Stereoboard Look At Positives & Negatives Of Festivals & The Great British Summer (Festival Feature)
Tuesday, 03 July 2012
Written by Heather McDaid
Hosting festivals across the summer is no coincidence. It's just a given that we'd rather spend days watching bands in the glorious sunshine as opposed to in the midst of a snowy winter. But that's not how nature works. "Oh, T in the Park's this weekend? Best make sure the sun's out." As a UK resident, we understand the unpredictability of our weather and that's probably a fair explanation as to why we always take wellies to festivals... just in case.
I'm a mud-phobic (it's a thing). It grosses me out. I can live with rain, but you make me traipse through ankle deep mud and risk falling on my backside at any moment and things aren't so great. So, as I turned up to Download Festival this year I walked into my own muddy nightmare. In Black Camp, I trekked to meet our friends, finding the grass surprisingly dry considering the state of the walkways. After the tent was set up, within two minutes the rain was pelting down and I resided in my tent for the foreseeable future, only leaving on the Wednesday to go get food.
Falling isn't the only issue. The Download website posted photos from the initial day of shoes discarded in the mud. You could walk around and find Converse laying limply atop the mud, although the optimism of the festival goer who thought the weather would be good enough for Converse needs to share some of that positivity with me. But what if the mud develops some super-human strength? In Black Camp, that seemed the case. A member of our campsite took a step to find the sole of her shoe stay in the mud, while the rest of it came with her.
If only she had wellies! But the mud of Download wasn't ready to quit - I've had my horrendous floral wellies for years, yet Download 2012 managed to cause a massive rip in the side. Nature wasn't ready to give Downloaders an easy ride.
Shoe conspiracies aside, the spirits of the campsite didn't really dwindle. The rain gives you opportunity to do things you haven't before: mud wrestling and mud sliding was rife the first two days. Fun to watch, but inside I always feared I'd accidentally trip and end up looking like Morph. Teams of people in banana suits skipped merrily around the mud, Thor quotes were bellowed between opposing campsites and, of course, the newest addition to festival yells 'Fenton!' echoed everywhere.
Spirits are high, though the attire is often questionable. During torrential downpour in 2010, I watched Aerosmith looking like what can only be described as a sad condom as I donned a clear poncho I had to borrow from a friend. My first Download experience, I was naive enough to avoid the waterproofs. But the point? When they turned up on stage I didn't care. I was watching Aerosmith. And that seems key. The weather can be a bit of a bummer, and I am a grump when it comes to bad weather, but when you're faced with seeing such great bands, the surroundings take a back seat to the experience.
The weather for Download sucked this year, but it didn't take away from the atmosphere of seeing your favourite bands. On the Saturday during Tenacious D, the sun came out and people roared in joy at just seeing the bright orb of heat peeking out from behind the clouds. Sunny festivals are glorious, but the rain only dampens your spirits if you're focussing your time completely on it.
I admit, there are some exceptions. I've been in campsites where a friend's tent has flooded, or they've gotten mud over everything. Last year, the rain bummed someone in our campsite out so much because of his tent flooding that he headed over to the airport and just flew straight home. Ironically, the sun came out a few hours after he left. When it rained and we inspected his wrecked tent, we sympathised, yet when the sun came out it seemed a waste of money when all he had to do was share a tent with someone else.
Furthermore, I wouldn't apply this to festivals where the weather is dangerous. Rain and mud is bearable, but the severe winds at the likes of Pukkelpop last year would be ludicrous to support as 'weather that shouldn't ruin your mood'.
To the opposite end of the spectrum, last year at Download was so dry that the dust was unreal. Admittedly far easier to navigate, people were coughing all the time, it hurt our eyes and it clung to festival-goers to the point we generally looked mucky, despite there being no mud.
I've also been lucky enough to attend day festivals in America. At the start of April a few years back I attended Bamboozle Left in California. This was my first full day in America - a pale Scottish girl - and I spent it outside in the Californian sun. It was unreal. The warmest days in the UK felt like they couldn't compare with the heat experienced there.
The regular warmth of sweat in the crowd was intensified, the cold water proved all the more refreshing and between bands I even found a bench to lie under just to get some proper shade. It was unbearable at first, and this was April. Friends of mine who have attended Warped Tour have said that they spend most of their day hunting out water because the heat is crazy and that proves a key difference: you literally have to keep drinking in this heat otherwise you become dehydrated.
While there's no difficulty in navigating walkways, no shoes being sucked into the ground, I suffered a fate worse than a ripped welly - I got sun tan lotion in my eye. I spent my first day with my eye twitching in the sun, my make-up on one side of my face ran and even in shorts and a vest top, the heat was overwhelming.
The point? Just like with Aerosmith, when the band's come on stage, you don't care. You're with friends, you're with fellow music fans and the heat takes a backseat to what you came here to witness. I look back at the photos from that day and see that 50% make me look happy and 50% make me look like I'm crying, but I laugh at the eye incident and remember the fact that I got to see some of my favourite bands with some of my best friends.
See, at the time you might be donning countless unflattering layers of clothes, or you might be sweltering in the heat, you might be soaked through to your skin or your clothes might be caked in mud, but when you look back on these events afterwards it's the music and the friends that stand out, not the fact that you looked a bit odd.
You remember the different things. I remember how during Tenacious D a guy with a rainbow mohawk got down on one knee in the mud next to me and proposed to his girlfriend. Furthermore he cradled her in his arms, crying with joy as they played 'Fuck Her Gently'. True story.
I can't speak for everyone. I'm sure there's a lot of people who attended Isle Of Wight or Download this year who hated the entire thing and thought the rain and mud ruined everything, but I don't. On the journey down, the prospect of mud seemed the worst thing in the world but the reality was that while it was an annoyance, it was bearable and the weekend, as always, proved a highlight of my summer.
Of my group, I'm the prime candidate for getting annoyed by the weather, but even I can appreciate that spending £200 on a festival ticket and travelling down for a weekend just to focus on the negative is futile, especially when the positives are as big as Black Sabbath, Soundgarden or Metallica.
I used to wish it was sunny the whole weekend, but I spent one day in America's festival heat and would have happily welcomed the British weather's cool temperament. So though I complained about traipsing through mud, Download was still fantastic and I vow never to moan about typical festival weather again.*
* Although if festivals could all be sunny and slightly overcast, I wouldn't have any reason to complain.
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I'm a mud-phobic (it's a thing). It grosses me out. I can live with rain, but you make me traipse through ankle deep mud and risk falling on my backside at any moment and things aren't so great. So, as I turned up to Download Festival this year I walked into my own muddy nightmare. In Black Camp, I trekked to meet our friends, finding the grass surprisingly dry considering the state of the walkways. After the tent was set up, within two minutes the rain was pelting down and I resided in my tent for the foreseeable future, only leaving on the Wednesday to go get food.
