In 2008, it was claimed that ‘boutique’ festivals represented a counter-trend to the exorbitant commercialism that had crept into many festival and concert productions in Britain (Mintel 2008). A term previously reserved for shops and hotels, its co-option by promoters seemed to herald an emergent, grassroots movement focused on restoring festivals with non-commercial – or perhaps extra-commercial – values. Some, Green Man and Hop Farm for example, were even promoted as conspicuously ‘anti-sponsorship’ in a clear attempt to distinguish the events from brand-friendly majors. Vince Power, who co-founded and eventually sold the leading production company Festival Republic, went so far as to state that Hop Farm offered a fresh alternative to a sector which had steadily grown ‘over-branded and VIP-ed’ (Wood 2011). His decisive approach was not, however, representative of the boutique sector at large: though many festivals provided a space that was free of overt brand partnerships, precarious finances meant that the option of lucrative collaborations could not be ignored. For the same reason, festivals labelled as ‘boutique’ also came to innovate their own profitable tactics, many of which were oriented towards maximizing festival-goer expenditure. In fact, the successful exploitation of new elements of the festival experience helped promoters to diversify incomes and suffuse their events with the exclusive poise that helped to establish their credibility. The ideals and practices associated with ‘boutiqueness’ were, then, far more complex than was initially supposed.
The first available reference to British boutique music festivals can be found in a June 2003 article in the Guardian, which described them as compact, stylish and intimate (Dodson 2003). The Big Chill, Green Man and a concert in the grounds of Somerset House in London were apparently chosen for the article on the basis that, while hosting notable line-ups of live bands and DJs, they were small, ‘arty’ and relatively unknown.1 Following this, the term ‘boutique’ rapidly entered media parlance in the coverage of other, similarly styled events. The proliferation of these so-called ‘boutique’ gatherings seemed to express a superior Zeitgeist that cast certain well-established concerts, amassing large audiences, as blandly antiquated – passé in comparison. Of the events featured in the 2003 article, it was the Big Chill that came to decisively brand itself as boutique, incorporating the term in its advertising and press release content. Founded in 1994 by Katrina Larkin and Pete Lawrence, the early Big Chill events drew modest numbers to various locations, including the Black Mountains in Wales and Dorset in the south of England. After some successful years at Ledbury’s Eastnor Castle, and after having grown the festival to a capacity of 40,000, serious financial difficulties led to an ultimately unsuccessful takeover by Festival Republic (a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment). Through the medium of a press release dated 5 November 2010, the company announced the departure of Katrina Larkin, who was the only co-founder of the original festival remaining. Larkin is quoted as stating the following:
From day one, they [Festival Republic] have fully understood the heritage of innovation, experimentation, creativity and escapism that needed to be upheld as the UK’s first boutique festival. I feel completely happy that I’m leaving The Big Chill in the safest pair of hands in the country. (Festival Republic 2010)
This declaration was intended to reassure the fans of the festival that its new owners would not corrupt the fundamentals of its identity. This was important to the Big Chill’s survival, because much of its appeal had been in providing an alternative to the features associated with festivals that were corporately owned. This conflict of identity presented a genuine problem: the trailblazing event had furnished the notion of ‘boutiqueness’ with a particular reading, one that it now had to reconcile with a new, and somewhat contradictory, ownership structure. Despite the hopes expressed by Larkin, the direction taken by the new owners of the Big Chill proved incompatible with this cultural heritage. One year after making the acquisition, Festival Republic introduced Pepsi, Lucozade and Vodafone as sponsors for the 2011 festival, in addition to various alcohol brands, while Lily Allen, Kanye West and Jessie J were among its headline acts. Following these adjustments, shrinking ticket sales underlined plainly that this combination of mainstream music and commercial sponsors had repelled the Big Chill, ‘boutique’ crowd. With the benefit of hindsight, it might seem surprising that an approach to programming and sponsorship more consistent with the festival’s long-standing identity failed to be taken by the new owners. It may be that they did not understand the sensitivities, preferences and idealism of the Big Chill’s original following and, consequently, knew not how to exploit it commercially. Or, perhaps its following had already been absorbed by competing events at the time of the acquisition, leaving organizers with little choice but to rebrand the event with a wider popular appeal. Whatever the internal rationale was, after just one year of production under Festival Republic, and much to the surprise of the industry, organizer Melvin Benn announced the event’s cancellation in January 2012, citing issues with availability around the London Olympic Games (Trendell 2013). Though the cancellation statement promised a return of the Big Chill, the brand rapidly became overshadowed by new and more nuanced events, and it failed to make a return to the marketplace.
The history, transition and eventual failure of the Big Chill followed a trajectory that is highly revealing of the sensitivities attributable to festival-goers aligned with the ‘boutique’ festival model. They are less willing to buy into festivals that are conspicuously commodified in ways that include heavily visible advertising from certain types of corporate sponsors. Yet the issue is based on experiential outcomes and representation, as this sensitivity has not prevented festival-goers from buying into festivals that market sponsors more subtly. Aware of their discerning audiences, most promoters have had no choice but to become savvy at balancing the realization of commercial opportunity with the preservation of the symbols and discourses necessary to retaining their event’s credibility. Teaming up with GlaxoSmithKline, Siemens or Volkswagen (for example) would be problematic for some festival brands, though the sector has, overall, strengthened income streams through other means; the gourmet food and the luxury camping options detailed in the previous chapter, for example, have been rigorously pursued by ‘boutique’-positioned events. The idea of boutique festivals as ‘commerce-free platforms’ relates, then, not to an absence of commercial interactions but to the form of escapism they provide and the way they are strategically presented to appeal to their audiences. It is illuminating for example that Green Man director Fiona Stewart, speaking on a conference panel in 2011, said that she rejected almost all of the corporate sponsorship offered to Green Man because not to do so would be ‘inconsistent with the Green Man brand’ (Festival Awards City Sessions, 25 March 2011, Leeds O2 Academy). The fact that this rationale is unambiguously couched in business terms does not mean that there are no principled motivations for Stewart’s preservation of a space free of conspicuous commercial interests. On the contrary, there are ideals underpinning her event design that coincide with the broad sensibilities attributable to the Green Man audience. Clearly, the need for so cautious an approach in the first instance suggests that a countercultural sentiment continues to strike a meaningful chord with audiences today – that there is a persistent, if rarely articulated, longing for a celebratory space that is able to sideline the ‘pollutants’ of the world outside. Evidence for this can be found in the long-standing success of similarly positioned festivals: 2000trees Festival, Larmer Tree Festival, Bearded Theory, Blissfields and Beautiful Days each deploy a similar approach to authenticating discourses. Each also has, in the past, been nominated for a ‘Best Grassroots Festival’ award, a UK Festival Awards category that champions events that ‘shun commercial sponsorship and support their local communities’ (UK Festival Awards Showguide 2012). This characterization maintains the rhetoric produced by the nominated festivals, but as mostly for-profit entities without secure grant funding or government subsidy, it obscures what is necessary for keeping afloat financially. This treatment underlines, again, the culture’s impulse to protect symbols that grant the pop festival format purity of a kind that is required for communitarian and socio-political efficacy.
The term ‘boutique’ is itself an idealizing symbol, for its meanings are oriented around purity, critical superiority and the alternative. Yet it is still inextricably tied to its original meaning, ‘shop’, calling forth the image of a lone shopkeeper standing behind a counter, inside a dimly lit boudoir. The boutique is small, and a little expensive; yet it is the personalized service, limited lines and bespoke wares that keep customers interested, and the operation afloat. When asked what it was that made a music festival ‘boutique’, the organizers interviewed for this book talked about the arts, premium food and camping options, as well as independence from corporate ownership. The idea of the boutique festival as a niche experience was also a regular theme. The sector’s development in the 2000s and beyond certainly suggests that these attributes were defining, and important: boutique events allowed festival-goers to re-tribalize in ways that expressed increasingly specialist preferences for music and art. There is sound justification for speculating that this not only strengthened the social ties between those who identified with nuanced festival brands, but also, that it allowed the patrons of some events to be perceived as astute. The power of any boutique product is based on its ability to confer a kind of superiority onto the consumer, as one that dares to take a path less travelled. Yet there were other factors at play: Kendal Calling provides a compelling example of how a sense of exclusiveness was tied to a provincial appeal that engendered a community’s sense of pride and ownership over an event that was close by and, initially, small scale – as many of the first boutique events once were.
By the end of the 2000s, journalists were frequently describing smaller festivals as ‘boutique’ with no obvious criteria. When the corporate-owned Latitude (Festival Republic/Live Nation) and Wilderness (Mama Group) seemed to successfully co-opt what it meant to be a boutique festival, promoters proved that they could produce festivals for corporations while simulating the ‘feel’ of corporate independence. Their success in this project meant that the use of the boutique stamp, as a way of marking out a particular festival type, gradually became devoid of meaning. Then, some conspicuously negative connotations surfaced, in the form of virtual satire: in March 2012, a spoof event, entitled ‘The Magic Fox Vintage Smoothie Boutique Urban Forest Pop Up Chill Retreat’ appeared on the Daily Mash. The feature drew attention to the middle-class pomposity that was, arguably, always a feature of the scene. The hoax get-together was described as the ‘ultimate pretentious weekend for utterly dreadful people’, gathering some 30,000 ‘likes’ upon publication. Humouring the joke, it was shared on reputable blogs, clubbing and festival websites with the original headline; ‘New Festival Aimed Directly at Twats’ (Daily Mash 2012). This warm reception, shared by festival-goers and promoters alike, marked their recognition of the satirist’s cynically portrayed event. A discomfort lurked beneath the humour – a sense that depthless luxuries and flowery gentrification had engulfed a scene that was once visceral, outspoken and raw. As a consequence of this, and the general ambiguity associated with the term, overtly branding a festival as boutique fell somewhat out of favour in the 2010s. The meanings it provoked by association remained however significant to the British festivals sector.
I see boutique festivals as parallel to boutique shops. They are more expensive, but they have more unique, artistic and special experiences – that you pay for. (Claire O’Neill, founding member of the Association for Independent Festivals March 2014, personal interview)
There are illuminating parallels between boutique festivals and other types of boutique offering, which affirm what purpose they serve as an aggregated category within festival culture. The first British businesses that came to be labelled as ‘boutiques’ were small clothing outlets in the 1950s, spaces that had simply appropriated the French translation of ‘shop’, exploiting the strong associations between high fashion, sophistication and French couture. They sold a specialist range of bespoke items, within intimately sized and stylishly decorated stores; importantly, they were presented as the purveyors of nuanced experiences that could not be had in the mass-marketed department store. Boutiques marked the fragmentation of culture as consumers sought to express themselves in increasingly differentiated and conspicuous ways. In that sense, the historical emergence of boutiques as settings for individualized consumerism is demonstrative of the social mores of the time, as the increased disposable incomes of a post-war populace began to open up new modes of expressivism and social identification. Georgia Seffrin, in her discussion of ‘boutiqueness’, argued that the desire to express oneself and to identify with a distinguished aggregate of society, were addressed by 1950s clothing boutiques (Seffrin 2006, 173). Despite the perception that boutiques were principally for the rich, they played a role in the communication of youth identities. They addressed the need for adolescents to distinguish themselves stylistically, while also offering a means for group identification (Seffrin 2006, 175). Independent, small-scale designers could be nimble in their responses to the shifting sensibilities of a newly fashion-conscious, economically empowered generation, while change was usually slower at the department store, which had to initiate adaptations via complex supply chains, affected through much larger scale modes of delivery.
