Are one-day inner-city showcases the future of festivals?
Getting older means you’ve got to take care of your ageing body a bit more before you begin to cause irreparable damage to its general function and sanctity. Whether you want to accept it or not, that means you’re going to have to start drinking less, taking fewer other substances and not going to bed at 5am so frequently, and it certainly means that it’s an even worse idea to rinse and repeat all of the above the following day. Having to take account of all the above means that you’ve got to start approaching festivals a bit differently from how you used to when you were a spritely wee thing.
Not only are the above excesses going to start posing problems, but considering a large number of festivals require you to use a small tarpaulin dome as a recovery chamber between days, you can’t expect yourself to be on top form the further you delve into a festival. One cold snap and your ailing joints might have seized up in the morning, meaning that you’ve got to be able to tackle another full schedule of traipsing around an uneven field with your bones screaming at you for your ill-judged decisions.
There’s no denying that the allure of going to a festival for a long weekend of live music in the resplendent countryside is hard to resist, but you’ve got to ask yourself just how you’re going to be able to sustainably continue in this manner for the rest of your life. Those lineups might seem tempting, but something’s got to give, and you’d better pray it’s not going to be anything corporeal.
It’s not just you, the punters, who might start to struggle with five days in a field, but it’s the field that might start to struggle with five days of punters in it. If the weather conditions aren’t perfect, you’re either going to churn up the turf until it becomes a slurry that you’ve got to wade your way through, or you’re going to turn it into an arid dustbowl that is crying out for some moisture. On top of that, the inevitable littering, bonfire ash and non-nourishing bodily fluids that get strewn across the meadows are going to pose an increased risk of damage to the environment that leads to these once idyllic locations becoming barren wastelands.
These festivals need to survive, but so do you – so what’s the solution? Step forward, the brilliance of the inner-city day festival. Plenty of multi-venue showcases of established and local talent have begun to crop up in cities across the country, capturing the same excitement as those that span several days in remote pastures.
Not only are you forgoing the hassle of camping and exhausting yourself from the exorbitance of a potential bender, but you’re getting it at a fraction of the cost without it being at the detriment of the artists, and it could all be happening on your doorstep. The question is, are these festivals primed to usurp the titans of Glastonbury, Reading and Latitude, or are they designed to co-exist as a more leisurely alternative?
Festivals such as Dot to Dot, which runs two separate days in Bristol and Nottingham over the May Bank Holiday weekend, stretch themselves across several iconic venue spaces in both cities and attract big names in a multitude of genres while also showing off an undercard of local talent from their respective areas. A Stone’s Throw takes place on the same weekend in North Shields, Newcastle, and offers up a similarly delectable programme of artists that cover all genre bases and is, as the name suggests, a stone’s throw away from the city centre.
Over the course of one day, you’re getting the opportunity to explore multiple different environments and helping funnel money into your local venues during a time that they need the financial help most. Not only this, but alongside seeing attractive headline names, you get to discover up-and-coming acts from a local scene that are scrambling for exposure in a world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to break into the mainstream.
The downsides? Of course, you don’t get to spend as much time basking in the great outdoors at multi-venue festivals, and sometimes the scheduling can lead to horrendous clashes where you’ve got to scoot yourself to a tiny venue a mile away from your current location in ten minutes before it reaches capacity. The accessibility of some inner city festivals also leaves something to be desired, and while larger festivals are able to accommodate the needs of virtually all people, smaller, underfunded venues still struggle to do this to the same degree.
You don’t have to be from the city the festival is taking place in to attend, and whether you fancy exploring what Sheffield has to offer at Get Together, what’s going on in Hull as part of Humber Street Sesh or if Reading can counter its gargantuan festival with a more manageable alternative in Are You Listening?, then it’s absolutely worth poking your head into a city near (or far) from you and soaking up everything a metropolitan day festival has to offer.
If they can manage to iron out their slight faults or find ways to work around their innate disadvantages compared to the traditional camping festival, then there’s no reason why the inner-city day festival can’t start becoming the norm for gig-goers. Given my friends are becoming increasingly resistant to shivering under the cold night air beneath a thin polythene coating but still can’t resist gorging on live music, the day festival might well be the way forward for plenty of avid music fans.
