The defining pop festivals of Britain have, since the 1960s, mobilized fans to labour in a spectrum of ways. Veterans of British free festivals and illegal raves might also recall, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the coming together of participants who freely donated sound systems, decor, even premises – yet the organizational process was fluid and necessarily clandestine; the apparatus of production obscured from those not in the know. Glastonbury, Britain’s harbinger of patchwork production, with an intricate terrain of distinct areas and thousands of contributors, has traditionally been a closed shop for members of the public wishing engage in anything other than basic volunteering. By contrast, the participation discussed in this book is different because it is conspicuously promoted, with paths to direct involvement accessible from anywhere in the world (with an Internet connection). Exemplary events – especially BoomTown, Secret Garden Party and Burning Man – are distinct because they have systematized this communitarian facet of festival culture. It is worth emphasizing the difference between this kind of engagement and the casual roles more widely filled by festival-goers, such as stewarding or accreditation. The schemes put in place at the case study events open up the possibility for building and performing in the event space in accordance with the applicant’s own proposals – cumulatively resulting in the co-creation of a celebration that reflects the expressions of its followers – or, to adopt Burner-speak, its residents. The principles of audience access and audience agency have become central to the festival identities, principles that are championed and disseminated through websites, social media and press releases throughout the year. As a natural side effect of this process, the status of the audience member and their contributions to the celebration are raised up – and it is not coincidental that these shifts towards democratization have coincided with high degrees of commercial success. The establishment of some fan projects as sustainable businesses in their own right, as a direct result of the schemes, also shows that they offer a potential avenue to transforming a leisure activity into more permanent forms of work independent of festival owners. Crucially for the promoters, the streamlining of contributions has enriched content and generated a sense of ownership that shapes the atmosphere at the live events. As one of my students described of Cambridgeshire’s Secret Garden Party, ‘everyone seems to know someone that’s involved; either in a band, or creating an area’ (personal interview, 2014). The incorporation of fan contribution sits within a wider, diversified terrain that also deploys the skills of many other kinds of paid and seasonal creative suppliers. The increased participation of creative crews more broadly also contributes to the way that the event is consumed; it is not wholly a show that is given to the people by a faceless committee – for many features are designed, built and experienced by associated members of the same community. This might sound like a lofty, romantic assertion, yet co-production might have a key impact on variant levels of disorder on site: when an audience has helped to build a festival, it stands to reason that they become naturally incentivized to become stewards for its protection. However, since arrest figures do not represent true levels of vandalism and other types of petty crime at music festivals, and are mostly drug arrests, it is impossible to explore this possibility by looking at the available data.
As a process that is fuelled by both ideals and commercial incentives, the shift towards democratized structures that British music festivals have developed is important in underlining the possibility for equilibrium between the forces of commerce, instrumentalism and art. The dialectic oppositionality between commercial and artistic interests is a widely theorized construction and it flavours many of the debates about the meaning of authentic experience and commercial appropriation. It is my view that the existence of profits is too often taken as a symbol for something disingenuous; Hakim Bey for example, in his influential Temporary Autonomous Zone, implies that audience agency and the commercial framework are mutually exclusive; that ‘money is a lie’ and that the legal festival can only ever be a masquerade for audiences of ‘culture lovers’ (Bey 1991, 24, 16). Applying this lens, the successful upselling of the festival experience and increasing tech-based systems for managing production might all be confused with a demise in authenticity. Yet the events discussed reveal creative outputs that have been fuelled by both commercial and idealist motivations, and indeed, the choices made by festival-goers. At the time of writing, no other event highlights this more than BoomTown Fair, which has grown its capacity largely through word of mouth while placing an extreme emphasis on the festival-goer as resident and co-producer. The commercial exchange behind this – the fact that the development of audience-produced features has coincided with strong ticket sales – in my view should be interpreted as collaborative and not exploitative in nature. This is a clear case of festivals unlocking pools of demand by providing experiential products of meaning to festival-goers. This does not need to be interpreted as art versus commerce, but can be viewed as a movement in the economy of pleasure; these forces are not diametrically opposed but are actually working together to fuel the complexity of festival productions. The same process is responsible for the importation of Burning Man’s ‘No Spectators’ ethos and its hallmark features, though the assumption that the UK’s appropriation of values from the Nevada event inevitably equals their perversion should be approached with caution. Reducing the duplication of values to a commercial tendency that plagiarizes meaning from a pure social movement would present a distorted and oversimplified picture; not only is it difficult to separate the significance of any movement from appropriators, since history testifies to their importance in popularization through increasing accessibility, but scenes and their commercial appropriators are two sides of the same coin. It constitutes a social fabric, an intangible collection of preferences and emotional orientations that tie people together. Historically, the United States and Britain have shared similar orientations of festival subcultures since the 1950s: early jazz festivals in Britain were influenced by the United States and vice versa, they emerged around the same time and featured similar artists. Their development throughout the 1960s followed aligned trajectories, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s the inauguration of the Isle of Wight Festival, Woodstock and Glastonbury each brought a mass celebration of popular music to the counterculture. Like those festivals, which struck a chord at a particular point in history, the festivals discussed in this book respond to a particular Zeitgeist – a convergence of audience sensibility. The British events discussed, BoomTown and Secret Garden Party in particular, are not guilty of simply plagiarizing content from Burning Man in the United States to win favour, though they have drawn upon the same strengths to appeal to audiences in a coinciding way – tapping into the human desire for community, co-production, immersion, agency; and for a festival commons that is not wholly shaped by narrow, profit-driven interests. When we consider broader, post-millennial changes in the festivals market, which has seen the very meaning attached to ‘music festival’ move to a much more diverse interpretation, it is clear that many festival-goers have moved on from formats that fully depend, through the economics of celebrity programming, on emphasizing the presentational mode of performance. When I began my research into festival cultures, the patchwork model of production that defined the boutique festival as a more democratized, mixed arts event was seen as a new alternative, and today, this model has become the norm – music festivals that limit their focus to music are now in the minority as the diverse blueprint has become widely absorbed into mainstream production.
