A field in Hampshire was once home to an onslaught of electronic dance music, in the summer of 1999. A 15-year-old version of myself stumbled through ankle-deep mud and discarded detritus, gazing at up trees as they blinked with silver strobes. Throngs of revellers did their best to dance across the saturated fields, to shuddering bass and repetitive beats. Organized by the leading concert promoters Mean Fiddler (now Festival Republic) this rave was actually Homelands Festival, my first festival experience and a fully licensed event, headlined that year by the Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Faithless. Located a short distance from Southampton, Homelands was the talk of the town, though its offerings were simple by today’s standards – a profusion of burger stalls and a few sparsely decorated marquees surrounded an outdoor stage hosted by BBC Radio 1. Thirteen years later, I revisited the same field but the scene had changed dramatically: I was in the midst of the kaleidoscopic chaos that was BoomTown Fair, an independent festival that beat with a Bristolian heart. An arsenal of visual stimulation exploded upon entry as a high street of individually decorated discothèques, a main stage town square, and a set-designed city of art installations formed a vivid, three-dimensional backdrop to the carnivalesque proceedings. This festival’s presentation as a town, both through its branding and the physical realization of space, forged a masquerade of the metropolis, incorporating all amenable objects, encounters and festival-goers into its theatrical display. In this setting, festival-goers were recast as residents, many of whom had helped to build the town’s multifarious and colourful milieu. BoomTown, though uncommon in its explicitly civic positioning, offers an extreme example of a subtler shift towards diversified programming and immersive arts perceptible in the British music festival sector as a whole. How events within this sector enshrine the role of the festival-goer, in ways that articulate a politics of participation, is an issue at the core of this book.
It would be sensible to clarify, at this point, what is meant by the phrase ‘a politics of participation’, which forms the latter part of the book’s title. It is a phrase that is similarly used by Thomas Turino in Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (2008). Documenting the musical practices of the Shona villages in north-eastern Zimbabwe, where the traditional Bira functioned as an inclusive percussion ensemble with no prescribed performers or audience, Turino traced how the colonial import of concert culture brought with it a presentational performance format. Presentational performance was associated with an ‘educated people’ – and as a consequence, came to be highly valued by the cosmopolitan middle class (Turino 2008, 139). Over time, this format objectified the virtuosic performer and gradually sidelined more direct forms of participation in music (2008, 122). The performative dichotomy of the presentational and the participative modes, used to interpret these historical events, should not be taken as a method for deciding what counts as meaningful action and what does not – as Turino himself noted, the concert model was not an inauthentic mode that betrayed some true Zimbabwean style (2008, 144). Yet it did reveal a behavioural pattern, reinforced by human roles 5 and the construction of space, which produced different statements of value 6 regarding the audience and their contribution to performance. In the participative setting, performance is dependent on direct and physical audience involvement, where participants are valued as performers, whereas the presentational setting relies upon their separation from the performance as complicit spectators. There are, of course, shortcomings in labelling audiences in this way – in the project of defining the roles that regulate media and popular culture, scholars from a range of disciplines have interrogated the concept of spectatorship, and indeed, essentialist pairings like production/consumption, activity/passivity (Levy and Windahl 1985, 110; Biocca 1988, 51; Gottdiener 2001, 6). Yet these pairings, like Turino’s dichotomy, are crucial in understanding constructs that are meaningful to music festival culture.
This book draws upon and offers an extended interpretation of Turino’s politics of participation because the context examined exemplifies a coinciding politics with a reverse trajectory: festivals that exclusively utilize line-up based business models have become gradually overshadowed by an increasing number of ‘boutique’ music festivals which favour an increased emphasis on the immersive environment, playfulness and varying types of direct audience participation. Though they may be more complex than the Zimbabwean Bira, the festivals discussed in this book echo Turino’s conceptualizations because they follow, like the Bira, an event design that awards the audience member the role of performer, adventurer, artist or creator. Democratizing schemes are increasing the number of festival co-producers, many of whom are sourced from the public, while spatial construction asserts coinciding principles of co-authorship and interactivity: art installations for example are there to be touched, embellished, used as shelter, climbed on or into, or used as a scenographic backcloth to audience-based, theatrical display, while interactive games, themed environments and costume heighten a sense of play. Aligned with the moral code of relational art, there is an attempt to unite audience members with the objects of their experience, closing the proximal gaps between spectacle and spectator. How these features are based around an ideal of festival-goer action is explored via key events, after a broader examination of socio-economic forces as the context for these emergent social milieus. Understanding the interplay between these forces and the incentives of festival gatekeepers is crucial to a complete perspective of the factors that shape participation today. Many promoters are struggling to overcome the commercial challenges presented by dependency on big name artists – such as soaring fees, the imposition of artist exclusivities and the general shortfall of ticket-selling artists able to play a burgeoning number of events. With a significant quantity of festivals jostling for notice among festival-goers, and limited means for securing top artist billings, participative programming has become crucial to adding a different kind of value. The ideals surrounding audience agency are, then, commercially framed – and in my view that is not a contradiction in terms. The presence of the mitigating force of instrumentalization, that makes its mark on many alternative cultures associated with music, has indeed influenced festivals, though in ways that do not necessarily amount to their ‘heat death’ (Spracklen 2014, 252–66). The commercial nature of many music festivals should not obscure the fact that many express a cluster of values, and if purchases can be viewed as a statement of value – at least in so far as in valuing some tangible or intangible aspect of the product – then audiences might also state their preference for what it is their ticket purchase represents.
