Something’s not quite right. It’s the day after the Sausage & Cider Weekender and I’m sat here hydrated, functioning, and only mildly ashamed of my life choices. No hangover. No mysterious bruises. No inexplicable receipt for £47 worth of loaded fries. And yet I drank enough to pickle a village. Parenting at a festival, it turns out, is the ultimate pace car; you can sink thirteen pints but you’ll still stop short of licking a generator because someone needs a wee every eleven minutes.
Which brings us neatly to the modern “local music festival”, that once noble concept that has quietly morphed into a tribute act safari with a bouncy castle. I paid £18 to attend what was billed as a celebration of live music and community spirit, which is technically accurate if your definition of live music includes Arctic Donkeys, Fleetwood Mac & Cheese, Rage Against The Vending Machine, Ed Shear-in and a group of firefighters called Guns N’ Hoses. Seven bands on the poster, six pretending to be other bands, and the seventh a bloke called Darren doing acoustic Ibiza classics, which is the musical equivalent of finding a wasp in your cereal.
Someone asked me what I thought of the day overall and my reply was simple: lovely atmosphere, appalling originality. If you want cutting-edge music, danger, art and risk, do not attend a local festival. If you want lukewarm lager, children covered in glitter and a 43-year-old man screaming “THIS ONE’S FOR THE LADIES” before absolutely butchering Mr Brightside, welcome home.
I understand why organisers do it. Tribute acts are safe. They are musical comfort food. Nobody has ever stormed out of a field shouting “I cannot believe they played songs I recognised!” Original bands are risky; they might be loud, political, experimental, or worse, contain a trumpet. Tribute acts, on the other hand, offer reassuring predictability. You already know the chorus. You already know when to cheer. You already know when to go to the bar because they’ve started the slow one. By mid-afternoon the entire crowd has settled into a beautiful rhythm: hear opening riff of famous song, cheer like Pavlov’s drunk dogs, spill cider on toddler, repeat. At one point I watched a man punch the air with genuine emotion while watching a band called The Rolling Scones perform Satisfaction in a gazebo next to a churro van. He was moved. Deeply moved. This is where we are now.
The real miracle of these festivals is the sheer number of children present. Thousands of tiny humans in ear defenders watching their parents slowly become folklore. Nothing says wholesome family day out like dad triple-parking the buggy at the cider tent, mum shouting “I LOVE YOU” at a band dressed as ABBA, and a toddler eating chips off the grass like a gentle badger. By 4pm the field becomes a sociology experiment with three distinct tribes: the Responsible Parents who leave at six, the Optimistic Parents who said they’d leave at six, and the Parents Who Have Lost The Concept Of Time. You see dads carrying sleeping children like fallen comrades while still holding two pints and a tray of nachos. You see mums doing that squinty one-eye walk that says I am absolutely fine and also the ground is moving. The kids, of course, will remember none of this. Their core memory will simply be: at some point Daddy sang Oasis at a stranger.
Then comes the magical hour, around half seven, when the sun dips, the temperature drops and the cider hits the bloodstream like a tax rebate. It always begins with a disagreement about queue etiquette, escalates into a heated debate about football and ends with two men named Kev grappling gently beside a falafel stand while security intervene with the calm professionalism of people who have separated this exact fight four hundred times before. Meanwhile on stage, No Way Sis Oasis Experience UK launch into Wonderwall for the third time that day and the crowd sings along like nothing has happened. Civilisation continues.
But the truth is nobody is really there for the music. The music is just a pleasant soundtrack to day drinking in a field while pretending this counts as culture. These festivals aren’t about discovery; they’re about familiarity. They’re not cutting edge, they’re cutting hedge: trimmed, tidy and impossible to get lost in. You pay your money, you drink too much, you clap for songs you already know, you promise never again and you absolutely go again next year. Because deep down we all love a sunny field, a plastic pint glass and a band called Blurred Lines (Not That One) shouting HELLO FESTIVAL like they’re headlining Glastonbury instead of performing next to portable toilets. Great day, terrible music, see you next summer.
