Festivals

Every day my inbox fills with stories of panic, madness and despair. The Edinburgh Fringe is upon us and the publicists are firing off emails begging critics to cover their shows. If the festival is a national X-ray, this year’s image is shadowed by emotional frailty and a distinct sense of humour failure. The brochure is full of performers advertising their mental disorders (ADHD, OCD, PTSD, and so on), as if they were badges of achievement. The chair and chief executive of the Fringe say that the festival means ‘giving yourself over to the (safe) hands of our performers allowing yourself to be swept away by their creativity’. The word

A few years ago, my nephew informed me that he and his friend were planning to come up to London for the weekend for the Wireless Festival. Did they need somewhere to stay? He looked at me like I was a mad old man. No, of course not. They were going to camp. In Finsbury Park. Because when you go to festivals, you camp. Thankfully, he didn’t turn up on the Victoria Line with his tent and then wonder why no one else was similarly equipped. Phoenix have the air of being as much a lifestyle choice as a pop group Inner-city festivals such as Wireless and All Points East

As the American superstar starts singing another slow, sad, rather beautiful song, my mind begins to drift. I’m thinking that our appreciation of music is so much about the who, the when and perhaps most crucially the where; the significance of place is an under-examined element in our relationship with what we’re hearing at any given moment. I’m also thinking that a massive over-reliance on concert revenue to sustain artists’ livelihoods means that nowadays bigger is almost always seen as better – even when ‘bigger’ comes at the obvious detriment of the music. And I’m thinking that an act’s popularity – and indeed their excellence – isn’t necessarily proportionate to

One of the first things I learned after seeing Big Thief triumph at Green Man is that some long-time fans are worried about them. There’s an extra percussionist; the bassist has been replaced; and the singer is now front and centre. Have they just become a conventional rock band, people mutter. Have they lost the intimacy they once had? I’d never seen Big Thief before, which is something of an error on my part. Not least because I can’t answer those questions: I have nothing to compare Saturday night’s performance with. I can only say that without caring about what they were in the past, they are extraordinary in the

Dr Phil Hammond is a hilarious and wildly successful comedian whose career is built on the ruins of the NHS. His act has spawned a host of imitators on the stand up-circuit and they share Dr Phil’s confused adoration for the NHS. All of them love the idea of universal healthcare but they dislike the messy practical details. And they’re convinced that extra cash will save the system. The evidence suggests otherwise; handing more money to the NHS is like giving a gambling addict the keys to a bullion van. The gallows humour is delightful if you’re not stuck in an NHS queue Dr Phil claims that he would gladly

There’s yet to be a Glastonbury line-up that hasn’t provoked a chorus of naysaying. Refrains like ‘looks rubbish. I wouldn’t go’ and ‘not like it used to be’ are de rigueur. Dismissing the headliners as ‘crap this year’ rivals football as the nation’s favourite sport. Yet there’s something to be said for trusting the Glastonbury bookers: check out, say, the lower-tier bands on the 1994 poster and see how many greats they discovered before they were famous – Radiohead, Pulp, Oasis… Nowhere else in the world could hand written signs for toilets induce a Proustian yearning to return Glastonbury’s prestige and legendary ‘vibe’ are now such that the festival is

Quite when the concept of coolness became a thing is uncertain, even to etymologists. As early as 1884, an academic paper noted the expression ‘Dat’s cool!’ among African-Americans. But it’s about 100 years since ‘cool’ entered the lexicon as an unambiguous description of something to aspire to (via jazz, inevitably), and it’s still a crucial concept in the world of pop: it’s being cool that meant the Strokes could attract 50,000 or so people to east London, even though most of those present were at primary school when the band released their two first two albums, which are the two on which their reputation rests, and songs from which comprised

Forty per cent of London is green space. And what we do with all that grass – all that potential – is pave it with music festivals. This year, Hyde Park hosted Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. Gunnersbury Park had Boygenius. Finsbury Park welcomed Pulp and Travis Scott. Field Day is a staple of the season. Always falling on a Saturday in late August, the day is wholly reserved for electronic music. Reams of twentysomethings make the pilgrimage: set off from wherever, change at Bank, District Line to Mile End, 15-minute walk, enter, set aside £7.50 for a can of warm Red Stripe. Everything is very clean: the organisers don’t

I love Green Man. The smallish festival is the second most beautiful site I’ve ever visited (after G Fest, which is situated on a beach in a fjord in the Faroe Islands). Nestled in a valley between the mountains of the Brecon Beacons, it has great bills, it’s impeccably organised and I feel nourished by it. But, in the interests of being honest about festivals for those who have never been, I should also confess that this year it supplied the single most miserable experience of my music-watching life. It was midnight, in a field in Wales, and I was lying face down in six inches of mud Friday was

One learns the strangest things at festivals. That, for instance, this summer has been a bit of a blackcurrant disaster in the UK because the extreme heat caused all the different varieties to ripen at the same time and fall from the bushes before they could be properly harvested. That fact came from a retired Kentish farmer called Ian, next to whom we were sitting at a £65-a-head dinner at this year’s Green Man, just outside Crickhowell in Wales. That alone should spell the difference between Green Man and the scene depicted in the Netflix series Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99. No one here was getting mouth ulcers because the drinking water

‘Well, it’s just not Glastonbury, is it?’ said my daughter aggressively, when told that our yurt featured an actual bed, wardrobe with hangers and electric points, and hot showers just around the corner. Our excuse was this was my and my partner’s first Glastonbury and we had a combined age of 125. ‘Anyway, why are you there?’ she said. ‘These are not your people, these are my people.’ Not from what I could see. With headliners such as Diana Ross, the Pet Shop Boys and Sir Paul McCartney, Glastonbury today is more a singalong event for people born in the 1950s (my husband) or 1960s (me) than anyone within shouting

What is the Edinburgh Fringe? It’s a sabbatical, a pit stop, a pause-and-check-the-map opportunity for actors who don’t quite know where to go next. Alison Skilbeck has written a ‘serio-comic celebration’ of Shakespeare and her performance attracts a decent crowd for a show that starts at noon. She plays a fruity-voiced thesp, Artemis Turret, who delivers lectures about the Bard’s older females to groups of layabout pensioners gathered in a scout hut. It’s pure Joyce Grenfell. Good fun, too, but without much potential beyond the fringe. Dominic Holland’s show, Eclipsed, is about his life as a fallen comedy god. In the 1990s he was on telly all the time and