One fundamental change in the festivals market is the complexity of their on-site, visual display. Particularly for the events discussed in this book, this is a result of professionalization in event design and construction, but also, of the increased number of mobilized crews and the donated labour of many hands. Fuelled by inter-festival rivalry, the fostering of such labour to produce increasingly novel features, interactive installations and richly themed, scenographic environs has culminated in what I term as the surrealist turn in production values. This phenomenon, which draws heavily upon the symbols and motifs used in commercial theming outside of festival culture, can also be viewed as the Disneyfication of festival space as it becomes increasingly ostentatious, fantastical and other-worldly. Music festivals are neglected in existing literature on themed environments, yet they follow a pattern that is well established in other sectors: as Gottdiener has argued of the themed restaurant and shopping mall (Gottdiener 2001, 73–103), the rise of festival theming in Britain has coincided with an increasingly competitive environment. Festival theming has offered a method for grabbing the much-divided attentions of the consumer, by clothing its spaces for human consumption with layers of symbolic meaning and experiential association. This has occurred to such extents that, as Gottdiener surmised of the themed restaurant, their connotative dimension overwhelms other aspects (2001, 73). While this might suggest that music festivals are no different to other, amenable forms of leisure product, the sort of scenography discussed in this book is also the antithesis of the franchised operations Gottdiener conceptualized. With a few exceptions (Tomorrowland being one), festival theming is leveraged by independent promoters to foster loyalty to a single event, with visibly handcrafted designs that nullify any sense of mechanized artifice and anonymous commerciality. This remarkably visual development does, nonetheless, represent a kind of insatiable consumerism: on one level, it evidences a limitless demand for novelty and the somewhat unflattering human drive towards what Boorstin branded the ‘synthetic happening’ (Boorstin 1992, 9). Ever-more bombastic and record-breaking forms of spectacle, thematic concepts and ostentatious costume seen at festivals could certainly support the idea that what audiences are really voting for is entertaining gimmickry and not a ‘more meaningful’ mode of engagement. Adopting the attitude of Boorstin, this drive for novelty could be viewed as nothing more than the continuous upward shift in consumer expectations for uniqueness and intrigue. Whether the surrealist turn has produced the Dubordian spectacle, Boorstinian novelty or a culmination of ‘actively created moments’ (as championed by Bey in Temporary Autonomous Zone) depends not only on the unique characteristics of individual events, but also the subjectivity of the festival-goer’s experience. As a perspective explored in only a limited capacity in this book, measuring festival-goer attitudes to the shifts this book has identified would be a fruitful area for further, subsequent research. It is difficult, however, to make sweeping statements about the summative significance of the festivals discussed, because despite their existence as interrelated gatherings, they vary significantly in their emphases on the role of the audience in the co-production of festival space. Burning Man for example is almost militant in its placement of the festival-goer as co-producer; whereas Secret Garden Party, BoomTown and other similarly positioned festivals in Britain are a more subtle manifestation of a ‘No Spectators’ rationale in action. To varying degrees, what they do share (together with the emergent areas of Shangri-La and Block 9 at Glastonbury) is a civic quality that clothes the festival with the feel and look of a carnivalized metropolis – the parallel society. Given the logical assumption that outdoor festivals draw upon the appeal of nature, its connection to new age philosophies, and the desire to escape city life, the civic angling of these collective performances is a surprising one. BoomTown, discussed at length in the previous chapter, is not the only gathering to perform a parallel society, complete with civic features and amenities. Lancashire’s Beatherder festival is moving in the same direction, and has, in recent years, built a semi-permanent avenue of shop fronts in its wooden glade, complete with a church, tattoo parlour and bookshop. It is as if these festivals have become simulations of urban societies – spaces that reject creative exclusivity in place of a society underpinned by ‘commons-based peer production’ – in that civic space is built as art, by its own residents, who reclaim the role of artists (Turner 2009, 23). Glastonbury’s Block 9 has performed a more dystopian present by building a dilapidated tower block of ‘flats’ in the middle of the area, effectively simulating the appearance of decay. Through this, Block 9 has maintained the quality of an art that imitates life: a somewhat spectacular affirmation of the festival as mirror of a civilization, or a screen, ‘on which are projected the dreams and models of an alternative society’ (Baczko 1989, 78). As Figure 7.1 testifies, the city-gone-awry is a newly emergent within Britain’s unequivocal industry leader:
Figure 7.1 Urban scene at Block 9, Glastonbury
Source: James Gillham/StingMedia.co.uk
It is arguable that it is the tools for artistic expression, and the level of investment in them, that have become more sophisticated post-millennium – not the fundamental nature of British festival culture, which has always had the liminal capacity to play with and re-imagine society. The level of scenographic skill that is being deployed in order to do this more conspicuously is, however, a development of this capacity in that it allows the festivals to masquerade quite clearly as caricatures of organized society – caricatures that are simultaneously surreal and realistic. This facet enhances escapism, but it also reveals the forcefulness of music festival as a mimetic medium that represents and adapts external society. The surreal metropolis exploits the festival’s capacity to reveal both the quotidian life for what it is, and the possibility for alternatives, intensifying the inconsistencies between ‘the dreamed City and the present – in a semi-conscious revelation that has long been recognized as one possibility of festival’ (Baczko 1989, 4). From a functionalist perspective, this can be understood as social introspection on a grand scale. As the anthropologist Victor Turner similarly claimed:
To look at itself a society must cut out a piece of itself for inspection. To do this it must set up a frame within which images and symbols of what has been sectioned off can be scrutinized, assessed, and, if need be, remodeled and rearranged. (Turner 1979, 468)
As Turner has suggested, festivals are a reconstitution of images and symbols that collectively perform micro-societies, mimicking and distorting the ways of the outside world with a ‘creation of new energy’ through the rejection and re-announcement of culture (Falassi 1987, 3). Particularly at BoomTown and Block 9, the civic-style theming plays with the paradoxes and tensions that underpin human reality; especially the contrast between the beautiful and the grotesque. The symbols used to represent the ‘city gone awry’ satirize but also celebrate the separation of society from conventional constraint and order. The visual complexity of these suggestive displays as part of the performance of festival is increasingly discernible as aspects, which are rewarded through media attention and festival-goer loyalty. Undoubtedly, the broadcasting of spectacle through social media has played a role in this process, for the displays constitute viral advertising when they form the backdrop to fan photography that is regularly posted online. Somewhat ironically, it is the spectacular aspects of festival culture that have been heightened along with the ethos of ‘No Spectators’.
Democratization, the surrealist turn in event design and the popular theatricality of festival audiences are the fundamental trends revealed in this book; three key ways that festival culture has developed during the twenty-first century. In presenting some concluding remarks, there is little point in speculating about where the British festival sector is headed (apologies if this is a disappointment to the reader). As we have seen, its fragmentation highlights some very contrasting, and in some ways oppositional, types of festival experience with its own kind of appeal. As long as there is an economics of celebrity, and intense fandom of popular artists, there will be the concert-model festival, reproducing the human distinctions that the boutique event erodes. What this book has really evidenced, then, is the professional advancement of a scene that engages festival-goers in a multiplicity of ways. Multiplicity and diversification are also themes that have recurred throughout this book, and at the very least, I hope that this has shown that it makes very little sense to subsume British music festivals that do not programme folk or classical music into the limited category of pop (a tendency that is alive and well in the field of cultural studies). The festivals discussed in this book should be acknowledged not only for the varied and niche genres of music they programme but also for the types of creative participation the events encourage, and sometimes, enshrine. This acknowledgement requires us to look a little closer at what might, on first glance, present itself as nothing more than an elaborate display of raucous bacchanalia. Yet the converging trends discussed throughout this book have shown that there is an idealizing ethos shaping event design that recasts that persistent dialectic between passivity and activity, between alienation and empowerment, between the will of the few and the will of the people. Taking a wider view of the discourses, practices and values attached to the festival experience, it is clear that these pairings are writ large within Britain’s enduring festival culture.