It would be a misleading generalization to imply that all festivals favour the features discussed in this book. They do not. Events that primarily emphasize lineups, such as Reading, Parklife and T in the Park, remain enormously significant to the music festival industry in terms of capacity and annual turnover. It is also the case that most events do not fall neatly into the participative/presentational dichotomy but blend these two modes together. It is more useful to consider the presentational and participative festival as occupying two opposite ends of a spectrum, with (for example) Reading Festival on one end, and Burning Man on the other – with most other festivals somewhere in between. The purpose of this book is to investigate the tensions that exist within this spectrum, by exploring the challenges to hierarchies in festival production, and their associated values, within the festival scene. This begins with a focus on the economic growth and development of the British festival industry, which occupies the first half of the book. This is followed by a discussion of the wider scene of ‘boutique’ festivals in Britain, as niche gatherings that repackage the sensibilities associated with an antecedent counterculture. Then, by examining the ‘No Spectators’ philosophy of the American event Burning Man, and a selection of British festivals that have drawn influence from its approach to production, I evidence a confluence of promoter incentives, transatlantic exchange and the audience’s desire for creative collaboration. Drawing upon ethnographies centred on BoomTown Fair (Hampshire) and Secret Garden Party (Cambridgeshire), as the two most compelling examples of systemic audience integration in creative programming in the UK, the British sector is shown to be developing new and hybridized alternatives to concert-style festivals, which primarily award performative emphasis to musical line-ups.
Existing research on contemporary pop and rock music festivals is not substantial in quantity, though it is growing, in line with the popularization of music festivals more generally. As professional and degree qualifications in Event Management and Music and Business Management have also become more common, there is parallel growth in a strand of festivals research rooted in the tourism and management disciplines, much of which focuses on economic impact, the optimization of systems and practices, and the motivations of stakeholders and attendees. Naturally the methodologies employed in these investigations often rely upon quantifications of socio-economic and survey response data. Considering motivational studies, for example, survey data has been used to explore broad hypotheses: large samples were used for studying the link between nationality and the motivations of festival-goers, for example Lee et al. (2004); and similarly, Crompton and McKay (1997) used survey data to consider various motivations for attending festival events. As has been noted by Anderton, much of the contemporary research about festivals tends to be ‘rationalist, instrumentalist, and managerial in their focus’ (Anderton 2009, 42). As valuable as these studies are, they are not matched in number by studies using deep-slice, experiential approaches, or studies that consider festivals from politics, anthropology and social sciences perspectives. In fact, there remains a problematic lack of academic studies on festivals using the qualitative approach (Holloway et al. 2010). As a consequence, the theoretical foundations laid down by the early studies of carnival and celebration, which apply perspectives from anthropological, cultural and social theory (such as Turner 1979; Clarke 1982; Bakhtin 1984; Bristol 1985; Falassi 1987; Danow 1995) are somewhat detached from music festivals of the modern age. As a result, the socio-political relationship between contemporary festival and quotidian society, and the systems that influence participation, remain areas of research relatively uncharted. Though the scope of this book is inevitably limited, it is hoped that its contents will begin to fill this gap in festivals scholarship – addressing, if not concretely resolving, some larger questions regarding their fundamental significance in society as arenas that perform new possibilities and new forms of social organization.
Taking the social constructionist view that language produces, rather than reflects, inter-subjectively shared meanings (Eagleton 1996, 52), the research explores the construction of ‘participation’ within festival culture as an idealized act with socio-political meanings that extend beyond the directly experienced sphere of festival. As portrayed by other scholars within the constructionist tradition (such as Foucault 1969) the production of meaning via discourse is also linked to behavioural practices. Action embodies the meanings expressed in discourse – as this book argues of festivals allied to a politics of extreme audience participation. These festivals generate a social praxis through synergizing participative ideals with event production, merging belief, discourse and tangible production.1 The findings of this book are the outcome of a methodology that explored these elements in depth, focusing on the meanings surrounding a ‘No Spectators’ idiom, deploying in-depth interviewing with the organizers identifying with this ideal and analyses of artefacts and online spaces that challenge spectatorship through design, imagery, marketing and communications. I also experienced how these meanings were brought to life at the live events. The range of festivals mentioned in this book is wide, though in-depth analysis is limited to Burning Man, Secret Garden Party and BoomTown. This selection was not formed arbitrarily: these particular events lie at the centre of a cultural nexus of shared ideals relevant to the study and were chosen because of the transatlantic relationship they evidenced, through information readily available in the public domain. They are each aligned to the ideal of audience-produced festival, though this is, as shall be documented in the subsequent chapters, expressed in different ways.
It is important to acknowledge that the content of this book has been heavily influenced by the many personal and professional experiences that unfolded outside the formal frame of academic research. Fifteen years before the publication of this book, I began to experience festivals through the role of a commercially disinterested festival-goer; as my interest deepened, I decided on a career in events. I founded a metropolitan festival in 2004 – ‘Raisetheroof’ – which outgrew its home at the Brudenell Social Club (capacity 200) and went on to become a 1,000 capacity party at the Leeds West Indian Centre, a venue famous for its dub and reggae nights (namely, SubDub), where it remained for some years. Ten years of promoting a festival-esque club night was an absolute thrill; I took immense pleasure in planning every aspect of it myself, booking bands, handing out flyers, painting decorations. These years provided an invaluable insight into the scene (and an unforgettable experience). Though music was fundamental to Raisetheroof, the presence of ancillary features were also important: costume, theming, interactive installation art, markets, workshops and a very open volunteering policy were all integrated into the execution and experience of the event. This medium allowed me to tangibly explore the principles of immersion and democratized festival production, and how they influenced crowd participation and atmosphere. Risking my own capital by putting events together was crucial, aligning me to the incentives and perspectives of the promoter; someone who, whatever their vision for the event, must sell tickets, and must present and price events in ways amenable to this single-most important outcome. As discussed at length in Chapter 3, promoters play a difficult game governed by the economic rules of the live music industry, which cannot always be predicted. Being one of those promoters was advantageous in illuminating the way in which two things – visions for participatory festivals and commercial incentives – were radically shaping the industry at large. This was revealed to me from multiple perspectives, and other experiences in industry were similarly formative: in 2008, I was employed as the production manager of the ‘Big Love Inflatable Church’ – a fully immersive performance installation that allowed audience members to get ‘married’ in mock wedding ceremonies, with actors posing as vicars and bridesmaids. With this unique feature, and a troupe of flamboyant performers, I toured a number of summer music festivals across the UK including Glade, RockNess, Electric Picnic, Bloom and Bestival. This experience was vital, allowing me to perceive, first hand, the way in which audience-centric features were utilized by festivals in their increasing emphasis upon immersion and play. Despite its simplicity, and relative low cost to the event promoter, the Inflatable Church often garnered rapt attention from both the press and from festival-goers. The novelty way in which it enshrined the audience member’s participation, while satirizing tradition, was irresistible to the public.
