Do’s and don’ts of being an MFG* (*Middle-aged Festival Goer)
As the former PM is photographed at a music festival, Simon Mills explains how to get it right without embarrassing you or your children
David Cameron was photographed twice at the Wilderness festival this weekend. One quickly tweeted picture, taken by Vanessa Price, a Labour councillor who has campaigned at the former MP’S Witney constituency, shows Cameron and his wife, Samantha, accidentally “photo-bombing” Price and her mustachioed husband Steve’s selfie.
Taken during a performance by Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit, the picture finds Sam Cam’s gaze locked stage-wards while Dave is staring down the smartphone lens, looking “awkward” (as one commentator put it), a bit cross and slightly accusatory. In the second shot, Cameron, whose Oxfordshire home is four miles from the festival in the village of Dean, is caught, cigarette in one hand, wine glass in the other, by a purple-haired chancer with the word “Corbyn” painted on the back of her sequinned jacket. The Corbynista described our former PM as “super chilled”.
I think I speak for the rest of the regular attendees of the Cotswolds when I say I am truly shocked by both of these unfortunate incidents. I mean, what is the world coming to? First Brexit, Trump and North Korea. Now, a brace of Labour Party supporters at the Wilderness festival? TWO? Who on earth let them in?
As somebody who has been to Wilderness four times (I spend my weekends in a little cottage just down the road from the festival’s idyllic Cornbury Park site), I can honestly say the self-styled “live music, wild swimming, spectacle, later night revelry and dining” three-dayer is the most braying, bourgeois, white, middle-class, Conservative jamboree this side of the Henley Royal Regatta.
The Wilderness crowd comes from London or the surrounding Cotswolds locale. (Many attendees have properties in both.) They are rangy, tanned free-spending WASPS; healthy
Forget Garsington, for many, this is what the new social “season” looks like
looking “gap yah” kids; prosecco-tipsy mums giving it some Stevie Nicks in their old Alice Temperley florals; and Boden dads teaming up their multiple rubber Vip-pass bracelets with raspberry-coloured pants and peacock feathers. There’s barely a “remainer” raver among them.
Headline acts on this year’s line-up included Cambridge-educated Tom Hollander and Harrovian actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Food is not greasy taco trucks and rank-smelling noodle kitchens but “long banquet tables” and 90-quid-a-head pop-up diners hosted by the likes of Nuno Mendez, Yotam Ottolenghi, Petersham Nurseries and “Deliciously Ella” Woodward of the Sainsbury’s supermarket dynasty. A round of drinks – that is a round of Aperols in plastic cups – will cost you up to £50. Even the fish and chip van bears the livery of J Sheekey.
So, far from feeling “awkward” in this rarefied environment, Old Etonian Cameron would have felt very much at home – just as he did at the Cornbury Music Festival over at Great Tew earlier this summer, and just as he will in the Groucho Club tent at Alex James’s and Jamie Oliver’s Big Feastival event later on this month. Forget Garsington and Glyndebourne, for many middle-class forty- and fiftysomethings this is what the new social “season” looks like.
The issue for Cameron and every other middle-aged raver at Wilderness – for Ed Balls at Glastonbury, for Charles Dunston, Bear Grylls and actor Jack Huston at Cornbury – is more musical, sartorial, behavioural and terpsichorean. When you have one foot in the rave and one foot in the grave, what kind of trousers do you wear? Do you forgo pants altogether and don a
quasi-pagan get-up of animal skins, a walnut staff and a feathered top-hat. Do you dance like no one’s watching or just idly nod your head to the beat? Do you get off your head on hallucinogenics or stick to warm pints of craft beer?
I might not be echoing the opinions of Nme.com here but for a 50-year-old man at a young people’s shindig, I think Cameron did OK. Most importantly, he didn’t make a fool of himself with his clothes. His chosen ensemble for these occasions tends to be gorpcore-driven – gorpcore being the new campinggear-based fashion trend (gorp is a kind of trail mix/health food snack). He wears hiking boots, cargo shorts, fleeces etc. (“I just caught someone taking picture of my calves,” I overheard him say at Cornbury.)
Thankfully, what he didn’t do was try to “join in” by dressing up like a half-assed circus act with glitter on his face. (I’m talking to you, Mark Carney, Wilderness 2016.) Call me a spoilsport but there’s nothing worse than the sight of middle-aged City trader males jigging around at festivals in harem pants, with their faces painted in butterfly colours… and their kids ashen-faced with embarrassment. Why does the likes of Stephen Price, aforementioned husband of Labour activist Vanessa, feel compelled to wear a hat and wax his face-furniture like a
cartoon strong man of a Sunday afternoon? Why has this kind of am-dram cosplay become synonymous with weekends of gourmet food and a performance by Two Door Cinema Club? Of course, posh people have been delving into the dressing-up box for generations. If you read Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, you’ll know that Harry and Caresse Crosby, gilded Bostonian aristos and decadent lifers, spent most of their lives dressed either as Pierrot clowns or as living Dadaist sculptures. And as recently as 1972, Marie-hélène de Rothschild, a genuine eccentric, held her Surrealist Ball at Chateau Ferrières and wore a deer mask decorated with tears made of real diamonds while she did so. But now that going to a festival is as essential to the summer’s social season as a nasty interlude of salmonella after a barbecue, it seems that every City square and Sloane ranger feels that they have to do a deep dive into the costume cupboard to do so.
But then I talk as a reluctant festivalist. I love music… when I can experience it indoors. I love the outdoors and I love camping… when there is no one else for miles around. I don’t like big crowds of people. I don’t like queues for food or loos. Despite all this, I have been dragged, moaning and complaining – my 53-year-old face unpainted, my headgear unfeathered – to several middle-class festivals during the past few summers. And it hasn’t been too bad. Like Cameron, I’ve worn shorts and sunglasses. I’ve grinned through the rain, the 50-quid drinks rounds and the ghastly communal peeing rituals.
Whether this is a good look or not is still up for debate. “The problem for a 50-year-old raver like Cameron is that he is too old and conventional to be cool and not old enough to be a treasure,” says style watcher Peter York. “I haven’t been to been to a festival in 30 years, but it seems to me, certainly as far as Britain’s festivalgoing middle-classes are concerned, that it is 68-year-old Jeremy Corbyn, with his sandals and his megaphone, who has the edge over Dave and his glass of wine and cigarette.”