Prior to the boutiques, the clothing worn by children and adolescents tended to be aligned to the position of their parents in ways that would clearly denote class (Seffrin 2006). The continuity of these clothing-based symbols of class coincided with the general assumption that sons would follow in the career paths of their fathers, while girls would marry into their own social strata. Early department stores both reflected and maintained this tradition, operating ‘top-down’ systems of supply. For years this operation functioned without much ground-level creativity in the determination of style: prior to the boutiques, stylistic innovations were directed at the wealthy, while ‘watered down’ and affordable versions would be mass produced for the rest of the population (Seffrin 2006, 17). Described here is a systemic monologue of style that pre-dates the fragmented and nuanced clothing industry that had established itself by the 1970s. Boutique models of production began to supply niche markets, and in focusing the parameters of business in this way, boutique entrepreneurs were better able to perceive and adapt to the consumer preferences within those markets. Independent clothing boutiques went on to facilitate the visibility of the early subcultures by encouraging individuals to construct pronounced assemblages of style, a commercial interaction which ultimately reinforced the outward expressions of social groups. Punk, for example, was inseparable from a particular style of dress, and while it was originally the homemade subversions of conventional clothing that went hand in hand with the punk aesthetic, boutiques emerged to provide ready-made reproductions for a wider populace. Perhaps the best example of the boutique as a vehicle for the subculture is Vivienne Westwood’s famous punk clothing store: epitomizing the sense of confrontation that lay at the heart of the scene, the store was named Sex, and was co-run by the self-proclaimed ‘Situationist’ and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. Given the store’s fleeting existence, from 1974 to 1976, the extent to which it is seen as a cultural nucleus, credited with the emergence and spread of punk both as a fashion and as a youth movement, certainly seems remarkable. Yet these perceptions are not misplaced, for the architects of Sex were also the architects of punk, and they were fully embedded in the scene associated with the store. There was little distinction between the store’s managers and those that purchased its wares, and this proximal relation is central to the boutique model: boutiques sold to a target audience of which the producers – the designers and the storekeepers – were themselves part. Similarly, the producers of Sex were able to sell to the market because they were the market – they were allied to their customers in age, culture and demographic. This proximity lent itself to a ‘dialogic’ relationship between producer and consumer, whereby ‘sharing attitudes, values and practices with customers’ was fundamental to the operation (Fogg 2003, 17).
As positive associations with the ‘boutique’ crystallized over time, other businesses began to couch their products in similar terms. The 1980s saw the emergence of the boutique hotel, which also appealed to a preference for intimate scales and individuality. Like the clothing boutiques, the boutique hotel tapped into a demand for nuanced, differentiated and superior products: this struck a chord in the market, and the considerable growth in the boutique hotels industry is attributed to an increase in consumers looking for a more ‘special’ hotel (Drewer 2005, in Aggett 2007, 169). The boutique hotel attempted to cultivate unique settings through novelty design, decor and the theming of suites. Similarities between the implied and directly marketed strengths of boutique hotels illuminate a common ethos underpinning their consumption. Drewer’s inventory of terminology and phrases that have been used to describe boutique hotels includes ‘non-chain operated’, ‘eccentric and highly individual’, ‘design-led’, ‘unique identities’, ‘small size’, ‘unique level of service’ and ‘thematic’ (2005, 171). Each of these qualities resonates powerfully with the ways in which boutique festivals are programmed and marketed, and the successful implementation of these values has similarly connected new types of festivals with newly segmented audiences. Considering each of the characteristics described, the notion of rejecting uniformity is clearly central to the ‘boutique’ positioning. This constitutes a subtle critique of the mass-produced product, as one that fails to deliver environments that lend themselves to meaningful, individualized experience. The relationship between the boutique festival and the concert-model festival in the 2010s is analogous to that of the boutique shop and the department store in the 1950s, for boutique festivals aim to supply that which is similarly absent from their massified counterparts: intimacy, uniqueness and responsiveness to nuanced demand. It is significant that the development of the festival market to include both the concert and the boutique model parallels the development of comparable categorizations elsewhere, because across all sectors, the impetus for the boutique product can be similarly interpreted in terms of both the desire for exclusivity, coupled with a sense of ambivalence towards notions of uniformity, anonymity and standardization. When a much wider perspective is taken, it is apparent that this dialectic flavours many emergent consumer trends: the rise of the organic and fair-trade produce indicates, for example, not only a shift towards conscious consumerism but also a preference for a premium product that is more closely aligned to the buyer’s sense of quality and moral credibility. Indeed, these themes are what qualify the premium-product positioning in these cases. Boutique festivals are, then, part of a broader consumer movement that conveys a growing attitude of suspicion towards uniformity, the factory, and the faceless, corporate ‘system’. Boutique festivals are positioned to supply a proposed solution, within a lifestyle that is loaded with coinciding choices, where part of the theatre of consumption is in the making of quasi-socio-political statements. Whether these statements can be externally justified or not, is perhaps less important than the experience of making them. Crucially, boutique events engage their audiences in an experience that is placed, meaningfully, at some distance from the concert-model event. Supported by the principles of independence, ecology and intimacy, this act is, of course, an authenticating one.
Prior to the ‘boutique’-festival brand, the most popular events within the broader sector were logically marked by the largest capacities. The self-proclaimed oldest pop festival in the world, Reading Festival (or as it was known between 1998 and 2007, the Carling Weekender) was exemplary in this respect. It grew exponentially throughout the 1990s, and I joined the crowds in the year 2000. That year stands out in memory: GCSE results were anticipated with nervous excitement. The end of school signalled the beginning of adulthood. Reading seemed to us the ideal marker for this transition; the experience was, in this respect, viewed as something close to a rite of passage. I distinctly remember our collective reasoning: if we pass our school exams, we have earned a celebration, and if we have failed them, we will most certainly require inebriated commiseration among friends. The current demographic of Reading festival-goers, still markedly young, suggests that this rationale remains a driver for attendance today. For us, being at a popular, well known event was important, yet our preference for this event was not summarily based on size. Our favourite rock bands, introduced to us via BBC Radio 1, were key: to be able to say to our peers that we actually saw Limp Bizkit and Oasis perform, in the flesh, was crucial. We were not only buying a three-day party, we were also scoring credibility as fans of alternative music, despite the fact that much of this music was introduced to us through the mainstream media. Although Napster was growing in popularity in the United States at the time, most of us did not have home computers and knew not how to download and store MP3s. There was a close relationship between our determination to attend Reading, the media’s support for the festival at the time, and our level of access and exposure to music. We wanted to share, directly, in the post-grunge angst and rebellious aesthetic of the artists that were broadcast through the available conduits, who would also be gracing the stage at Reading. The experience would be a feather in our caps, which could be plucked out and shown off whenever the conversations within our social milieus required it.
The factors that motivated my class of 2000 are somewhat typical of festival audiences both pre- and post-millennium. Today, line-ups of known music are the major initiators of ticket sales and personal recommendations remain crucial. In the 1990s, this triggered steep capacity inflation: teenagers were drawn to go to the same festivals that had been attended by friends they knew and trusted, while events that had achieved an earlier foothold as a successful brand ballooned into massive concerts. Through the acquisition of social capital, individuals were then introduced to a culture that was also diversifying and broadening out. Piqued by their first and second experiences, attendees of the handful of established festivals in the 1990s helped create a pool of demand that shaped, and was shaped by, the introduction of new brands in the 2000s. The nature of the market today suggests that as musical tastes and experiential preferences evolved, the highest-profile line-up billings at the largest events became less important to the audience, and gradually, less reliable as a guarantee of ticket sales. In the more crowded market, festival-goer loyalty and a reputation for innovation were gains that could not be had through main stage programming alone, particularly when this was traded-off against other attributes. This shift in the stakes coincided with changing attitudes specific to size as ‘intimate’ events successfully entered the market, with the Big Chill in 2004, Secret Garden Party in 2005, the Summer Sundae Weekender in 2006 as indicative examples. Although the majors still drew massive numbers, the proliferation of small music festivals was palpable, and their popularity seemed to underline the fact that large-scale events brought with them certain disadvantages – increased feelings of vulnerability and anonymity, for example. There are practical inconveniences too: upon arrival at a large festival, heavy camping paraphernalia is usually carried on foot some distance from the car park to the campsite; and the chance of getting lost, forgetting where your tent is pitched or losing friends is logically much higher at a larger festival. The larger scale event can also incur higher expenditures on food and drink as a result of the hassle of travelling back and forth to tents for supplies. Arguably though, these inconveniences are less important than the relationship between size and atmosphere: very large events can engender treating guests as something close to cattle, who are ‘herded’ around by security.
Compared to a festival of 50,000+, it is certainly arguable that the scaled down setting of a 10–20,000 event, or less, allows for a different sort of experience that permits a greater sense of security, comfort and convenience. The audience is able to get closer to the performers on stage, narrowing the proximal distance between the entertainer and the entertained. There is a ground-level impact on sociality as smaller scales mean that festival-goers are more likely to re-encounter friends met the night before, time and again, strengthening social connections via familiarity. At larger festivals, these opportunities are more limited, simply due to the scale: it logically is less likely that you will keep bumping into the stranger you were laughing with in the dance tent earlier that day. Because of this, new interactions can be more transient at major events and the interactions do not always have the chance to develop into new friendships. Although these effects on communication and sociality are rarely acknowledged, it seems sensible to deduce nonetheless that some favourable aspects of attending a small festival, as a pleasure-giving experience in itself, contributed to the boom in the ‘boutique’ format throughout the 2000s. For promoters, selling an intimate event could present problems, for small scales were limited in line-up potential: only being able to sell, say, 8,000 tickets, meant that the event could not compete in the market on the basis of securing the ‘biggest’ artists. Though this meant that many festivals had no choice but to grow, it also meant emerging artists, heritage artists and niche music were often emphasized in place of more expensive programme content, which actually reinforced the association between boutiqueness and exclusivity, strengthening the impression that the boutique festival was a space for the discerning.