As I took on freelance management contracts with Kendal Calling festival (2009) and then Beacons festival (2012–14), while lecturing part-time in event production, I was ultimately focused on the creative and participatory aspects of festival design – but was compelled to consider also the optimization of operations, efficiency and profits, each in compliance with rigorous UK regulation. During this time I also fell in love with and married a festival promoter, whom I had met on a freelance contract, and many of our dinner conversations would include festival news and gossip (they still do). If this mixture of personal circumstance, necessity, hobby, profession and academic enquiry, an amalgam which has crystallised in the formation of this book, qualifies me as a ‘fan as researcher’ or ‘critical insider’ – it is worth considering the shortfalls associated this approach. Fans, or indeed practitioners, who limit their research to their own experiences, can be regarded as ‘me-searchers’ who fail to inform their findings with real critical thinking and theoretical credibility. Challenged by both Andy Bennett and Kevin Hetherington, the fan-as-researcher approach stands accused of advocating and romanticizing cultures, failing to present characteristics with critical reference to the researcher’s own, potentially distorting, influence on research outcomes. Bennett in particular points to a trend in cultural studies for ‘younger researchers’ to report uncritically on music subcultures (Bennett 2002, 460, 462; Hetherington 2000, 10). Although no uncritical approach to insider-based research should be supported, it is also true that exploiting pre-existing roles for the purposes of research is a kind of shortcut that can draw enriched insights from level of access that a ‘disinterested’ or less connected researcher simply would not have. It seems sensible to argue that it is a lack of reflexivity that is really at the heart of the problems expressed here, rather than the fan-as-research methodology itself. The role of the researcher is not, for example, to support the judgements of value that inevitably make their way into discussions about ‘mainstream’ versus ‘underground’ or ‘alternative’ culture, but rather, to acknowledge their meaning as constructed discourse for understanding the relational poise of what is being studied. As the following investigations will show, the ideal of extreme participation is enshrined in emancipating terms at the festivals under study – though it is not the aim of the author to reproduce these associations as fact. Neither is an uncritical presentation of spectatorship as ‘bad’ or ‘alienating’ intended. Rather, the aim is to acknowledge the milieu that constructs this system of associations, to posit some explanations as to why the idea of spectatorship is challenged, and to explore how far this critique relates to a broader pattern of production and consumption within British festival culture.
The politics of participation at the heart of this book can be understood in terms of a wider deliberation over who controls the creation of content. The unequal level of access to the apparatus of content production is a historically contentious issue, whether that content is arts-based or simply consists of factual information. Prior to the emergence of the Internet as an informational commons, the mass consumption of information through the medium of television, for example, raised a number of illuminating perplexities. This had to do with the troubling impotence implied by the television audience – which could be considered an enfeebled, inert group, unaware of the larger, informational processes that absorb and control them. This has been described as a ‘hypodermic’ model of mass communication, which places audience perception as conveniently malleable and uniformly defined by media stimulus (Biocca 1998, 57). These assumptions are now widely discredited, yet the concerns the hypodermic model brought forth expressed an enduring fearfulness regarding what happens to society when the production of goods and services are controlled by the few, and consumed by the many. As mediated information became increasingly ubiquitous, anxieties regarding who controlled the media were sharpened into distinct critiques. The media form could, it was feared, be used as a hegemonic weapon and a tool for brainwashing the population – a prospect forcefully argued in Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978). He presents a serious epistemological problem: how can we really know reality, when so much of what we know is based on artificial representations? Today, we may smile retrospectively at Mander’s visceral unease with the introduction of the electronic screen into daily life, something that is today a staple of modern living. Drawing upon the light experiments conducted by Dr John Ott, Mander argued that the artificial light that television produced physically numbed the mind of the spectator upon entry into the eye, nullifying critical capacities and ‘dimming the mind’ (see IX and X, 170–215, 1978). A pseudo-scientific conclusion, perhaps, though his other observations are not so easily written off: working as a successful advertising and public relations executive in 1960s San Franscisco, Mander observed how access to the mass dissemination of information was limited to the rich, for the principle purpose of further enrichment (1978, 19). The comparative poverty of civil rights and environmental groups rendered their infrequent forays into mass media advertising mere drops in the informational ocean. Instead, they had to resort to headline-grabbing direct action to raise awareness of their causes (1978, 18). Social injustices could be hidden from view or narrowed into distorting sound bites that hid their true complexities. Fears regarding who controlled information were not unfounded: viewers could confuse real and mediated experience, and had little awareness of the way in which the media transformed information. Collectively, the media also produced ominous depictions of reality: according to Haggren et al. (2005, 14–15), mesmerizing yet meaningless cornucopias of superficiality and violence disabled viewers both from reality, and from the means to create content. Thinking about what forms of entertainment might reverse this perceived malaise, most idealizations of more ‘direct’ or ‘creative’ forms of participation offer solutions to the ills of a pliant populace. They express, therefore, anxieties surrounding the control of culture, and, more broadly, consumerist society. The issue can be described as follows:
The role of the producer is to create suggestions. The role of the consumer is to experience them. This is a form of one-way communication. Controlling the shape of suggestions means controlling the experiences of the recipient; the media relationship is always a relation of power. Media that are based on one-way communication always have authoritarian structures. (Haggren et al. 2005, 4–5)
