Real rock

Last weekend, in a pleasant park outside Maidstone, a most unusual rock festival took place. For one thing, it was a rock festival. Despite ‘rock festival’ being a common term for any live music event featuring multiple artists taking place outdoors, there are very few actual rock festivals any more. There are festivals for specific forms of rock — the metal events Download and Bloodstock — and there are festivals that have a few rock bands amid everything else. But not festivals that feature a broad range of bands, all of whom can be called ‘rock’ — hard rock, prog rock, country rock, blues rock.

For another, there was the crowd. There were no gangs of shirtless teenaged boys, overly exuberant at being out in a place where the normal rules of social engagement don’t apply. There were no groups of young women, faces painted with glitter. There were some small kids, some twenty- and thirty-somethings, but they were outnumbered by the swarms of the middle aged, buzzing idly — and in an orderly fashion — around the site, most of them, by far, being men. How middle aged? Never have I seen so much garden furniture at a music festival: it was like a branch of B&Q on the year’s first hot day.

‘Broadly, our crowd is middle aged, white,’ says the director of Ramblin’ Man Fair, Chris Ingham. ‘Some are empty nesters. Some bring grandkids. They like to enjoy themselves but they pace themselves. They police themselves — we haven’t had one arrest in five years.’

The nearest thing I saw to rebellion was a tipsy man throwing his plastic pint glass to the floor (which his wife picked up and put in a bin). Astonishingly, while I was at the front of the main stage, watching the vintage American band Cheap Trick, a festival worker with a bin bag and a litter picker worked his way through the crowd.