Industry commentators came to recognize that newly appreciated intimate scales and specialist line-ups were shaping the industry at large. In 2008, and for the very first time, Glastonbury failed to sell out its 150,00 tickets. The factors that led to the slow-down of interest in Glastonbury and the weakening of its hold as the unequivocal leader of the market that year are varied, yet the increase in competition from smaller festivals is certainly one that was widely acknowledged as promoters wondered, with more than a little incredulity, whether this would spell the end of this hallmark event. The smaller size of competitors was not, according to some commentators, circumstantial in this respect. As Ben Turner of the Association of Independent Festivals stated:
The Glastonbury situation has surprised everybody. It has been the benchmark. It is an example for the establishment not to rest on their laurels. The market has changed. There is a shift of people wanting to be at more intimate events. (Music Week 2008)
This 2008 slump however proved to be an anomalous dip, and since then, both Glastonbury and the boutique scene have maintained strong positions in the market. Although commentators on the slowdown underlined the popularity of alternative events, it would be inaccurate to suggest that every boutique festival-goer was a misled ex-Glastonbury fan in search of a smaller event. Large concerts remained, and will always remain, appealing in other ways. What is important is that before the 2000s, the advantages of small-scale events were mostly unarticulated because promoters were not fully utilizing them as selling points. The conscious development of small event brands transformed small scales into a fashionable quality; and much like the hotels sector, ‘boutique’ festivals became inextricably tied to the marketing of uniqueness and intimacy. The emergence of boutique hotels was not the death knell for large franchises, and the same has proved true for the festivals industry: boutique festivals mark the diversification of offerings to address more nuanced consumer preferences, and today, survey results show that while significant numbers of festival-goers do not pay attention to size (36 per cent), there are in fact preferences for the full range of scales, from small, medium to large-scale events (UK Festival Awards Market Report 2013). Although this data might suggest some flexibility for promoters, difficulties arise if festivals have previously appealed because of promoting a small size, before becoming locked into a trajectory of growth. As discussed in the previous chapter, inescapable economic factors drive many promoters to incrementally increase capacities after launching a small festival, and even for some very successful festivals, growth is not an option but a necessity. The organizer of BoomTown Fair, for example, acknowledged that the only way to increase the budgets of the co-producers of scenography and installation art was to expand. At least on the surface of things, increased revenue from a sharply increased capacity reflects the aim to compensate workers, at this particular event. Problematically, the real reasons behind capacity growth tend to be of little consequence to the festival-goer, who is likely to jump to far more cynical interpretations. It is not surprising, given the intimacy that is often intentionally marketed at the beginning of a festival’s lifespan, that there are audible complaints when the same festivals grow ‘too’ big. As a consequence, promoters are often cautious in this respect, playing down the true extent of planned capacity increases. Sometimes audience complaints are grounded on straightforward and practical concerns about queues and facilities, yet more often it is a more visceral sense of disgruntlement over lost community, exclusivity and ownership that is expressed, and a sense that newcomers will dilute and destroy the things that made the festival so special. The apparent impulse to protect festival from the polluting influence of the mainstream crowd summons a particular, memorable conversation: stunned by the beauty of Electric Picnic in Ireland, where I was working in 2008, I delightedly effused my appreciation to a nearby Irishman. Possibly perturbed by my unmistakable southern English accent, he looked at me sternly. ‘Don’t go telling everyone how good it is here’, he warned, ‘we want the festival to stay like this!’ This palpable desire for exclusivity expressed a politics of distinction that underpins the wider boutique movement in that it appeals to the idea of alternativism and narrow – not broad – social identity. Even though Glastonbury has cultivated countercultural credibility and an enormous capacity, for other grassroots-style events, maintaining credibility is sensitively connected to scale. ‘If I had a penny for every time someone said [the festival] was better when it was smaller’, as BoomTown’s organizer said to me, ‘I’d be a multi-millionnaire’ (personal interview, April 2014). Unfortunately, in the absence of such payments, many promoters choose growth as a path to sustainability, though the likelihood it will be achieved through expansion is far from certain. Thus a unique problem has emerged in the culture: how to preserve intimacy and exclusivity, while reaching equitable economies of scale?
Ensuring that larger crowds do not dilute the experience of creative minutiae on site, the decor, micro-stages, workshops and the arts – in short, the entertainment itself – certainly helps to limit the blandness that can creep in when expanding a music festival. This strategy certainly appears to have been taken by Bestival and BoomTown Fair, which have both enriched their programmes in this way as they have ballooned in capacity (up to 70,000 and 40,000 respectively). They have maintained an extremely high proportion of arts programming and scenographic design, which accounts for the extraordinarily high number of creative crews on site. One of the factors this programme-shift addresses is the contemporary festival demographic: as argued in the previous chapter, festival audiences have matured while family festival-going has become a palpable aspect of many events. As groups of consumers, families and the 30+ festival-goer in particular tend to seek more than line-ups of music from their festival experience.
In Britain, music festivals that are particularly favoured by families include Latitude, Kendal Calling, Shambala and Green Man. The presence of families at music festivals is not wholly a result of intentional marketing strategies: it is likely that, at first, festivals began to adapt their provisions and programming as it became apparent that family-friendly facilities were necessary for a diversifying ticket-buyer base. Many broadened their offering by addressing the needs of families, and for events like Kendal Calling and Shambala, this development has contributed to brand cohesion and consequently to long-standing business success. Considering the makeshift nature of the emergent festival scene in 1960s and 1970s Britain, it is remarkable how it has come to integrate youthful hedonism alongside more mature and inter-generational forms of bacchanal. Importantly, family festival-going marks a shift in how audiences position music festivals as a form of leisure, over the trajectory of their lives, signalling a change in attitudes towards the appropriateness of festival as a context for the family. Children, in smaller numbers, were present at the hippie festivals of the late 1960s and 1970s – we know this through personal accounts and historic photographs, depicting traveller families pursuant of a new age lifestyle, punctuated by gatherings across rural England. The families that attend music festivals today however reflect a far wider demographic of individuals occupying a professional social stratum. The pop festival format, once a symbol of the counterculture, has been widely absorbed by the middle classes. On a more practical level, parents have been reassured by improvements in facilities, food and accommodation packages, in short, by the professionalization of production. There is also the communicative reassurances that have come through the medium of marketing messages and targeted publicity: online and print media for boutique festivals often include emphases on family-friendly provisions, such as child-only toilets and baby changing facilities, as well as ample entertainment aimed at babies, children and teenagers. The resulting uptake of family festival-going has been so widespread that it has ushered in a completely new model: the ‘greatest family show on Earth’, as Camp Bestival credits itself, is a Dorset-based offshoot of the Isle of Wight’s Bestival, curated by Josie and Rob da Bank. This event is certainly a new breed; while conspicuously placing children at the heart of the celebration through branding, with a vast variety of child-friendly activities, Camp Bestival also features a full line-up of high profile performances for the parents, which in 2014 included Sinead O’Connor, De La Soul and Basement Jaxx. By integrating its family focus with a very credible (adult) music line-up and a scenic area of rural idyll, it has morphed from music festival into something else entirely: a carnivalized revival of the English resort holiday.
It is not coincidental that as family festival-going has become more popular, the parameters of what is considered adult behavior have also shifted. Fans of music are not expected to abandon the pursuit of festival experience when they surpass a certain age, or when they become responsible for a family. Providing further encouragement, heritage artist bookings allow British music festivals to appeal to mature audiences by providing them with the opportunity to see artists that reached their peak while they were adolescents. The inclusion of entertainment and marketing aimed at families coincides, then, with the maturation of the festival audience more broadly. As acknowledged in the 2012 UK Festival Market Report, the idea that festivals of rock, pop and dance are exclusive to the young is a myth: as the market has matured, so too have audiences. Though the ageing of audiences is particularly discernible at events firmly situated within the boutique sector (at Festival No. 6 in particular), some festival majors have also shifted towards attracting a wider mix of age groups. In 2011, a total of 15,000 attendees over the age of 50 reportedly attended Glastonbury, and this population was, according to the BBC, the aged hippie culture of the 1970s. There is now a first, second and third generation of pop festival-goers, some of which are attending the same events. The maturation of festival audiences is also attributable to a number of fundamental social changes: Britain is home to an ageing population, and it is conceivable that the extension of the average Briton’s lifespan has instigated what McWilliams described as the ‘upward shift’ in what is considered adult behaviour, along with later retirement ages and longer spells in education (McWilliams 2010). The impact of these shifts on festival culture marks a development which has been met with scepticism from some quarters. Michael Eavis was widely reported (with no small degree of incredulity) as having bemoaned the ‘descent of the middle-aged’ upon his event. His actual words were in fact mild: ‘people say we’re getting middle class, which is stretching it a bit far’, stated Eavis, ‘but we’re getting the thirty and forty year-olds in, which changes the character of it’ (Financial Times 2009). Instead of transient membership in festival culture, participation was becoming characterized by a new kind of permanence as many individuals remained in the scene.
Today’s spread of family-friendly music festivals is not only attributable to slow demographic shifts and the inter-generational popularization of festival culture, but also to the corollary opportunism of promoters. Heightened competition naturally brought with it brand fragmentation, as promoters began to rely heavily on their unique selling points, though it also brought about assimilation too as promoters took their cues from each other. Nobody wanted to lose ticket sales for failing to put the provisions for families in place, and as a result, family entertainment and facilities became the new standard at many music festivals. Exceptions to the rule were just that – exceptions, in the minority, and these tended to be youth-focused and genre-specific rock or rave events (Creamfields, Global Gathering, Sonisphere, for example). There were additional economic incentives for actively targeting older audiences and families, who were more responsive to luxury accommodation and food options, as they had greater disposable incomes. This was particularly significant during the global financial crisis of 2008–13 when young people were at a particular disadvantage in terms of employment. They could be easily repelled by inflated bar prices, and were more likely to rely on their own supplies of alcohol; contrastingly, events that actively sought out a greater portion of older professionals had the potential benefit of healthy expenditure on the official traders and merchandise. VIP packages, luxury camping and gourmet foods, hallmarks of the boutique festival sector, each came to exploit the spend potential of an older and more middle-class audience, and went some distance in accommodating the demand for a cleaner, quieter and more pampered festival experience. As a consequence, the ways in which promoters have ‘upsold’ the festival experience, as discussed in the previous chapter, is naturally angled to appeal to a more mature and wealthier audience. This has radically altered the fabric of festival programming, as one promoter described:
Once you get into having bespoke banquets designed by top chefs, and all the rest, you’re in a totally different world – you’re appealing to a totally different group of people. That’s where the concept of what a festival is, is being pushed. It’s certainly not just a party at that point. But it’s a very effective business model, because you open up so many different streams of income. People are paying for their spas, their manicures, their kids to be looked after, a meal cooked by Gordon Ramsay … and an evening dressing service with bespoke makeup and fancy dress. (Personal interview, March 2014)
Considering this commercial opportunism, does the dilution of the scene across multiple generations, and the development of premium options that reproduce the consumerism outside, mark the end of the radical potential of festival culture? Certainly, such options cultivate intra-event hierarchy and social distinctions based upon variable economic means. And yet, by creating additional packages that appeal to new and/or older audiences, it is also true that these options open up festivals to wider audiences. Although it might seem bizarre to suggest that ‘first class’ style packages actually promote inclusiveness; given that this usually means cleaner toilets, quieter camping and more comfortable sleeping quarters, these aspects can hardly be said to constitute celebrity treatment. The packages appeal to the middle class, not a wealthy elite. Traditionalists might see the limited access to these developments as the gentrification of the culture, yet premium options are just that – options; and by providing a greater number of those, the events are set to appeal to a more diverse range of audiences. Interestingly, however, there appears to be a limit in terms of how far expensive tickets and premium provisions can be successfully positioned for an older and/or wealthier audience, without triggering a backlash. With headliners that have included New Order and the Manic Street Preachers, Festival No. 6 is presented as the haute couture of festivals and a province for the mature, discerning and well off. Yet its pricing strategies have caused tensions both inside and outside of the festival arena: when the festival announced a raised early-bird ticket price in 2013 (to £170 plus booking fee), with campervan spaces set at £200, a flood of complaints hit its Facebook page, one of which branded the event as ‘pretty disgusting’. The Magic Loungeabout – self-billed as a ‘refined unwind’, and by the Guardian as the ‘Harrods of festivals’ (2008) – heavily promoted the luxury features of the festival, yet the event failed to achieve sustainability and, citing various reasons that probably masked the reality of slow ticket sales, the festival was cancelled in 2013. From these events, one can deduce that there is only so much price inflation and designer posturing the music festival audience is willing to tolerate, regardless of age, before a ‘rip-off’ is perceived.