This theoretical lens would be shortsighted if it sidelined the possibility for any noteworthy creativity embedded in the act of consuming information. However, if we were to grant that some forms of media definitely do restrict the audience’s ability to ‘create suggestions’ and alter informational content, then it would follow that any adjustments allowing for multiple voices could offer a solution to narrow production. This rationale for democratization has been raised before: with reference to the letters page of a newspaper, the canonical Marxist Walter Benjamin acknowledged how the medium transforms consumers into producers, granting the reader access to authorship (Benjamin 1931, 90). Problematically such adjustments to established media make little difference to the kind of information that is disseminated, for the power of selection remains with the principle producer. As is similarly recalled in Benjamin’s terms – the Soviet press ‘still belongs to capital’ (1931, 91). The dialectic between production, consumption and the tensions that lie in the space between, have inspired other ‘redemptive’ forms of media: the gatekeepers of alternative cultures have responded to excess commercialism by initiating the complete takeover of production, as discernible in the DIY scene of amateur-produced music newspapers, zines, non-profit gigs and independent record labels. Although these media exist largely on the margins of culture, mass file sharing, open source software, the blogosphere and social media, on the other hand, could be viewed as a widespread virtual realization of user-based cultural production. The same ethic of user-produced content has also defined a movement in the art, theatre and festival contexts that can be described as interactive, immersive, or understood as a ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud 2006, 160, 171). Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics addresses benign consumerism by casting participation, and the co-authorship of art, as an idealized solution – a political act. The participatory model is a tool for challenging the narrow control of cultural production – eliminating traditional lines between spectators and artists in a ‘domain of exchanges’ (2006, 162). Therefore, when we speak of increasing participation via the co-creation of media, art or festival, we are alluding to an egalitarian ideal, where no meaning-makers are excluded.
In the framework of cultural celebrations, whether there is an exclusive or participatory system of production can often be discerned through event design. Different event designs embody different values about the audience and their relationship to performance, which are then animated by the kinds of behaviour the designs permit. Vicky-Ann Cremona’s investigation of audience participation and carnival forms in Malta, for example, evidenced the vital connection between event design and patterns of theatricality in audiences, underlining how carnivalesque behaviours – a form of participant-produced content – can be shaped or curtailed by seemingly innocuous elements (Cremona 2004, 69–90). The label ludus, previously used to define organized and competitive forms of play, is applied to the extensively regulated carnivals of Malta, found in the regions of Valletta and Rabat. At the ludic carnival, highly ostentatious performers are at the centre of its theatrical emphasis, both prior and during the show, rendering the live atmosphere conducive to watching (2004, 70, 71). This, argues Cremona, is a deviation from the historic carnivals at Valetta: adapting Turner’s use of the term paidia (describing unregulated and ‘agonistic’ forms of play), these paidian carnivals were characterized by spontaneity and interaction between performers and participants (2004, 70, 76). Thus, Maltese carnival had bifurcated into two cultural strands that reproduced contrasting values surrounding the legitimacy of audience participation – a duality that was, in part, down to commercial forces that sought to enhance the touristic potential of the celebrations. Prior to the involvement of the National Festivities Committee in the 1920s, the carnival lacked emphasis on display and included non-competitive vehicles with amateur decoration, providing platforms for members of the audience to dance upon. Gradually, the carnival committee rerouted the procession to occupy wider streets, physically separating the spectators and placing them at a greater distance from the performative focus – undermining spontaneous communication, and the interchangeability of roles that had once blurred the dividing lines between performers and spectators (Cremona 2004, 72). Conspicuous demarcation, which allowed only official and authorized performers to make up the procession, put an end to laypeople joining it on undecorated, unprepared trucks. This, as well as popular and improvised comedy, was lost as the carnival became increasingly structured and predictable (Cremona 2004). The carnival can be described, then, as a once-collaborative event that was incrementally altered for the purposes of tourism and profitable economies of scale. As a side effect, the audience’s capacity to spontaneously create performative content was limited over time. Ironically, Cremona reports that the demand for countryside carnival increased because they remained free of these forces and their informal, spontaneous, ‘paidian’ qualities were retained – preserving a greater degree of audience participation, countryside carnival was increasingly seen as a more authentic celebration and tourists were attracted to the experiences that could be found there (2004). This research is vital because it acknowledges how far degrees of display, spatial proximity and the placement of performers within an event design holds remarkable power in legitimizing, or suppressing, modes of audience participation. These subtle factors can inhibit or liberate audiences from their role as spectators, and designs that inhibit are, as Cremona has shown, sometimes the result of commercial instrumentalization. The variant role of performance in the ludic and the paidian carnivals can also be aligned with presentational and participative modes as defined by Turino (2008, 23, 65). The presentational mode, like the ludic carnival, emphasizes the virtuosity and elaborate display associated with a concert tradition, which the participative replaces with a collectivized and fluid approach to performance. A politics of alienation versus empowerment inevitably emerges from these classifications: Cremona is not afraid to posit, for example, that the modernization of the carnival was negative because it curtailed the audience’s creativity through restricting participation to spectatorship (Cremona 2004, 72). The subtext implies that participative carnival in its pure and uncorrupted form represents a more authentic mode of social celebration, because it allows uninitiated audience members who are not trained performers a level of direct control in becoming part of the performance. Whether one wishes to buy into this judgement or not; that carnival can pass from an inclusive event to one that implicitly prohibits audience participation is exemplified by these accounts, which also highlight how adaptations to convivial space can promote or extinguish popular theatricality. Divergent carnival traditions offer an exemplary case of participative and presentational performance competing within the same social frame.
