Last weekend, while the masses were at Latitude, I was at Truck Festival – a relatively small festival just outside Oxford, run by Truck Record. Truck’s first festival was in 1998, started by a bunch of teenagers with big dreams and a collectively overactive imagination. Tickets were £3. Since then, Truck has grown steadily, this year featuring the likes of Manic Street Preachers, Kodaline, and Catfish and the Bottlemen. Yet, somehow, despite the exponential rise in popularity and status, Truck has managed to maintain its raw and home-grown feel. Being there, I couldn’t help but think that in an age of mobile music streaming and Pokemon GO, festivals can be more of an exceptional experience than ever before. Away from the virtual and the digital, standing in a field at sunset, screaming lyrics into strangers’ eyes; the pounding of the bass eroding any difference in heartbeat between you.
However, this immersive vibe, simultaneously communal and deeply personal, is a far cry from the kind of event that commercial television would have you believe lies at the heart of a great festival. Spend no more than five minutes watching your average ITV-type channel and you’ll undoubtedly the festival is being bastardized for profit. As much as I’m sure this is a product of the commercialization of festivals themselves (you only have to look at most festivals bar prices to know what I’m talking about), this new on screen trend is contributing to it as a cause.
Take Boohoo’s ‘Festival Shop’ clothing collection, maximising on the festival season to add another ‘essential’ summer item to their online fashion store. Take L’Oréal’s latest ‘#FestivalReady’ advertising campaign, offering ‘Miss Hippie Mascara’ for one to, ironically, ‘stamp her individuality on festival beauty and stand out from the crowd’. The fashion and aesthetic they create may be intending to capture the spirit of freedom in festival life, but the commercialisation they force onto the self-proclaimed ‘alternative’ scene goes further than any antonym. Even in the freedom that is so inherent in the purpose of music festivals, the commercialisation surrounding them is in danger of slowly bringing about their degradation. If the festival experience has come down to being unable to take three steps from your tent without seeing a group of girls in identical crochet crop tops or matching ‘bohemian’ dresses , is it suprising that we pay extortionately for the ticket, for the camping, parking, merch, £5 for a box of chips and £2.50 for a bottle of water, without any indignation? Furthermore, as festival culture is absorbed into everyday consumerism – festivals lose their capacity to be springboards for new talented artists, musicians or filmmakers. It’s the established names that bring the crowds who shop for the commercially established aesthetic. Sure, a festival has to be profitable to be viable. Yet, the extent to which profit is becoming the point rather than a necessity threatens to turn the festival into a withered shell of its former self.
For me, this was the brilliance of Truck. No extortionate food prices: just an endless (and delicious) choice of local and independent food stalls and vans; locally sourced ingredients; family-run businesses charging their regular prices and all food profits, festival-wide, being donated to local charities. Drinks allowed into the arenas. Big name bands performing alongside Truck veterans Danny & the Champs and local up-and-coming Oxford artists like Esther Joy Lane, The Dreaming Spires and Pixel Fix. I couldn’t help but notice that there was no one paying more attention to their flower crown than they were to the stage in front of them. Truck was unfitting to the consumerist angle with its cafe/record store roots and its cross-age appeal, untouchable by the ‘Hippie look’ advertisers – and wholesome due to this.