It is without doubt that the influx of families, professionals and mature festival-goers has altered the British festival landscape. On the one hand, most music festivals have become very diverse assemblages of multiple arts and entertainments to cater to this broader clientele. Higher expectations for professional production, smooth running services and well-kept facilities, as a corollary effect of audience development, have pushed promoters to improve their operations. However, premium options (such as boutique camping areas) have generated a strong sense of entitlement for the tailored product audiences have paid extra for. This is evidenced through the new kind of noise complaint festival producers must now contend with: these come not from local residents outside of the festival but from individuals staying within the festival, in designated quiet zones. This might seem somewhat at odds with the hedonistic and chaotic bacchanalia that remains at the centre of music festival culture, yet audiences have contrasting motivations for attendance: while some attend for a more intensely inebriated experience with friends, others, particularly families, are understandably desirous of an alternative kind of festival experience (and environment). Direct conflicts between contrastingly motivated groups are rare, though the existence of these groupings does produce certain underlying tensions: I have heard many individuals claim, for example, that the parents of children brought into the livelier of the so-called family-friendly festivals are irresponsible – that they are attending primarily for selfish reasons, forcing their children into environments to which they are ultimately ill-suited. Perhaps this view is not without a little credence: there are certainly always some bored and bewildered looking children at music festivals, dragged along for the ride by earnestly enthusiastic parents. Much more seriously, the fact that adults commonly consume illegal substances at festivals where there are children present marks a tension that is not easy to resolve. I have personally known the co-ordinators of some children’s areas, who have found themselves having to dispose of drug residues and containers carelessly discarded by carousing adults before opening up for the next morning’s kids’ breakfast club. From my perspective at least, these instances are outweighed by the majority of families who have no issues with bringing their children onto the festival site, and it is important to clarify at this point that given what appears to be a high-risk environment, a review of the media coverage suggests that there have been remarkably few serious child-related accidents on British festival sites. Yet it is certainly true that, though children usually receive adequate care on site, they may witness criminalized behaviour through observing the use of banned substances, and for this reason, the festival arena exposes institutionalized contradictions to the young. It really is unavoidable that some children will witness drug taking at British music festivals; and indeed, drugs have been openly sold in huge numbers at fully licensed festivals prior to changes in the law. For example, nitrous oxide and magic mushrooms were sold at Glade festival prior to criminalization, a festival that admitted under 12s for free. Many contemporary events openly sell legal highs, while dealers conduct an illicit trade in criminalized substances. Few police officers or politicians would be willing to go on record to affirm the reality that legal and illegal drug taking is rife at fully licensed and fully policed events, and in many ways, their approach to containing, as opposed to eliminating, drug taking can be viewed as tantamount to temporary decriminalization – as McKay observed of Glastonbury in 2000 (2000, 43). Police and promoters work together primarily to target dealers; usually making only what will be viewed as an acceptable number of arrests in order to demonstrate that some enforcement of the law is being carried out. No police force attempts to arrest all or even 30 per cent of the drug takers on site. This would be impractical, expensive and probably unachievable, and for these reasons, the symbolic visibility of police presence with respect to drugs has become more meaningful than their tangible actions. Their presence maintains an illusion of lawfulness, a reminder not to consume drugs too openly – while surreptitiously, criminalized activity is unfolding across the site. Strategies for suppressing drugs at music festivals vary across regions, though the somewhat tolerant approach that is usually deployed by the police works in favour of the promoter, who is balancing the legal conditions of the event licence with the realities of British festival-going. Promoters are incentivized to minimize heavy-handed police involvement in this respect, for a zero-tolerance approach to drugs would unavoidably equal a more harassed audience, and perhaps as a result, a smaller audience the following year. These difficulties, that emerge from the impossibility of reconciling the reality of carnivalesque behaviour and the strictures of the law, signals the wider, intuitional failure to take a workable and justifiable approach towards recreational drug use, and the perpetuation of legal standpoints that are impossible to enforce. Returning to the issue of increased family festival-going, to assume that children do not pick up on this absurdity accords them an undeserving and inaccurate level of naivety. What kinds of conclusions are drawn as a consequence of what is absorbed remains an open question, yet it seems probable that the official line on drug education, reproduced through the institution of primary and secondary schooling, would become less credible – particularly given the conspicuous presence of illegal highs, many of which are equally if not more dangerous than ‘traditional’ but illegal substances, such as cannabis. Problematically, this scenario breeds cynicism and distrust, muddying the waters as to the real dangers of drug taking at music festivals.
These observations express some very deeply entrenched issues in British society, yet they should not obscure the significant positives around the nation’s emergent tradition of family festival-going. I have met three generations of the same family at a music festival – this form of participation allows children to glimpse their parents in a truly convivial, non-authoritarian mode; as the people that they are beyond the daily pressures of parenting. Family-friendly music festivals are of incredible social value because they de-compartmentalize parent entertainment from child entertainment, and many child-friendly activities are as appealing to adults as they are to children. Costume and fancy dress days are a prime example of this; both parent and child are capable of sharing equal enjoyment in picking characters and creating weekend alter egos in the other-worldly context of festival. Equally, fairground rides, facepainting, interactive installations and carnivalesque parades appeal to both children and adults. Within the boutique festival scene, this is occurring to such extents that it is possible to argue that, alongside the increased presence of mature festival-goers, there is a reverse shift towards child-like and playful modes of experience.
In the spring of 2008, Glastonbury’s PR team announced to the media that the hip-hop artist Jay Z would be headlining the festival that year. This was quickly met with a swirl of debate, peaking with some highly controversial statements made by Noel Gallagher from the Britpop band Oasis. During an interview filmed for the BBC, Gallagher claimed that Jay Z was, quite simply, ‘wrong’ for the festival (Paterson 2008). Elsewhere, arguments to a similar effect challenged what were perceived to be Jay Z’s misogynist lyrics (namely ‘I’ve got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one’, from the 2004 hit ‘99 Problems’). Yet a more unseemly element seemed to underlie the atmosphere of criticism surrounding the booking; a wider discomfort with the fact that mainstream hip-hop could feature so prominently in the festival programme. Yet the forces for change have a history of winning out over Glastonbury’s conservatives, and in the end, Jay Z executed a perfect rebuttal of Gallagher by delivering, at the start of his performance, his own rendition of the Oasis classic ‘Wonderwall’. As the Glastonbury crowd assiduously sang along, even the most cynical observer could not help but be seduced by the drama – a multimillion-dollar American rapper taking a public pop at the multimillion-pound Britpop indie band, in front of hundreds of thousands of people. All of the negative hype surrounding the booking in the preceding months was neatly jettisoned as the live performance endeared Jay Z to the audience and media alike, and, by the end of his set, commercial hip-hop seemed no longer out of place on Glastonbury’s main stage. It became just another strand of the festival’s rich cultural tapestry. Beyond Glastonbury, festivals of ‘pop’ and ‘rock’, as they are defined in cultural studies, have actually become melting pots for a multiplicity of sights and sounds that continually adapt to new technologies and preferential trends. Though some may align themselves to particular styles, they programme within a spectrum of evolving sounds. In terms of number and popularity, genre-specific festivals have been overtaken by those that combine electronic dance music with live bands playing folk, reggae, indie and rock music, and many variations in between. Today, even the most dedicated of the major, guitar-based music festivals tend to include a space for electronic dance: this is because the once-obvious divide between the dance and the live music scenes has eroded. At Glastonbury, this cross-pollination was not incidental, for Glastonbury’s founder has, over the years, openly and consistently championed a patchwork model of production that supports diversity. This diversity is inherent in his event’s musical programming, which encompasses jazz, world, folk, dance, and everything in between, however, it is often said that much of the celebrated ‘Glastonbury spirit’ is captured in activities found away from the main stages. Glastonbury is, in fact, several festivals rolled into one: there are themes within themes and sprawling districts, each with uniquely designed decoration, programming and overall style. Non-musical arts are carefully situated across the site, and this area of entertainment has grown to occupy an equal, if not more fundamental, place in the programme’s delivery. In a BBC documentary, Glastonbury After Hours, Michael Eavis revealed his idealized view of the non-musical arts as fundamental grounds for programme innovation: ‘anyone can put on U2’, he stated, ‘that’s not clever’ (2012). The ‘clever stuff’, according to Eavis, is that which pushes the boundaries of performance elsewhere on site (2012).
This view exposes a rationale that is shared by most boutique festival promoters; a view that has helped to fuel a sector-wide process of diversification. The same year that Jay Z broke new ground at the UK’s best-loved festival, the 2008 Mintel report claimed that most British music festivals had diversified into arts festivals – today, the transition of programming from music to arts is so widespread that most of the festival organizers I interviewed for this book viewed it a natural evolution of the culture; the inevitable result of a well-developed market. Festivals which have not diversified to include non-musical arts are those with a similarly narrow focus in musical line-up: the dance events Creamfields and Global Gathering, for example, remain distinct from festivals like Secret Garden Party in their avoidance of arts programming, a route which allows them to maintain the distinctiveness of their brand identities as separate to the ‘boutique’ trend. Similarly, while a dance tent has featured at Leeds and Reading Festivals for some years, they are oriented towards a narrow remit of punk, rock and indie and, similarly, non-musical arts do not feature prominently. It would seem, then, that the diversification of the arts has prevailed at the shows that were already taking an eclectic approach to the programming of music. The greater visibility of the arts at British music festivals is inextricably linked to the maturation of their audiences as well as the sector itself. Music festivals in Britain have fostered the many forms of leisure that cultivate visual spectacle, bodily interaction and enhanced audience experience: sculpture, performance art and immersive installations in particular are areas of rapid development in the boutique sector. It may seem odd, then, that such events are generally excluded from the reported cachet of the nation’s arts festivals. Though a report published in 2008 classified arts festivals as events that featured more than one form of art, many leading music festivals were excluded, despite the fact that several had diversified their programmes to include a substantial range of non-musical arts at the time of publication (BAFA 2008; Allen Shaw 2000). The report does appear to prioritize, however, some music festivals – primarily those of jazz, folk, blues and early music. This selectivity reveals an historical tendency for arts organizations to overlook the somewhat less highbrow pop, rock and electronic dance music festivals as legitimate arenas for art. This deduction is supported by the fact that during the early 2000s and prior, many music festivals developed their arts programmes with little, and very often no, financial support from the Arts Council England. Overall, this may have worked in favour of boutique festival culture during the formative years, obligating promoters to develop their own financial strategies for fostering the arts independently – without unsustainable funding grants that could be discontinued, or cut back, at any time. This independence also meant freedom from the bureaucratic processes and project requirements that grant funding imposes – a freedom that likely shaped the types of art that flourished in the festival arena. For some, prohibitive criteria for funded projects and the lengthy application process is still enough to discourage many promoters from applying for public funds, despite the fact that many of their events are fulfilling a primary Arts-Council goal by facilitating community participation in the arts, in particular, by engaging with those who infrequently, if at all, attend ‘high art’ events or gallery spaces. Considering the idealizing criteria imposed by arts funding organizations, it is certainly arguable that the orthodox approach to supporting the arts has an inadvertent affect, promoting a form of instrumentalization that transforms art into a tool for something else, rather than an end in itself (Smith and Forest 2006, 147). When art is used as a tool for achieving a political purpose beyond itself, it is inevitable that the imposition of associated criteria sets up methods by which it is judged as valid, and in doing so, excludes many forms that do not support the constructed definitions. Festival culture fosters many forms of art and expression that may not be validated through such avenues because its absence of socio-political and conceptual posturing would seemingly place it outside of the parameters of ‘art’; as ‘decoration’. However, festival culture makes no such distinction: it constructs legitimate art as simply that which is conducive to pleasure, whether sculptural, performative or interactive. The Arts Council may now be taking a much more forthcoming approach to funding the arts at music festivals, as indicated in its recent support of Beacons Music and Arts Festival (Yorkshire), Kendal Calling (Cumbria) and Long Division (Yorkshire), though the fact that pop and rock festivals have grown to prominence without reproducing the institutionally perpetuated divisions between high and low art, and art and design, is a direct consequence of their historic independence from official funding bodies.