Simon Frith’s observation that there was a separation of the audience from artists at the 1969 Woodstock constitutes no more than a single line in Sound Effects (Frith 1981, 222). This claim is contrary to the (albeit scant) festival research, which prefers to examine festivals as arenas for carnivalesque, participatory and ‘active[ly] engag[ed]’ crowds – found (for example) in the work of Laing (2004, 7) and Botstein (1999, 481). Attempts to define the festival crowd have reified the associations between expressivism, crowd sociality and the deterministic consumer, though this treatment has also produced problematic assumptions regarding the level of agency attributable to the audience. For Botstein, the audiences of pop and rock concerts offer up a sharp contrast to the subordinated silence of the concert hall audience (1999). Recognizing the shortcomings of labelling an audience as passive, he uses the similarly slippery notion of the active audience to contrast the formality of the concert hall performance with the fluidity of the rock concert audience:
In the case of rock concerts [audiences] are so actively engaged in their own self-expression that, as audience members, they create their own event and sound. They are also convinced that the ‘meaning’ of that to which they are listening is not stable and lies not in the music itself and is certainly not limited by any authorial intentionality. Rather it is created by the context of the event and their own personal responses and associations. (Botstein 1999)
These are valid observations, although they betray not only a problematic conflation of subjectivity and control, but also some essentialist distinctions between audience types. It is fair to say that the rock concert experience is not wholly fixed upon the authorial status of featured artists, though why this should be particular to the rock concert is trickier to defend. Employing the comparative lack of expression that characterizes the concert hall audience as grounds for denying them similar subjective powers is problematic because it renders the idea of ‘active engagement’ to a conceptualization that is both counterintuitively limited, and ambiguous. Yet this tendency is one that is rooted in historical ways of thinking about culture: the inference of creativity on the part of the rock audience, and converse impotence on the part of the classical, is due to generalized associations between festival, youth culture and social protest forged by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s. Problematically, emphasis on the subversive function of youth culture sidelines its other causes and impacts. For example, Laing’s use of Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), the canonical text for the squatting movement, to define the social significance of the contemporary outdoor festival, glosses over those events that are inconsistent with Bey’s original conceptualization: not only did the ‘TAZ’ necessarily exist outside of economic mechanisms, it also dissolved the artist/audience distinction by demystifying the performer and democratizing art – it is not, therefore, applicable to many pop festival events (Laing 2004, 7; Bey 1991, 40). This, and indeed most accounts of festival culture, disregards the ways in which many festivals reproduce, rather than dispense, with systems of hierarchy by placing featured acts as idols at the zenith of the celebration. There may be a fluid boundary between performers, audience, producers and consumers at some festivals, but the standard business model for festival production relies on a formula that requires those distinctions to be maintained – as a consequence, featured acts remain as common foci, where they are elevated upon stages with screens, lighting shows and effects. Blanket-labelling festivals, as the contexts for active participation, sidelines this reality. Merely by virtue of the audience’s ability to perceive and to express, they are granted powers of determination. This depiction of the festival audience amounts to a stereotype that does not allow room for recognizing important nuances in festival forms and contemporaneous modes of participation. Any delineation of ‘passive’ versus ‘active’ audiences, whether as constructs in discourse or measurable modes of behaviour, should acknowledge the intuitive point that there are, simply, different kinds of participation that contrasting types of celebration engender and promote. This reverts back to the intuitive logic of Victor Turner, who recognized that all celebratory behaviour is framed behaviour (Turner 1982, 28) – when examining participation it is vital that the frame itself as a heterogeneous influence is not disregarded.
Botstein’s depiction of the rock festival as the antithesis of the concert hall also neglects the commonalities they share – despite their differentiation in the reified categories of the ‘high’ and ‘popular’ arts, they both emerge from the quintessentially Western and presentational performance tradition where, in both cases, there is a separation of artist from audience. Indeed, an acknowledgement of this, which recognizes the presentational underpinnings of Western concerts, is crucial to understanding pop festival culture as it exists today. The presentational format has always been part and parcel of the festival format as we know it, for it is inseparable from the fundamental purpose of introducing live music to the ticket-buyer: emerging from the jazz club scene in Southampton, the trailblazing outdoor festival at Beaulieu arose, in 1956, principally as a method for presenting many acts on the bill, because the event could be spread out over several days (McKay 2000, 21). As discussed at length in the next chapter, for jazz audiences accustomed to a single or limited number of acts at an evening club performance, the outdoor festival offered multiple acts and a ‘novel method of presenting music’ (Laing 2004, 5). The rock festival format was shaped, therefore, by precedents set in the domain of jazz culture, and the commercial opportunism surrounding the billing of popular artists – a format that endured because, by the end of the 1960s, there was ‘more money to be made out of rock music than out of other forms of pop’ (Frith 1981, 100). Licensed outdoor concerts, some of which drew upon the new age themes of esotericism and the communitarian lifestyle often emphasized in scholarly accounts, were also methods of capitalizing on the popularity of new music; they were platforms for the celebration of profile musicians from the outset. The significance of the festival line-up became the principal hook that all the other aspects of a festival production were hung off; an arrangement that matched the atmosphere of adulation surrounding the artist: while Frith notes that rock musicians became the new idols, Arthur Marwick describes music festivals as facilitators of the ‘idolatry’ inspired by rock music, a vital feature of a potent mix of ‘nature, love, drugs and mass togetherness’ (Frith 1981, 99; Marwick 1998, 497, cited in McKay 2000, 12).
