Festivals no country for old men

Daughter #1 got back from Leeds Festival last Monday filthy, exhausted and her voice had gone.

She went to bed at 1pm, got up to half-heartedly shovel in seven forkfuls of chicken tikka masala for dinner six hours later, went back to bed and got up at 11am the next day.

Rainy festivals are nobody’s idea of a good time – and boy, did it rain at Leeds.

Their tent got ruined on the first night and leaked like Manchester United’s defence. Back in the day, that meant you were stuck in a wet tent all weekend. But festival organisers now sell tents on site for £50. So they bought one. And that got ruined as well.

You may have seen on the news that tents and assorted camping paraphernalia worth £1m was abandoned by revellers at Leeds’ sister festival, Reading.

It may have been worth that brand new, but after a weekend of being rained on, puked in and covered in all manner of fluids, to quote Oz from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, the contents of the entire site wouldn’t fetch a fart at a bring and buy sale.

And then there was the music itself. There was a lot of noise on Twitter in the run-up to the festival from bumptious, bucket hat-wearing old curmudgeons that “music isn’t as good now as it was in our day” and compared 2018’s bill with 2000’s.

Back then Oasis, Primal Scream, Foo Fighters, Pulp and Stereophonics topped the bill. Fast forward to 2018 and it’s Fall Out Boy, Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa, Travis Scott and Post Malone.

Thing is, music changes, tastes change and audiences change. Oasis’ plodding, three-chord, strummy-strummy-strum-strum, will-this-do? drivel they were churning out by then would today see them bottled off Daphne & Celeste-style – who, incidentally, were on the Reading bill in 2000.

Daughter #1 hasn’t spoken much about the festival itself, by the end of the week she still had that Vietnam veterans’ thousand-yard stare, save to say that when she looked behind her during one of the sets, all she could see were dozens of people from Lancaster.