The diversification of the arts at boutique events signals the sector’s adaptation to both competition and to limited means for booking ticket-selling artists in music. The fact that this diversification was particularly discernible at independent events, before the co-option of the arts model by Festival Republic and Mama Group, supports this deduction. With the exception of Glastonbury, which was always built on a performing arts model, festivals that enjoyed dominant purchasing power over available artists in music had fewer incentives to alter the formulaic production of shows that were principally focused on high profile, main stage, ticket-selling bands or DJs. It was the promoters, who were unable to effectively exploit this simplistic formula by booking the most popular names in music, who were encouraged to innovate elsewhere. In the early years of the Big Chill, Sunrise, Shambala, Standon Calling, Solfest and Secret Garden Party, to name but a few, each competed for audiences through line-ups and the introduction of an array of art installations, activities, homeopathies, non-musical performances, while decor – an often sidelined yet crucial feature of festival culture – became a key addition to their non-musical repertoire.2 Like Michael Eavis, the organizers behind these events were manifesting their own idealized view of the authentic festival experience, as something more complex and edifying than a fanfare of stage-based musical performances. Yet this was only made possible through easy access to the resources required for arts-based content – volunteers, skilled, affordable labour and creative design crews – which could be far easier and cheaper to source than high profile line-ups of music. The arts not only compensated for the lack of big names, it was also far more flexible than the booking of line-ups: today, while boutique festival promoters continue to face challenges in the limited selection of appropriate, available and affordable acts each summer, the arts offer alternative opportunities for delivering experimental features that can be planned far in advance of the show, and under the full direction of the promoter. As festival promoters have increasingly exploited these opportunities, novelty has become a crucial form of capital. The most conspicuously hare-brained features splice through the cramped market, garnering attention from ticket-buyers and media alike. The summative result has been a sector-wide drive towards creative differentiation and programming bombast – the ‘world’s greatest disco ball’, a record-breaking structure built for Bestival in 2014, is an illustrative example. Suspended from multiple cranes, the installation was a major feature at the event. Mega-watt lasers were carefully angled to ricochet beams of light off the silver-encrusted orb each evening, illuminating the skies with dazzling reflections. It is probable that, overall, this feat garnered more attention than the headline artists. Live science experiments, festival weddings, parades, pyrotechnic stages, record-breaking fancy dress parties, flashmobs and even the ceremonial burning of towering art installations are similarly positioned features in so far as they expressly set out to grab attention in a crowded marketplace. Taking a broader perspective of the festival ecology as a whole, there is also an imitative aspect to these developments: when an event makes its mark through introducing a new feature, it is done in so public a way, with captured images accessible by anyone in the marketplace, that it is not difficult for other promoters to adopt and adapt similar features. The Guinness world-record breaking disco ball at the 2014 Bestival, for example, was preceded by a world-record breaking collection of festival-goers dressed up as superman, at the 2013 Kendal Calling festival, which was themed ‘super heroes and fairy tales’. Yet of record-breaking festival feats, Bestival was a trendsetting initiator: the largest-ever gathering of fancy dressed festival-goers in 2010 preceded their 2014 disco-ball stunt. The extent to which festivals borrow from each other, not just in terms of basic infrastructure and service suppliers but also in terms of creative producers and arts-based features, accelerates further the process of cultural exchange while heightening the need for boutique festivals to reinvent themselves. In order to differentiate from competition, a festival might invest in a crew to create a particular feature, and if successful, competitor festivals might opt to create something similar, or the crew might develop the feature into something that can be hired out to festivals across the circuit themselves. Examples of the latter scenario include the Big Love Inflatable Church, which was popularized at Bestival and then went on to feature widely across the boutique circuit. The cumulative impact of these manoeuvres exposes a pattern of assimilation and differentiation within the boutique sector, sustained by an ongoing search for novelty. The cultural economics underpinning the development of the highly diversified, ‘patchwork’ festival models resulting from this process has also transformed the organizational structures that put the events together. Pressure to compete in the non-musical, creative domains has added significantly to the complexity of skills required by organizing companies, who have had to add arts and decor managers, to their staff nuclei. The additional cost incurred, coupled with the cost of differentiation through the continuous addition and reinvention of features, puts pressure on the festival budget by increasing overheads. A truly competitive arts programme has a high production cost, which can reduce further what might be, even for a ‘sellout’ event, a precariously slim profit margin. Festival-goer expectations surrounding the boutique festival experience demand, nonetheless, extensive music and arts programming – a scenario which, for some, has contributed to financial losses (see the discussion of Festival No. 6 in Chapter 3) and reliance on bailouts from directors or angel investors. It is one that makes contributions from brands, who are able to subsidize costs through funding arts or through creating installations themselves, even more attractive to organizers. This has presented a unique opening for corporations, many of which have done away with traditional forms of sponsorship and instead execute one-off, highly tailored features for British festivals. The telecommunications, financial services and Internet provider O2, for example, contributed to the 2008 Electric Picnic in a way that exemplifies the shift of sponsors towards the experiential arts. The company commissioned a team of creatives to incorporate the themes associated with their brand (bubbles, orbs and the colour blue) in the execution of a jaw-dropping piece of performance art. This was marketing at its most subtle and powerful; it was not obvious that this piece had been created by O2, yet its thematic associations were clearly communicated and highly memorable. Features like these enhance the differentiation of the boutique event, while conferring a special status onto the brand sponsor. These facets suggest the definition of the boutique movement as a ‘counter-trend’ to commercialism, a claim made in the same year that O2 pioneered corporate sponsorship at Ireland’s most popular boutique festival, is only true on the level of appearance, or Baudrillardian simulacra. Boutique festivals may reproduce an anti-commerce rhetoric, and indeed a direct experience of alternativism, but commercial parties have merely adapted their aesthetics to mimic the experience. This represents, as Simon Frith once described of commercial rock in the 1980s, a remarkably smooth ‘reconciliation of rebelliousness and capital’ (Frith 1988, 2, original emphasis).
It would be wrong to obscure, however, the ways in which this changing terrain has championed subjective validity, expression and autonomy. Free of the limitations of conventional gallery space, festival arts have come into their own as bedazzling stunts and immersing features that draw attention away from the pantomime of celebrity that unfolds on the main stages. This has elevated the status of such feats by providing a framework for their validation, for often it does not, as would be understood in the conventional sense, constitute fine art, or even contemporary art. However, with more than a little irony, it is precisely the absence of traditional qualifiers that renders this art challenging, for it disrupts received notions of what art does require for its own validity. In this sense, it is significant that sidelining traditional systems of artistic credentials and freeing art from the gallery have been explicitly championed by one of the key figures behind the early boutique festival movement. Katrina Larkin, who co-founded the Big Chill, upheld this legacy with her own spin-off event, Nova, launched in 2012. In a press release disclosed to the media to promote the festival, Larkin said that the festival was ‘do[ing] away with the stuffiness of the gallery and the rules … there are no rules in a field. It’s a leveling experience for everyone’ (Smith 2012). Though these words were angled to elicit public approval, they do reveal a critical rationale: the inversion of the seriousness of the art gallery and the highbrow, even stifling, connoisseurship it often predicates. The re-configuration of the music festival as an alternative gallery space has connected many artists with new audiences, their work ranging from towering sculptures to digital arts and scenographic design. The influence of the expanded market has generated emergent opportunities for artists and site-specific work, though the number of boutique events in the circuit means that projects can effectively ‘tour’ the sector. The boutique festival scene has cumulatively provided a fertile ground for artworks and creative projects. Multimedia installation Arcadia offers the best example of how the scene has not only promoted the arts, but has also fostered some astonishingly inventive projects of international standing. Arcadia is a stage-cum-sculpture, an enormous, twisted metal performance space that combines pyrotechnic display, vivid lighting and an industrial aesthetic – it is one of the most spectacular features on the circuit today (see Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1 Arcadia at BoomTown, 2013
Source: Tom Martin
In many ways, Arcadia exemplifies the erosion of distinctions characteristic of boutique festival culture. It is a fully functioning stage, yet it is also highly sculptural and stylistic; marking the fusion of conceptual site design, functionality and aesthetics. In many ways, pieces like Arcadia reunite art with purpose and in doing so reject the fine-art paradigm that demands a separation of design from artistic content. Art that is so abstruse that it requires advance warning for its cerebral interpretation simply does not work within the convivial setting of music festivals. That is not to say festival art is necessarily simplistic in form, the opposite is very often true; rather, it operates on a level that is accessible and readily intelligible, in so far as it instigates easy appreciation. Arcadia marks a fusion of principles that similarly influences the shape and style of festival sites: many present such an abundance of stimulation and visual interest that art installations, shelters, stages and traders are not always distinguishable. This blending of features has been enhanced by purposive selectivity: features are more likely to be chosen if they can perform more than one purpose. Food and drinks traders, for example, may be selected not only because of the quality of their produce but because of the less tangible ways in which they aesthetically contribute to the festival, through pleasing structures, uniquely decorated vehicle decorations, or through their provision of an attractive chillout space. Sensing that the stakes are high, some refreshment stands have innovated well beyond their primary function; ‘Grannies Gaff’, for example, dresses its staff in pensioner outfits and hosts the ‘OAP Olympic Games’ at Glade, Secret Garden Party and Green Man. Functional stalls have become more artistic, and art has also become functional – many sculptural installations are also designed and selected for their dual provision of a function, usually shelter, or seating. This means that the boundaries between features have become, on the level of experience, indistinct. This amalgam of features is sustained by spatial arrangement: the identification of art installations, for example, are rarely defined via their placement in a specified ‘installation area’ or ‘art area’. Instead the objects tend to appear haphazardly, blending into the site, fostering unbiased interpretation and individualized discovery. Significantly, much of the aesthetic milieu seen at festivals is bespoke and mastered by hand. It is unavoidable that in a context such as this, the definition of art naturally shifts to a more inclusive interpretation as the mixed placement of crafted objects confuse the distinction between art, environment and decor. Across the sector, there are also thousands of non-musical, performative contributions that both animate and theatricalize event space. Performance art ranges from the very specialist to the amateur, and the inclusion of both bridges a gap between audience and virtuosic theatricality. This can happen in an almost literal sense; ordinary audience members inspired by the theatrical permissiveness of festival culture can shift roles, from the fancy-dressed festival-goer to the semi-professional performer. The Booty-Skool Dropouts, a performance group with members based in Leeds, Bristol and London, provide an illustrative example of this. United by a love of festivals and, perhaps, an extroverted mentality, this group of women began sporting gold ‘chavette’ outfits at festivals in 2011, complete with oversized faux-gold jewellery and sportswear. Among their most prized achievements is ‘blagging’ their way onto the main stage at BoomTown with live act Goldie Lookin Chain (a Welsh band who scored a number three chart single in 2004 with ‘Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do’), before performing with more regularity with the circus-cum-burlesque outfit Slamboree, a firm fixture of the British festival circuit. These experiences allowed the women to morph, somewhat unexpectedly, into performers, a transition marked by the development of their quasi-narrative: they decided that the Booty-Skool Dropouts were ex-beauty school college students, who had been expelled for lewd behaviour. In reality, the women were middle-class, young professionals. The motivational factors that guided the group’s formation were straightforward; for the women involved, participation was immensely fun, and membership within the group also gained members free entry into their favourite festivals. As stated in a 2014 interview with a group member:
Everyone just likes going to festivals, getting dressed up, prancing around, and now we’re kind of getting paid to do it or at least getting into the festival for free, getting to do it on stage, which is great … I think what people love about the routines is that they are not always perfect. We’re not professional dancers and I think that’s what people like about what we’re doing as well – that we’re not pros, we’re not perfect.