In many ways, the presentational format of festival culture shares some similarities with theatrical production – reproducing actor–spectator relationships that exchange complex flows of energy (McAuley 2000, 247, 275). In the festivals sector, this format has been fuelled by the recording industry’s cultivation of high profile and ticket-selling acts. Concert-model festivals in particular can thus be viewed as manifestations of the supply and demand of artists that governs the recording industry at large. Examples of what can be classified as concert-model festivals include Leeds and Reading, though other examples in the UK could include Knebworth, Download, Bingley and the Isle of Wight Festival. Taking the Festival Republic-owned Leeds Festival as an exemplifying event, focus is generally geared towards the action that unfolds on the main stage, despite its plethora of vendors and smaller stages. Featured there is a substantial list of profile bands, largely from the guitar-based genres of rock and indie, though folk, hip-hop and dance acts have also been included. As featured in Figure 1.1, a sizeable stage and eye-catching logos located either side makes for an iconic impression of the festival’s brand identity, which until 2008 included the title sponsor Carling.
Figure 1.1 The Libertines performing at Leeds Festival 2010
Source: Tom Martin
The counterpart events at Leeds and Reading constitute a festival that relies wholly upon the programming of well-known acts to guarantee both ticket sales and media attention. Audience experience is based around convivial sociality as well as music reception; however, the event relies on a set of nationally and internationally recognized names to induce attendance in the first instance. An advertising strategy is adopted that is not only illustrative of the centrality of named artists, but also of the formulaic way in which they are organized each year. Each programmed selection is presented as a new combination of attractions, a result of artists entering the market, and shifts in the popularity of established (and, often, previously featured) acts. Headline performances usually reflect who is available each summer, and lower down the bill repeat performances are common, with exact positioning changing as an act ascends or descends the ladder of fame and notoriety. This is representative of the commercial utilization of profile artists as cultural capital, which translates into measurable capital for the promoter. Placement of artists on billings is also ranked, and this positioning is more or less a direct translation of economic worth in the marketplace. This aspect is so essential to the history, function and perceived validity of music festivals that it can mistakenly appear as if there are no possible alternatives, and as a consequence, the meanings and emphases this model produces can be lost. Yet the centrality of artists, and the hierarchical way in which they are organized, constitutes a particular version of social celebration that places great significance on ‘must see’ acts. Emphasis on ‘seeing’ has established not only a festival format that capitalizes on stardom, but also the norm that valid performance must be qualified in a conventional, though not always accessible, set of ways.
The regular deployment of such assets in popular culture more broadly has had a cumulative impact on the psychology of celebrity, as many ‘stars’ have come to be viewed as almost celestial or demonic beings. As figureheads they are able to incite irrational, visceral forms of adulation or contempt based on mediated impressions, of a kind that would be irregular within most human relationships. Film, television and print media are well-known conduits for celebrity; while festivals, and orchestrated live shows in general, are not. In his itinerary of stakeholders in the rock star system, Turner, for example, excludes the promoter (Turner 2007, 193). Others have rightfully acknowledged, though briefly, that participating in a rock concert does constitute an interaction with celebrity culture (Redmond and Holmes 2007, 309). Perhaps the scarcity of such analyses is because there is no perceptible and obvious intermediary between audience and the musical content delivered by artists – yet like a film or a book, a festival still remains authored by its promoter, even if this may seem less clear in the absence of a ‘writer’, ‘creative director’ and rolling credits. When the advantages inherent in the full utilization of the star system are considered, it is not difficult to understand why festivals depend upon it. The deployment of movie stars provides a useful illustration of the same formula at work, since stars constitute assets for those who benefit from their commercialization (Dyer 1998, 10, 11; Turner 2007, 193). As can occur in film, the prioritization of featured artists at festivals has engendered simplicity in design and content. This allows promoters to achieve straightforward economies of scale, for fame, by its very nature, already leverages this. Expenditure on stars does not constitute a guarantee, for both festivals and films can fail despite their inclusion, yet their chances of commercial success are vastly increased by ‘names’ – their procurement is, therefore, vital for securing income from the fans they attract. Stars in both contexts offer, therefore, a lower risk business model and a commercial safety mechanism. This instrumentalization of stars does impact many aspects of festival production, and consequently how festivals are experienced as a form of sociality. Motivations for attending festivals are much more complex than the appearance of names, yet the decisive influence of names over purchase decisions can narrow the programme focus to a limited set of artist-centric features. In the realm of film, this process stands accused of side effects more troubling than a mere lack of complexity, but is also held responsible for defusing the impetus to deliver an original and high-quality narrative (Dyer 1998, 10, 11). Hortense Powdermaker, who examined the emergent movie industries in 1950s America, also noted the relationship between celebrity and standardization:
The system provides a formula easy to understand and may serve also to protect executives from having to pay too much attention to such intangibles as the quality of a story or of acting. Here is a standardized product which can be sold and which banks regard as insurance for large profits. (Powdermaker 1951, 228, 229)
