Dancing in fields! Live music! Fun with friends! Festivals are back to save our summer
IT’S not a light on the horizon, but a mud-splattered welly and cidersoaked Ramones tee. The Prime Minister’s roadmap for a release from lockdown offers a little hope for culture-starved, Vitamin D-deprived music lovers: festivals will rise again. And with the anniversary of lockdown feeling more like a centenary, even those of us who thought we’d long ago swapped squalid tents for hotel suites are salivating at the thought of negotiating portaloos and screaming along to songs we don’t know the words to — long live the lost weekend.
Setting the stage
After a year out of the game, the festival sector is still scrambling to attention, even if the fans are way ahead of them. Reading, Creamfields, Boomtown and Field Day have all already sold out, while this week, Download, Junction 2 and Brighton’s Great Escape all announced they won’t be setting up their stages till next year. Meanwhile, Glastonbury is busy making cheese for the first time since the Roaring Twenties; the music will be back in 2022.
Presently two dates are key for the resurrection of live music. May 17 allows smaller gigs to go ahead with some social distancing but festivals, which thrive on the joyous crush of crowds, will mostly work to June 21, when all distancing rules are set to be removed. Still, with Boris Johnson’s promise/ threat that each lockdown lift won’t be confirmed until the week before, it won’t be until June 14 that anyone knows for sure. In the meantime, it’s what happens by the end of this month that could really rearrange the calendar.
“March 31 is the cut-off for the announcement of government-backed insurance for festivals,” says Nick Morgan, chief executive of festival production company We Are The Fair and vice chair of the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), which says that 92.5 per cent of its members would be unable to stage an event without it.
“No money is moving around the ecosystem currently and all of the supply chain is on pause. No promoter is going to pay the deposit because they don’t know the shows will happen. So we’re all doing the planning but festivals need that promise of insurance, otherwise they won’t be able to go ahead at all.”
Such insurance is hardly uncommon — Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Norway all have it — but if Rishi Sunak doesn’t soon flesh out a plan, the summer of fun may yet remain a sun-dappled dream.
The old normal
The bright news is that the festival format is a fairly unmoveable beast. Most of the big boys will return the same as ever — or they won’t be back at all. “You can’t expect everyone front of the main stage to socially distance, and even if you did, how would you implement that?” asks Morgan.
Melvin Benn, managing director of Festival Republic, which looks after Reading, Leeds and Latitude among others, has made the same point repeatedly over the past year and smaller shows seem to feel much the same. Brixton Disco Festival boss Nicholas Bravette told the Standard his 3,000-capacity event would go
ahead as normal. “Food and drink will be available and facilities will be functioning as before.”
Even camping is unlikely to face disruption. “Everyone in the campsites is already in their bubble, really,” says Morgan. “Festivals are likely to look at whether they can increase the space on site but I think generally camping will be fairly self managed. We already have to do a huge amount around things like fire lanes so there’s already lots of breaks in there. It’s not just like it’s a field completely full of tents.”
Testing, testing
Benn has attributed his bullishness for a successful season down to the speedy vaccine roll-out. Still, Morgan says, behind closed doors the constant chatter centres on the need for attendees to be tested.
Administering these on the doors seems unlikely: “You’d have to keep everyone within a sterile environment until the result of that test. It’s not practical.” Pre-testing is the preference, whether it’s part of a vaccine passport or self-administered. Morgan is hoping that by the summer, regular testing will be part of a “normal, everyday routine”, that the public simply accept, taking a burden off event organisers.
Many festivals are sympathetic to the strangeness of the times. Love Supreme’s guarantee offers ticket-holders a full refund for those who test positive or are required to isolate; check with wherever you’re headed but many places are doing something similar, with no festival boss wanting Covid-positive people to risk coming, potentially causing another mass outbreak.
The other worry for festivals is how people will react being back in crowds after so long separated. While organisers have long been required to have welfare and medical provisions in place, there’s concern people may struggle to readjust. There is no quick-fix for this. Heading out and getting used to being around other people is likely the best way.
If everything goes to plan, the next few weeks should see even more festivals firm up their programmes. For those about to rock, we salute you.
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