ISSUE #4

WASH OUT
From the Lord
of the Flies
vibe at Fyre,
to the meltdowns at
Hope & Glory and Y
Not, music festivals
feel more precarious
than ever. Are the
failures down to ‘acts
of God’, or just bad
leadership?
Last weekend, punters
turned up to Hope & Glory
in Liverpool expecting a
“wonderful boutique
festival” that would be
“stylish yet subversive –
think Charles Darwin
meets Tim Burton”. At
least, that’s what the
advert promised.
It wasn’t too wrong. There
was denitely a sense of
survival of the ttest for
event-goers trying to
navigate queues and the
lack of facilities, mixed
with nightmarish
Burtonian unease. But
there wasn’t actually a
festival, so to speak. The
rst day was marred by
overcrowding and hours of
delays, and by Sunday
morning the whole event
had been shut down, with
nothing more than
printed-out posters and a
tweet reading “no festival
today”. Rather than being
all about the headliners, it
was all about the headlines
that followed.
Back in April, when the
accid cheese sandwiches,
emergency shelters and
general Lord of the Flies
atmosphere of the doomed
Fyre festival were beamed
out on social media, it felt
a long way from home.
After all, this was on the
remote island of Exuma in
the Bahamas, and with
tickets selling for up to a
quarter of a million
dollars, it attracted a more
exclusive crowd.
Spain’s Tomorrowland
faced a re that led to the
evacuation of over 22,000
people. Sweden’s Into the
Factory, meanwhile, was
deemed a safety risk
before it even began – this
was just weeks after the
same organisers’ Into the
Valley festival was beset
with poor planning,
needing volunteers to take
on security tasks, and
leaving ravers nowhere to
shelter from
thunderstorms.
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