Is it possible to apply the same arguments about the use of problematic stars in films, to music festivals? It is certainly true that line-up-centric formats, when compared to others, appear somewhat predictable and standardized. We might not know which artists will appear before they are formally announced, though we can visualize the overall environment in which they will play. Models that rely wholly on high profile artists often exclude other forms of musical and non-musical content that does not have as obvious a causal connection to ticket sales – these represent elements which the promoters would argue, however, are inconsistent with their event brand. Likewise it is true that in film, stars can render complexity less necessary, for their inclusion in the drama guarantees a certain quantity of box office sales. For the promoters of festivals in Britain, budgetary concerns have, since the 1950s, crystallized this standard business model, for there is the additional consideration that majority expenditure on live acts leaves little for investing in other areas of entertainment. When these factors are considered, we might posit that the concert-model music festival can operate in a way that coincides with the processes identified by Powdermaker, and it is at least as old as Reading Festival – which bills itself as the ‘oldest pop festival in the World’ – and, since its launch in 1961, has standardized a formula that can be replicated anywhere that demand for featured artists is sufficient. This mode of festival, which utilizes the economics of celebrity, should not be viewed as depriving audiences of features they were unaware they really wanted – such would be an erroneous and somewhat elitist misrepresentation of concert-model ticket-buyers. Without making such judgements, it is nonetheless logical to conclude that these festivals are fully dependent upon festival-goers to perpetuate the economics of celebrity, to whom line-ups remain of paramount importance, because they are basing their purchase decisions within a broader system that enshrines the appearance of their favourite artists in social significance. As such, there is a kind of circularity in the way that festivals both respond and reproduce the system of celebrity that exists outside. However, demographics and the socio-cultural backgrounds of festival-goers also have a lot to do with the motives that underpin their ticket purchases. The fact that Leeds and Reading Festival, Download and Sonisphere are notoriously attended by a large proportion of school leavers and college students, is significant: the simplistic format they present offers up a familiar affirmation of celebrity, coinciding with mediated messages regularly consumed by the young who are not targeted as powerfully by alternative music festivals. Many line-up-centric festivals are consequently positioned to appeal to the ‘uninitiated’, as a first or second festival experience. Ironically, while the music that is played at each of these examples embodies a rebellious, punk aesthetic, this is executed within a context that can be considered highly conservative in conforming rigidly to the economic system of celebrity. Narrow production at a remove from the audience is also reinforced by design: human labour is responsible for every aspect of the build, yet the appearance of the handmade is sidelined within these orchestrated milieus. All aspects of event design reproduce artist-centric values conducive to the continued reception of music – most food and drink vendors do not promote lengthy sociality away from the presentational performances, for example, while advertising, decor, staging and branding all resonate with large-scale and mechanistic, as opposed to individualized, production values. Contrary to assumptions regarding the creative determinism of the festival audience, these standardizing conditions create an overarching frame of celebration that implies a form of spectatorship, despite both the expressivism of the audience, and the experiential nuances of individuals. Events such as these can be viewed in terms of a performance convention that separates audiences, symbolically and physically, from the fields of production. The continuous prioritization of celebrity and emphasis on broadcast at the concert-model event aligns them as ‘mediatic’ spectacles (Bowdin et al. 2001). Such a set-up is not isolated from shifts in the wider habitas in which we live: celebrities are a component in the spectacular assemblage of representations that now commoditize social life. It is not difficult to move from this idea to the notion of festival as a synthetically produced, theatrical spectacle. The fabricated ‘happening’, which some have viewed as compensation for a lack of spontaneity in the real world (Boorstin 1992, 9) presents a coinciding problematic: the concealment of creative production and its removal from the milieu of the audience – as expressed in the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord (1967). He placed the mediated image at the centre of social separation, a wedge between the observer and the observed – and the familiar image of the main stage performance constitutes one that is central to identifying festival experience, though it is also communicative of a division between producer and consumer. The impression of the rock star on an elevated stage can be considered akin, therefore, to the Debordian spectacle – as one that reproduces a particular kind of distance between social actors, despite the experience of togetherness and connection that may be experienced as part of the crowd.
Arguably, a social disconnect has played a part in the destruction that plagued Leeds and Reading Festival over the years, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s. When I attended Reading in 2000, rumour had it that rioting was an age-old tradition reserved for the last night of the festival. As promised, at around midnight on the final night, teenagers began setting rows of Portaloos alight, dispensing with the nicety of checking whether anyone was still inside first. Crowds of spectators treated these events as pure entertainment – myself, at age 16, included. I still have photographs of the life-threatening fire at each stage of its rapid development, captured on a cheap disposable camera. The charged atmosphere as I watched rows of Portaloos burn, before the fires were put out by three fire engines, has proved more memorable than any of the headliners that performed that year – as the firefighters did their work, I recall chanting with the crowd ‘we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn – burn motherfucker, burn’ – a line from ‘Fire Water Burn’ by The Bloodhound Gang, released in 1996. Yet it was easy for us to revel in the destruction of the festival space because the way the event was organized ultimately detached us from it. There were no conspicuous volunteer schemes aimed at teenagers, and the staff – heavyset security and police in high-visibility jackets, even the bar staff – all looked much older than the audience. We did not identify with the people that ran the festival, so we had little to lose by contributing to its vandalism. Though we were music fans, nothing we were asked to do as individuals would have any real impact on the artists on stage or the event itself – as a result, the impulse to create our own disorderly spectacle was more powerful than the incentive to behave ourselves. In 2000, there was also a total lack of entertainment after the music had been turned off at 11 p.m.; a recipe for mischievous work by idle hands. The simplicity and anonymity of this environment, together with other factors, was conducive to large, drunk, bored and destructive crowds. Crowds that were subconsciously misled, too – perhaps we could recognize that the festival required little more from us than our money.