As this perspective suggests, there was little pressure on the group to become immaculately rehearsed performers, even when they were invited to perform at some of the country’s leading festivals. Booty-Skool exemplify a category of performance whereby imperfection is part of the performative identity, and this imperfection, or ground-level accessibility, also erodes performance distinction for they are indistinguishable from ‘ordinary’ festival-goers – indeed they are ordinary festival-goers, who have merely assumed a heightened performative role. This, the pleasure-giving absurdity of delivering the performances and modest financial incentives granted by festival clients, were enough to keep the Skool together for some years over the early 2010s (the group is still, at the time of writing, in action today). The same incentives govern many similar groups: free access to festivals in exchange for a creative contribution is logically attractive to those who wish to attend the events anyway, the expense of which, as a standard customer, adds up to a significant amount. For the typically shoestring festival budget, this arrangement effectively subsidizes costs because amateur groups, doing work that they enjoy, but are relatively inexperienced at, are willing (at least at the start of the relationship) to participate at a low cost to the promoter. This is a typical collaboration which, taking a broader view, is one that is responsible for the ‘beguiling array of expressionism’ found at British, commercial festival sites (UK Festivals Market Report 2012). Ground-level performers like Booty-Skool, together with the many other creative production crews, have also shifted the on-site proportionality of producers to consumers. According to one source, Bestival increased its capacity by 20,000 purely to accommodate ‘huge creative and site-build teams’, who accounted for almost one-third of all attendees on site at the 2013 festival (Corner 2013). Today, the festival crowd cannot be accurately described as an ‘audience’ in a traditional, uninvolved sense because they comprise such a large proportion who are also engaged in a form of work.
At several key events, the increase of art and artists on site has begun to weaken the traditional leadership roles of headline artists in terms of performative emphasis. For the boutique festivals that have embraced this model, where does this leave the high-profile musical performances, which are usually seen as the staples of festival programming and promotion? Line-ups remain, in actuality, an important proviso for musical festivals: it is not at all the case that arts have replaced music, rather, they have simply increased in status and competitiveness within the music festival context. Ultimately, the broad incorporation of art at many music festivals has heightened competition and crystallized the now-common expectation that there will be far more on offer than music. Festival-goers take for a given the fact that there will be an abundance of music on site, whereas the diversified programme of art is the signature of a more mature, cosmopolitan and developed approach.
Many music festivals are integrating themes to organize complex, diversified minutiae under recognizable motifs, and this is particularly characteristic of events within the boutique sector. The same factors responsible for the diversification of the arts have incentivized promoters to conspicuously promote themes, and this is, somewhat counter-intuitively, a noticeably British phenomenon. Given the historic lenses through which the British are traditionally viewed – as a generally uptight and inhibited people – it is curious to find that themes, and corollary, colourful costumes worn by festival-goers, are discernibly popular at music festivals across the British Isles. There is a view that costume-wearing at large-scale pop and rock music festivals is an oddly British phenomenon, with only a small number of coinciding events abroad: ‘the UK festival scene is the only festival scene in the world that does fancy dress’, one promoter commented during a personal interview, though he went on to guarantee that ‘in 10 years, everyone in Europe will be dressing up’ (2014).
Perhaps the British respond to themes because they offer up a plain invitation to the absurd – an open request for the abandonment of stifled inhibition. Themes present themselves as an incitement to lose oneself in an imagined place, while legitimizing individualized contributions to the illusions through adopting character and costume. Hence it has transpired that popular theatricality – that is, a theatrical audience – is today a noticeable feature of contemporary British festival culture. An announcement of a festival theme casts a strange kind of spell over the spatial location, framing it in a way that loosely refers to another, and usually more exotic, location. Heavily themed festivals have become the ultimate, immersive simulacra, laying on the hyperreal in vivid form, fusing the mythical and the physical into communicative and infinitely malleable quasi-narratives. Bestival was the first British music festival to intensely promote the thematic aspect of the show, and it remains today an apt example of the festival as theatricalized event. Bestival is a prominent antecedent of leading arts-heavy music festivals staged today (Latitude, Secret Garden Party, Wilderness, BoomTown). Curated by BBC Radio 1’s Rob da Bank, and located on the Isle of Wight, Bestival was first categorized in 2004 as a 7,000-capacity, small festival. The event remains at the same location, but relinquished its ‘intimate’ status when it reached a 30,000 capacity in 2007, and since then, it has entered the UK Festival Awards category as a major event in 2010 and attracts some 70,000 attendees. The festival’s emphasis on costume has provided justification for crediting the event with a personalized, idiosyncratic status:
With its annual fancy dress theme leading to more than half of the sun-drenched crowd stumbling across the Isle of Wight’s rolling hills dressed as pirates, wizards or superheroes, there is little danger of it succumbing to corporate anonymity anytime soon. (Gittins 2007)
Interestingly, the connection between costume and corporate anonymity made in the above article implies that the former is some kind of antidote to the latter; providing the level of audience-fuelled individuality required for a collective performance that truly shows itself to be ‘of the people’. Perhaps more so than any other British festival, Bestival incites ostentatious costume wearing en masse, and has become such a prominent aspect of the event that it often classifies itself not as a festival, but as an enormous fancy dress party. In a significant diversion from the concert-model format, its focus on fancy dress collectivizes display and occasionally subordinates the media’s usual prioritization of profile acts. One NME.com article, for example, places the headline ‘Bestival 2011 Fancy Dress Theme Announced’ in triple-sized text compared to what is placed beneath it as something of an afterthought: ‘plus Public Enemy to appear at the bash’. Other contemporary festivals making a significant use of theme in the British Isles include Kendal Calling, Blissfields, Standon Calling and Shambala, while beyond the UK, theming and its associated spectaculars can be witnessed at the European festival ‘Tomorrowland’, which grew to a capacity of 180,000 in 2014.3 Annually refreshed festival themes, while providing a springboard for creative contributions, do not comprehensively dictate the visual minutiae that animates festival space. This actually works in favour of the festival’s level of accessibility: the breadth of commonly selected themes, and sometimes their ambiguity, strengthens their ability to connect with audiences. Individuals are more likely to be able to relate their own interests to a theme that does not rule out desired expressions; that is not too exacting and prescriptive. This flexibility also allows for the realization of many sub-themes within site venues, campsites and zoned areas, which have the power to meaningfully connect divergences between decor, arts, entertainments and functions. Sub-themes are often styled in ways that become permanently grounded parts of the festival identity. Lost Eden, a permanently themed woodland zone at Kendal Calling festival, launched in 2015, is presented as conceptually distinct from the overarching fancy dress themes that are deployed each year. As a festival based in Cumbria’s Eden Valley, the Lost Eden sub-theme draws upon existing associations with the district as an area of natural beauty, but also calls to mind more complex dystopian and biblical elements – and it is these secondary aspects that provide a fruitful conceptual ground for artistic interpretation.4 Approaches like this have become vital to the aesthetic ordering of space on festival sites. Green Man festival in Wales, for example, is divided into 11 distinct spaces, many of which are mysteriously titled – such as ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Far Out’. Other titles are slightly more suggestive as to what is to be found in the area – like ‘Little Folk’ and ‘Nature Nurture’. It is significant that decoration, programming and art work together to reinforce the angling of sub-themes in order to enhance the sense of travelling between one distinct environment to another. In this sense, the greenfield sites that are the traditional homes of British festivals have become blank canvasses upon which highly complex productions are designed. When a festival grows, sub-themes can result in a sense that there are several distinct festivals rolled into one, and they begin to resemble the urban metropolis in its varying districts that are distinguishable through variant architecture, residential population and commercial services.
Figure 4.2 Festival-goers in costume, Bestival 2009
Source: Jamie Baker
Annual fancy dress themes are presented in a spirit of participative surrealism that allows for many deviations, which influences the experiential passage of festival-goers as they traverse the fields. From Desert Island Disco (Bestival) to Fact or Fiction (Secret Garden Party), themes form aesthetic umbrellas under which the makers of costume, art and decor find unity and stimulus. Festivals that engineer richly themed environments do so by saturating their virtual and physical spaces with symbols that allow them to masquerade in chosen forms. As shown in Figure 4.2, costumes lend themselves to the co-production of spectacle and, like carnival’s inversion, the event becomes a stage on which festival-goers perform.
Outside of music festivals, theming has been critically theorized in commercial terms as a function allowing restaurants, amusement parks and shopping centres to simulate more interesting environments. The increased enjoyment resulting from the added layers of meaning have proved to be, for many franchises, conducive to increased consumer expenditure. A theme park setting does deviate from the boutique festival arena in a number of crucial ways, nevertheless, there are some telling commonalities in the way festival-goers are inclined to interact in these environs: themed areas, fantastical objects and an atmosphere of play pervades both settings. In his work on Disneyization, Bryman argues that otherwise ‘lacklustre’ environments are able to introduce ‘a veneer of meaning and symbolism’ (Bryman 2004, 15). Walt Disney also cited more practical motivations for his theme parks: he wanted to create clean, less tawdry versions of the amusement parks he visited in his own childhood (2004, 21). Disney’s parks pioneered the use of theme, but they constituted a distinctly sanitized form of escapism. By contrast, festivals offer a more hedonistic, spontaneous and bacchanalian thematic milieu. The spontaneous element is a particular ward of the audience, for they represent an unpredictable aspect of the show. Costumed festival-goers convey considerable enjoyment in becoming part of the fantasy, immersing themselves in the surreal atmosphere by adapting the signifiers of bodily display. That is not to say that there is no connection between festival culture and the sprawling thematic environments of amusement parks. Indeed, the co-founder of BoomTown acknowledged taking inspiration ‘straight out of Disneyland’ (personal interview, 2014). The festival’s title – BoomTown – itself denotes a mythical setting: the township of Boom. In the festival’s online presence, a town history mingles fact with fictional events (BoomTown website). This detailed fantasy spans a sequence of chapters, engaging festival-goers in an imagined metropolis long before they reach the fields.
