I love festivals. I go to as many as I can and I’ve seen everything – from a few hippies partying in the woods, to some of the largest events the UK has to offer. I fully appreciate that putting on a festival is an enormous amount of work, a massive logistical and artistic effort to create a temporary slice of paradise. With this in mind, I am led towards a question — why do festival organisers spend thousands of hours carefully booking music and curating the perfect vibe, just to let some asshole with a fairground ride and some tweeters pollute it with an incessant pop playlist?
Picture this. You are listening to an intimate set from one of your favourite artists in a small tent. The quiet part of your favourite song approaches. You suddenly hear that instantaneously annoying hook – Ed Sheeran’s “I’m in love with the shape of you” blaring in from the outside. The music in the tent starts up again, but the magic is broken, the earworm is distracting you and you miss out on the beautiful experience that would have been that set, unimpeded.
This problem plagues bigger festivals worse than their smaller brethren and is particularly egregious at Download. You go to the UK Mecca for heavy music to listen to metal, punk and rock, to be surrounded by other metalheads, to escape the rest of the world, (and their boring chart music….) and yet, slap-bang in the middle of the festival – is a big wheel or dodgems blasting the top 40.
It is spreading, too. While initially affecting the larger more-mainstream events, reports now indicate that the pop music blaring funfair rides have now infected our beloved Bearded Theory, a long-time stronghold of punk culture and music. How long will it be until our precious small independent festivals will be marred by some asshole with a merry-go-round and a 2022 pop playlist?
Of course, the reason this happens is almost certainly money. These ride owners will pay a festival thousands for the chance to sell their adrenaline-inducing mechanical thrills, and the thing is, I don’t even mind that. Rides are fun, and people need to make money, as sad as that fact is.
I have a few solutions to this problem.
Firstly, the rides could just turn their damn speakers off. I know they’re important for attracting trade, but punters at this year’s Download report wearing earplugs for navigating the village and then taking them off for the Doghouse Stage. (And I don’t mean the tunnel-based variety). At the very least they should carefully limit the volume of these attractions, to ensure NONE of the actual stages suffers any bleed-through from the musical porridge they play.
Alternatively, as a second option, if the extra nausea money is just too damn important,. Then the ride owners could do some research on the festival, and you know, actually play relevant music. They could put together a playlist with slightly appropriate acts themselves or alternatively, festival organisers could provide these. Hell, they could just grab one put together by a member of the public. Spotify playlists exist for even the smallest festivals nowadays, after all.
Finally, there is a third option. Get a proper DJ. Loads of skilled disc jockeys are desperately looking for a set, and will happily play for a small fee. Hell, the dodgems at SGP 2022 turned into one of the most popular stages at one point, both due to the skill of the selector running the attraction and the lack of variety in the late-night music offerings at that event.
At the end of the day, I just don’t know why this problem hasn’t been solved yet. Is it incredibly minor? Sure, but is it, at least at the surface level, incredibly easy to fix.
I just don’t get why experienced festival planners feel the need to give up this element of creative control when it can make such an impact on the musical feel of the event.
Rant over.
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