The centrality of artists at concert-model events signals a system of celebrity that may seem an immutable part of contemporary festival culture. And since these are branded as festivals of music, is this phenomenon at all surprising? If festival-goers desired experiences that go beyond this convention, we might argue, then they would have supported them with their purchase decisions throughout the history of their development. The rise of Glastonbury and its acquisition of flagship status in the British festival market in some part evidences that they have, though this event has long been over-subscribed and it was not always possible to buy into extra-musical festivals when the wider availability wasn’t there. Prior to the 2000s boom in mixed programme festivals, for a British teenager interested in the escapism and freedom outdoor camping festivals provided, the available festivals principally emphasized music. The arts were not positioned to appeal in the same way – in large part because they lacked the bacchanalian qualities that defined music festivals as a particular frame of celebration. It is also the case that, though the Arts Council England has now begun to turn its attention to supporting non-musical art at music festivals in various regions of the UK, prior to the 2000s its focus remained heavily stacked in favour of supporting more gentrified forms of high art, such as opera and ballet. As a consequence, music and art were much more compartmentalized forms of culture than they are today, and the early years of licensed and large-scale music festivals were not considered particularly viable contexts for ‘the arts’. It is true that Glastonbury has championed the arts alongside its musical programme for almost 40 years, succeeding in part because this was its niche – yet there were few other licensed festivals that similarly appealed to the young while supporting diverse and inclusive, extra-musical entertainments. Given these limitations, it is arguable that unlicensed, free festivals were popular precisely because they provided some relief from the star-centric, economic models that were a conspicuous part of the licensed market. Music festival culture offers up, then, two contrasting event designs: one is limited to placed sequences of high profile artists, the other integrates this within a diverse aesthetic milieu.
This architecture is imperceptible when the purposive nature of the festival audience is uniformly magnified. Uncritical allusions to the determinism of the festival-goer, connected to broader reifications associated with the CCCS school of thought, mask the facets of spectatorship inherent to the festival format. This way of thinking was already gathering pace by the time the first Glastonbury and Woodstock took place, and when it was applied more broadly to festival culture, it coincided with a broader habit of viewing subcultures as provocative, outspoken and dissonant. This is particularly true of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which is inseparably entangled with the modern music festival blueprint. On a more profound level, the desire to reinstall the individual with action arose not only from the inability to locate and measure the ‘hypodermic’ effects of the so-called mass culture, but also from the desire to reinstate the classical liberal democratic citizen (Biocca 1998, 57). This illuminates a politically loaded aspect to the way in which festival audiences are viewed, when their participation is equated with a particular type of freedom: choice. Problematically when this choice is limited to subjectivity, festival-goers are ‘active’ simply because they are conscious thinkers. The same perplexing logic is found in assessments of the media: as Rancière has stated, ‘the spectator is active, as the student or scientist: he observes, he selects, he compares, he interprets’ (Rancière 2004). Since consciousness inevitably involves choice, the fact of its existence is used as evidence against the notion of the passive, cultivated audience. It is therefore not difficult to understand why audiences at music festivals have been declared actively engaged, when the cerebral processes involved in watching television and reading newspapers had already been used to qualify the mass media audience as such. And yet, all modes of engagement are problematically rendered active under such a premise. This underlines the absurdity in the use of cerebral intention as a signifier of ‘activity’: as Biocca has asked, ‘if the existence of passivity is to be defined by self-reports of unmotivated behaviour, should we be surprised by its absence?’ (Biocca 1998, 58). This not only renders activity everything (and thus, nothing), it also renders the active audience ‘unfalsifiable … for what – short of brain death – would render an individual a member of the passive audience?’ (Biocca 1998, 58). It is clear that the terms ‘passivity’ and ‘activity’ depend on an essentialism that is simply not suitable for accurately describing the nuance and complexity of how human beings engage with informational content, whether it is transmitted through festival, television or the Internet. Yet, as terms firmly embedded in the discourses central to this study, they remain powerful relational constructs. Their analysis in later chapters considers, therefore, the constructedness of these concepts and what the difference between them actually represents in the social milieu under investigation. However, in re-evaluating audiences at music festivals, it is also important that we move beyond this dialectic towards a deeper understanding of nuanced forms of participation and the values attached then. ‘Activity’ is more usefully aligned to the idea of authorship, which is essential to the rationale for interactive and relational arts. This reading is principally concerned with whether audiences directly influence event content, which may be the arts, organization or infrastructure. In many ways, this brings us to the real nub of the active/passive dichotomy; as previously argued, debates on this subject ultimately concern issues of control. Arguments that label audiences passive, while erroneously implying a lack of intentionality and motivation on behalf of the social actor, are actually sensitive to the audience’s failure to exert influence over content, or its medium. Therefore, unpacking audience activity at music festivals should not resort to subjective experience, which is a given, but focus instead upon whether or not the audience exerts control over the medium in which they engage. Of the television and radio audience, Biocca posits the same: the debate regarding passivity and activity ought not depend upon a capacity for thought, ‘rather, the question turns on whether the audience has active control over the structure of the information process’ (Biocca 1998, 61). Equating, or even replacing, interpretations of activity with that of authorial control better defines the nuanced modes of participation raised in this book, and better explains the productive capacities and patterns of theatricality discussed throughout. If we equate activity with control, it follows that there is a low degree of active participation in a context where the audience exerts little or no influence in shaping, directly, the orchestration of festival content, and a higher degree when audience input plays a tangible part in event design and performance.
1 Praxis is taken from the socialist Antonio Labriola who called Marxism the ‘Philosophy of praxis’ in Socialism and Philosophy (1912). This study employs the concept to indicate ideologically informed practice in the context of festival cultures.