It has been claimed that all ‘workable’ themed environments relate to a limited set of concepts (Gottdiener 2001, 176; Schmitt and Simonson 1997, 138). According to Gottdiener, these include status, tropical paradise, wild west, classical civilization, nostalgia, Arabian fantasy, urban motif, modernism and progress (2001, 176–83). The following breakdown demonstrates that although music festivals were not referenced in the formation of his typology, many themes found at music festivals coincide with the spaces that were. Like amusement parks, restaurants and other public contexts, music festivals are recycling the thematic motifs that pre-exist in popular culture.
• Superheroes (Y-Not Festival, 2013)
• Rock Stars, Pop Stars and Divas (Bestival, 2011)
• TV Shows and DVD Box Sets (2000trees, 2014)
• Kendal Calling goes to the Movies (Kendal Calling, 2013)
• Kendal Calling goes Beyond the Stars (Kendal Calling, 2014)
• BoomTown Fair goes to Outer Space (BoomTown, 2012)
• Frontiers of the Future (Beacons Festival, 2013)
• Decades (Blissfields, 2010)
• Thrift Shop and Vintage (RockNess, 2013)
• Empires (Beacons Festival, 2014)
• 80s Movies (2000trees, 2013)
• Desert Island Disco (Bestival, 2014)
• 30,000 Freaks Under the Sea (Bestival, 2008)
• The Seas of Shambala (Shambala, 2014)
Some themes overlap and relate to more than one overarching concept, and a few do not relate to this typology at all. However, the majority conveys a sense of place, in space or time, enhancing the symbolic, immersive and hyperreal qualities of festival space. Gottdiener disparaged what he saw as an inevitable corporate preference for themes that speak to the ‘lowest common denominator’ (Gottdiener 2001, 176, 178). It is true that from the perspective of promoters, the choice of themes is necessarily limited because it is bound by the criteria that determines levels of engagement: they must be broad enough to suggest multiple avenues to creative participation, but clear enough to be of interest to the majority of their festival’s clientele. That is why festival themes invite imitation, and numerous iterations of the same concept are reconstructed as organizers try to avoid obvious plagiarism or repetition. In this crowded scene, theme names are also important. A clever turn of phrase (like Desert Island Disco, Bestival, as opposed to TV Shows and DVD Box Sets, 2000trees) increases the likelihood a theme will be remembered, and thus, the likelihood of audience response. They are also connotative, triggering mental associations that allude to imagined settings. For example, Desert Island Disco connotes sunshine, sand, Hawaiian shirts, grass skirts, disco balls and multicoloured parrots. These material associations are first introduced with brand imagery, before physical realization on the festival site (which happens to be a resonant festival island, the Isle of Wight).
Standon Calling, BoomTown, Bestival and Secret Garden Party have all displayed colourful illustrations of festival arenas on the home-pages of their respective websites, which represent the single-most viewed marketing tools in the run up to the event. It is no coincidence that the events breeding the most discernible costume cultures are also the ones that are releasing the most fantastical images and videos online. Online representations communicate thematic styles and a general sense of other-worldliness, and in doing so, prepare for their audience’s entry into the theatrical metropolis. Home-page illustrations, often in an animated, cartoon-style, are suggestive of utopian adventure playgrounds; they also caricature reality, mixing together the real and the unreal. In 2011, for example, the Secret Garden Party’s website depicted the lake and greenery of the Abbotts Farm Estate, while train tracks, a pirate boat and the suspension of the festival in the air marked the incorporation of fictional, surreal elements. Imagery used on the BoomTown website offers an allied mix of illusion and reality. Also depicting the festival as suspended, not in the air but in outer space, the home-page in 2014 featured a central impression of a town. Whereas the ‘town square’ at the centre of the illustration resembled the physical space that was actually built on the live event site, it also features a rollercoaster and other objects that are not real features of the festival. This blend of the real and the mythical prior to the celebration has a subtle though important influence on audience expectation in that it communicates the quasi-narrative and theatricalized space – inviting them to participate. In these stylized settings, festival fashion and full-blown costumes constitute the co-production of spectacle and, like carnival, the event becomes a stage on which festival-goers perform. Identities are playfully reconstructed as the codifed language of dress is configured to communicate objects, animals or fictional characters. Evident upon examining the illustrated representations of those festivals specifically aimed at families, it is clear that the need to appeal to multiple generations has coincided with an emphasis on the fantastical. The depictions do not stand alone as promotional tactics, but rather, they bolster the angling of fragmented milieu towards the realization of play and relational participation. They are allegorical of directly experienced celebration, for they offer up a blend of the real and the unreal; portraying an exalted, utopian society that borrows from the prevailing metropolis, while leaving behind its ubiquitous functionalism.
Theme type is also becoming a mark of distinction. Themes like Beyond Belief (2003) and Evolution (2009) at Nevada’s Burning Man challenge participants to consider loftier, more conceptual associations, and testament to its cultural allegiance to the festival, Secret Garden Party’s themes are similarly abstract, with theme titles such as Superstition (2013) and Standing on Ceremony (2012) poised to appeal to a well-heeled, intellectual and bohemian demographic. Festival themes are united in offering escapism, other-worldliness and in constituting a similar invitation to play with dress and alternative identities, yet nuanced approaches reinforce connections between specific festival brands and their corollary audiences. Though the boutique event positions itself as the authentic alternative to exclusively line-up-centric festivals, the mechanics of distinction within the boutique sector allow individual promoters to realize, nonetheless, a defined position within the marketplace. This was supported, in interview, by one festival-goer’s comparison of Bestival and Secret Garden Party:
Bestival does [theming] in quite a commercial way; it’s a more ‘I’m going to hire a costume from down the road’ kind of festival. Lots of people make their own costumes which is great, but it’s a little bit more commercial, with very simple themes like ‘space’, or ‘underwater’, which is great because everyone understands it and it’s really accessible. Secret Garden party go for ‘fact or fiction’ or really weird themes. Which is more complicated but it’s more intelligent. (2012)
Again, this reveals the pattern of assimilation and differentiation previously discussed, for inter-festival rivalry means that promoters are continually adopting and adapting creative features. In many ways, the pattern supports the principles of distinction identified by Bourdieu in showing that the impulse to elevate works of art as more authentic is one that is echoed in the festival sector’s approach to thematic design. As festival promoters have embraced this aspect of creative production, they have had to proceed with some caution, for the unpredictability of audience responses mean that it is also possible to trigger an undesirable PR event when designing a theme. One only has to recall the public outcry following the Sun’s publication of photographs showing Prince Harry wearing a Nazi swastika armband, worn for a ‘colonials and natives’ themed party in July 2007, to perceive the PR risk associated with theming. Other, far more innocuous-seeming themes can nonetheless trigger either politically incorrect outfits or politically sensitive associations that could be damaging to a festival brand (‘Bad Taste’, ‘Empires’ and ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ are the sorts of themes that are debated in festival offices, for this very reason). There continues to be a grey area in terms of what is or is not acceptable in this respect; blacking one’s face out to represent an African tribesman is likely to be perceived as racist whereas wearing an Indian feather headdress is not.5 Equally, the politically insensitive sub-theming of particular areas has the potential to cause negative PR: BoomTown Fair’s ‘Oriental Quarter’, for example, was replaced by ‘Chinatown’, as a response to justifiable criticisms of racial stereotyping. Even though theming is unavoidably based on stereotyping, as a method of communication, in today’s era of media hawkishness and the Twitter backlash, the presentation of a poorly considered theme could be used to accuse the festival of promoting anything from racism to domestic violence. Themes might appear to be a low cost and easy way to enrich a festival programme, though they backfire when they fall short of contemporary standards in political correctness, and undermine core values that are associated with a festival’s identity. Perhaps even more dramatic in terms of the festival’s financial success are themes that actively discourage audiences from attending. In 2006, one apparently innocent theme announced for Bestival spurred mass objections: the year after the festival’s attempted record-break for the largest number of fancy dressed festival-goers at its Wild West themed event failed, its promoters proposed a similar attempt to break the record held for the largest number of people dressed up as clowns. The event soon made the national news when it disclosed that it had received of dozens of complaints from ticket-holders who suffered from coulrophobia – a fear of clowns. Prior to withdrawing the circus theme, organizer Rob da Bank told the BBC ‘we have had so many people with clown phobias contact us, I am worried everyone might end up hiding in the woods’ (Sherwin 2006). As this incident suggests, while themes certainly appear to be secondary to the music and even the arts programme, their connotative potential does hold the power to flavour the experience in ways that impact the attractiveness of the celebration.
Despite some variation of approach, the increasing prominence of fancy dress across the music festival sector is widely apparent. Like the pop stars who continually reinvent themselves through adopting new assemblages of sounds, style and dress, fancy dress themes allow these festivals to preserve their novelty through continuous renewal. Audience involvement is a key component in this system of renewal, animating the scenographic stage that is primed with stylized infrastructure. Elaborate or hare-brained costumes generate colourful imagery that is deployed to promote the festival online, and in doing so, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for next year’s event. With such an increased quantity of boutique festivals jostling for notice amongst festival-goers, and limited means for securing top artist billings, the engagement that theming promotes has become crucial to achieving a loyal relationship between festivals and their fans. As previously discussed, it is a point of some consensus among festival producers that fancy dress is particularly observable at UK festivals and, certainly, it presents itself as an increasingly popular practice within the boutique sector. This might owe, in one sense, to the suggestibility of festival crowds. Certainly one interviewee, who had worked in the industry for several years, saw the increase in fancy dress as a proliferating phenomenon. Since there are no precise quantifications of this behaviour it is impossible to illuminate this shift with firm statistical evidence. Yet it seems likely that dressing up at festivals has spread through viral adoption: dressing up, like any kind of fashion trend, has taken off through social mimesis. As one festival worker commented:
I think as [costume] grows it influences other people. One year there’ll be a thousand people doing it and the following year there’s be two thousand people doing it, because they saw the other thousand people doing it last year. I know that’s massively part of it. (Personal interview, 2012)
This certainly appeared to be what, in the beginning, motivated serial costume-wearer Karen Emery. For her, a culture of costume wearing infiltrated her life when she embarked upon a new relationship. She found pleasure in the activity, for certain, yet its validation depended on the behaviour of her peer group. There was without doubt a competitive dimension to this, as she acknowledged in a personal interview, ‘My boyfriend’s friends made so much effort with costumes and I thought – I need to up my game if I’m going to continue hanging out with these guys’ (2014). This competitive atmosphere was friendly but no less influential on her subsequent focus as she soon began spending large quantities of her free time, after work, constructing outfits. One year, as a response to a theme entitled ‘All the Fun of the Fair’ at the 2012 Beacons Music and Arts Festival, she spent many weeks creating a goldfish outfit complete with a fish-head helmet. The outfit was, as many elaborate costume creations are, cumbersome, impractical, yet an impressive display of considerable handiwork. When a friend suggested Karen attend Bestival in 2010 they eagerly looked up the theme, and began planning outfits months in advance:
The theme that year was ‘Mythical’. I was like ‘OK, mythical, what does that concept mean, let’s think about this’. The Internet is a great source for ideas, I use that for sourcing ideas and images, and all sorts. I went through a few different ideas first, and then absorbed myself for months in creating the look. The costume evolves really, and it depends on what I find as well. I mean, I’m learning sewing, but I’m not great at it. I have to source material, see what I can find and put it together, you know? So yeah, I went with Medusa, and I thought ‘well, I’ll make a cloak’ and hang loads of scales from it so it looks like snake scales, and made it up as I went along really.
