I can remember a single song. I can still feel it and see it though. That never diminishes. Though how much is memory and how much imagination is difficult to tell.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Living in a country with a dearth of genuinely good live music (or at least music that I like), I really miss seeing live bands. I still find, however, that when I do get the chance to witness music live the enjoyment is inversely proportional to the size of the audience.

[evilC]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Vicarious Thrillseekeur wrote: ...when I do get the chance to witness music live the enjoyment is inversely proportional to the size of the audience.

This is my experience too.

[linus]

Old people at festivals are so gross

The last few years, the main problem is the quality of the lineup, with immensely popular but fairly mediocre acts usually headlining, to the point where it's not worth the time, $ and energy investment just to see the two or three good acts' shorter sets among the 40 mediocre bands.

[Reed John]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Amor de Cosmos wrote: I understand the people who say music should be about the live experience, and that's fine for them, but I don't have to be them to "enjoy it properly."

Sure. Being prescriptive about how others "should" listen to music, or look at pictures is presumptuous and condescending. But there are a variety of ways an individual can do those things. I'd listen to lots of stuff alone too, usually things no one else I knew could stand — like the first Velvets album, or maybe Jansch/Harper intimate acoustic stuff.

Festivals had a different vibe. First I was usually very stoned, mostly hash sometimes psychedelics. I kinda wanted to be a mad dancer but either never had the bottle, or had the wrong drugs, or something. So I'd just sit in the rain, or sun, and listen and look. In some ways I was just as alone as I was in my room. Everything washed over me. I felt part of it but rarely within it. I was the pebble in the stream, never the water. These days flashes of those events are vivid and the aura is strong, though almost entirely visual. Some people can recall entire set-lists, I'm lucky if I can remember a single song. I can still feel it and see it though. That never diminishes. Though how much is memory and how much imagination is difficult to tell.

I've never been stoned in my life, but that sounds pretty great.

[Reed John]

Old people at festivals are so gross

linus wrote: The last few years, the main problem is the quality of the lineup, with immensely popular but fairly mediocre acts usually headlining, to the point where it's not worth the time, $ and energy investment just to see the two or three good acts' shorter sets among the 40 mediocre bands.

The flip side of that is that you might hear an relatively unknown band that's really good. But after hours and hours in the sun it might be hard to maintain a positive attitude.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Reed John wrote:

I understand the people who say music should be about the live experience, and that's fine for them, but I don't have to be them to "enjoy it properly."

Sure. Being prescriptive about how others "should" listen to music, or look at pictures is presumptuous and condescending. But there are a variety of ways an individual can do those things. I'd listen to lots of stuff alone too, usually things no one else I knew could stand — like the first Velvets album, or maybe Jansch/Harper intimate acoustic stuff.

Festivals had a different vibe. First I was usually very stoned, mostly hash sometimes psychedelics. I kinda wanted to be a mad dancer but either never had the bottle, or had the wrong drugs, or something. So I'd just sit in the rain, or sun, and listen and look. In some ways I was just as alone as I was in my room. Everything washed over me. I felt part of it but rarely within it. I was the pebble in the stream, never the water. These days flashes of those events are vivid and the aura is strong, though almost entirely visual. Some people can recall entire set-lists, I'm lucky if I can remember a single song. I can still feel it and see it though. That never diminishes. Though how much is memory and how much imagination is difficult to tell.

I've never been stoned in my life, but that sounds pretty great.

Really?

It was usually enjoyable, and I don't regret the experiences for a moment. But I also rarely felt the communal togetherness that others apparently did, so there was a lingering, peripheral feeling of disappointment too. A bit like Christmas after you've opened all your presents.

I think it was just me. I could never really let go fully, and being wasted just turned me even farther into my my own head.

As someone said up-thread the best times were usually at smaller events. Particularly, for me, the early Hyde Park free concerts in the cockpit by the Serpentine. There were no more than a couple of hundred people, and had more of a picnic/party vibe. Very casual, no hype. That all ended with the Blind Faith launch, then the Stones a few weeks later.

[Jon]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Talking of hyde park, did I read yesterday that stevie wonder is performing the whole of songs in the key of life there this summer? If so, it's very tempting.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Old people at festivals are so gross

Jon wrote: Talking of hyde park, did I read yesterday that stevie wonder is performing the whole of songs in the key of life there this summer? If so, it's very tempting.

Very expensive and now sold out.

I did love going to Glastonbury in the early nineties and had some genuinely incredible and unforgettable memories there. It did seem to go downhill once you couldn't get in for free (Only jumped over once, paid the other 4 times).

I go on about it all the time, repeatedly on here, but Orbital's show at Glastonbury in 1994 is still one of the most incredible concerts I've ever attended. The clip below shows it, 7 minutes and 15 seconds in you basically hear about 30,000 people absolutely losing their shit to a strangely altered rendidtion of "Impact (the earth is burning)":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhVU8RKRaTY

I think that could only happen at a festival, it's my Hendrix playing Star Spangled Banner moment, just as good if not better, in my opinion.

Same show, this time "Chime" - check out the ravers, in their own world, no flowers in hair, no fashion, just darkness, music, drugs and dancing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SJqGR5u5LI

I went to see Orbital quite a bit after, but nothing was equal to that show because it worked so well in the late night and lost festival atmosphere.

I go to the odd festival these days, Field Day was quite good last year; I was and still am tempted to go the world music festival in Sines, Portugal this month. But I find the festival experience a bit forced and conventional nowadays; I would rather watch it on TV.