I saw a few other Medusas around. And there was another Medusa that looked pretty good as well, and we were both together like, ‘we’re the best Medusas here!’ It does get you involved. Seeing other people in costume brings people together – it was just a great experience wandering around with your costume on, seeing other people with their costumes on. It takes you into a bit of an extreme, social kind of world, where no one is afraid to talk to you. People don’t mind coming up to you and saying ‘oh that’s great!’ and likewise, you can go up to other people easily, talk to them, and get photos. (Personal interview, 2014)
The pleasure in becoming Medusa was the outcome of the heightened communication, playfulness, and sidelining of inhibitions that is the inevitable outcome of bizarre and ostentatious clothing. Yet the clothing, at Bestival in particular, marked a type of uniform that brought her closer to similarly presented attendees.
In the act of dressing up, the first moment the alter ego is revealed to the festival is a performative one of particular significance. Karen spoke to me warmly of the moment she emerges from her tent for the first time, fully costumed, and fully converted into her new form; a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. That moment is a peak experience and a moment of triumph because, for Karen at least, it usually marks the completion of many weeks of creative, voluntary labour. Yet it is the showing off of this prowess and the reactions of others that also render it something more viscerally gratifying. Reactions include visible amusement, surprise, even fear; and while some may not react in so dramatic a sense, even the most disinterested festival-goer will stare at the most unlikely get-ups. At the moment she exposes her transformation to the festival crowd, Karen senses her increased visibility, and she immediately becomes an object of attention. Many festival-goers marvel at her handiwork, they are drawn to her; photos are taken and posted online. Owing to Karen’s particularly outlandish outfits, official media crews have been known to keenly buzz about her, capturing the opulence of her bodily display. This occurred with particular frequency when Karen attended Beacons Music and Arts Festival in 2013. Raising the bar from the 2012 goldfish creation, Karen invented her own unique character she entitled ‘Tri-Kaz’. This three-headed creation, made for a ‘Frontiers of the Future’ theme, would not have been particularly noteworthy at Bestival, where costume is very common. At Beacons ‘Tri-Kaz’ was highly conspicuous, and public reactions to her ranged from fear to adoration: ‘I kept having to stop for loads of photos’, she says; ‘maybe I should’ve given autographs as well. It was a weird dynamic’. Her image was captured a hundred times over as ‘Tri-Kaz’ instantly became an emblematic celebrity of the festival.
Karen enjoys festival costume because it allows her to become both part of a scene, and to assert a theatricalized role within it. As a wider phenomenon, the practice is related to, but also distinct from, subcultural dress. As Dylan Clark noted in his discussion of the Death and Life of Punk (2003), human beings have a tendency to express their solidarity with a scene by using the conspicuous marker of dress (Clark 2003, 223). While costume certainly signifies an alignment of the individual with the imagined, thematic setting of the music festival, it is less certain that it constitutes outward signifiers of some inner, deeper, subcultural sensibility. Unlike traditional readings of subcultures, festival-goers dip in and out of costume, as they do festivals: festivalized clothing does not definitively articulate social grouping, at least not in the same sense that the assemblages of style associated with punks, goths or skaters have done in the past. In an effort to reach a greater understanding of the behaviour it is worth remembering that stylized audience dress during festivities can be observed in various carnival cultures, and though the contemporary form discussed in this book appears quite distinct from these traditions, it performs the basic though vital function of marking an occasion as meaningfully distinct from the day-to-day quotidian. As is also true of these traditions, theatrical display also confers a kind of status onto the participant. Costume is capable of inverting the norms of society, as Bakhtin has argued of medieval carnival participants (1984), yet contemporary festival cultures do not always initiate this in the sharply disruptive ways he described. Bakhtin emphasized ritualized inversion, men dressing up as women, children as authority figures; temporary, symbolic debasements of the systems of power. By contrast, the costumed festival-goer plays with the parameters of fantasy and reality in a pre-fabricated landscape that is heavily clothed in romanticized symbols. The framework of the celebration is conspicuously permissive of costume and, as a result, the practice is an expected one – one strand of novelty within a cinematic terrain. As a contained form of leisure, it is not surprising that costume is a pleasure-giving rather than statement-making practice. Cross-dressing remains a fairly common occurrence at some festivals, at least when compared to other forms of leisure, yet this kind of inversion in part loses the semiotic meaning that Bakhtin ascribes to the practice within historic celebratory frameworks because conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity are far less polarized in the modern context. Modern festival reinvents symbolic inversion, for the reversal of clearly delineated norms is replaced with what Stoeltje has described as a ‘principle of juxtaposition’ with the rational and material world (Stoeltje 1992, 269). Costume marks an occasion as the opposite of the quotidian through the inherent sense of juxtaposition that is created through unconventional dress. The costume wearing within British festival culture allies itself, then, with Stoeltje’s broader depiction of carnival costume as a communicative practice:
[Carnival participants] draw upon both the familiar and the strange but distinctly transform the human inside into a message bearer – carrying information that may be supernatural, exotic, condensed, bizarre, or mysterious in nature. (1992, 270)
It is inevitable that the behaviour of festival-goers shifts when they embody the role of message bearers via outward assemblages of dress. As Karen testified, becoming an object of attention in the first instance influences behaviour through encouraging greater levels of interaction with strangers, but on a more transformative level, costume can also prompt additional behaviours that would not normally be characteristic of the wearer. New members of the Booty-Skool Dropouts, for example, regularly adapted their behaviour to fit the gang’s outwardly displayed identity.
Once you put the costume on you take that character and become this gold gang, all street and stuff. Especially Leora, the first time we golded her up at Eden Festival, she just changed. She turned into a slut. She is usually prim and proper and all ‘I couldn’t possibly’. We dressed her in gold and she was suddenly bumping and grinding. We were like ‘we put you in gold and you changed!!’ SO funny. It just brings this thing out of you, it changes you. Makes you a bit more rowdy, and in your face, and like ‘yeah, we’re a girl gang! We’re gold’! You wouldn’t normally get away with doing that, but because we’ve been asked to do it [by the festival], we can. Because we’ve got gold on and we are all pimped up. (Personal interview, 2014)
Leora was not a professional performer, and in fact was not presented as a naturally extroverted individual. Nonetheless, the costume seemed to facilitate more confident behaviour – allowing the wearer to assume the corollary mindset of the character portrayed. This indicates that as a communicative genre, the wearing of costume functions as both an outward and inward signal, with powerful efficacy, influencing the reactions of others and galvanizing the behaviour of the wearer. For the Booty-Skool Dropouts, their costumes coincide with lewd and unladylike gestures that, for the women involved, would be unthinkable outside of the festival context. They are permitted to unleash a socially unacceptable version of themselves, to mimic and parody masculine aggression in a distinctly comedic and light-hearted way.
However, these performances are not limited to the live domain for they are also broadcast online, and there is a meaningful connection between the ostentatious theatricalization of leisure seen at British boutique festivals, and the vastly increased social value that is now attached to the surface image. When the analogy of cultural ‘capital’ is considered, that draws into focus the function of sociality as currency, we can see that social media monetizes social experience in much the same way. In this newly digitalized social reality, the impulse to optimize appearances to a photogenic standard is already heightened to an extreme. That this has bred a more appearance-obsessed festival audience seems supported by the numerous make-up boutiques and hair-straightening salons, as well as fancy dress parlours, included on many festival sites. Though these features have emerged from the overall gentrification of festival culture, they also support the theory that the ubiquity of social media has, for better or worse, destroyed the anonymity of festivals and provided greater incentives for transforming individual appearance. Any consideration of costume must acknowledge the broader legitimization of public vanity through the unstoppable spread of social media and acknowledge, also, the way in which costume is performed in a dual sense: at the festival and through the media. At boutique festivals, more specifically, costumes articulate an additional development in sociality, and that is, the surrealist turn in the production of festival space. Emphases on diversity, audience immersion and theatricality, and the resulting erosion of consumer and producer distinction within these settings, have become a core value to boutique festival audiences. As has been claimed of differing carnival traditions, in these contexts, physical event design has a decisive impact on audience participation, influencing patterns of theatricality (Cremona 2004, 74). Audiences are actors in the collaborative performance of festival spectacle, and while the assumption of this role may not articulate clearly defined statements of value, the act nonetheless implicitly sidelines more passive modes of spectatorship. This is not the first context to have contested modes of spectatorship: DJ and rave events in the 1990s were thought to offer a meaningful relief from theatrical spectacle (Huq 1999, 17). DJs, unlike watching live bands, did not seem to be predicated on watching stylized personalities on stage. The very removal of watching, and the repositioning of the DJ as the medium, rather than the message, removed the spectator-inducing facets perceptible within the realm of live music. If DJ-centred culture offered a replacement of the spectatorship induced by live music, the ‘boutique’ festival scene discussed in this chapter restores spectacle on more democratized grounds, allowing festival-goers to reclaim performative focus.
1 The only capacity size listed in the article is 2,000 (for Green Man), though the festival reportedly sold just 300 tickets that year. In 2008, the industry report commissioned by Mintel (Music Concerts and Festivals), claimed that festivals branded as ‘boutique’ had an average capacity of 5,000. However, since the publication of the report, many of the festivals that featured have outgrown this capacity figure. Consequently while ‘boutique’ connotes intimacy, premium options and an arts-focused programme it should not be taken as a referent for a set of concrete and unchanging characteristics.
2 Decor is an element of festival design not traditionally categorized as programmed entertainment as such, though its visual impact and appeal nevertheless represents a powerful asset used competitively by leading boutique festivals. Increasingly, decor is deployed to create emphasized features: Larmer Tree, for example, transforms a simple arch of flags into a featured performance space.
3 Social media has played a crucial role in promoting themed festivals as they provide ideal conduits for conveying the novel images that such festivals produce. Promotional videos for the Atlanta Tomorrowland, for example, have succeeded in conveying a level of creative production and a sense of contrived otherworldliness unseen elsewhere. As a result, one YouTube promotional video has been viewed (at the time of writing) over 20 million times. This unrivalled PR success has allowed the event to develop into a ‘franchise’-like operation with identically branded Tomorrowland events launched in Brazil and Belgium.
4 It seems prudent to acknowledge the author’s involvement in this project. I have been advising my husband and Kendal Calling director Ben Robinson in the conceptual development of the Lost Eden project since December 2014. The Arts Council England is set to fund the area, which, it is hoped, will become a major experiential and immersive feature of the site.
5 Since the initial research for this book, the view towards the wearing of Indian headdresses among the public and promoters has changed significantly, largely owing to a small but successful campaign by Daniel Round to ban the selling of the items at Glastonbury (Michaels 2014).
