Making wristbands at the festival

Music festival time is upon us again and, if they are proliferating then who is to blame, in these times of agricultural diversification, any farmer using his fields for that cash crop that is middle class people listening to music with their faces painted.

There’s the Big Festival, there’s the Folk Festival (formally the Crusty Festival), there’s the Hipster Festival (formally the other Folk Festival), there’s the Other Folk Festival (formally a Great little Folk Festival That The Family Really Enjoyed), there’s the Family Festival (formally Just Another festival until somebody added a comedy tent, a poetry tent and a puppet theatre), there’s the Rock Festival and, of course, there’s the Corporate Festival In The Park, probably sponsored by a credit card company or arms dealer.

There’s lots of festivals.  Want yours to stand out?  Here’s how you do it.

Every ticket holder gets their own toilet.  Which is cleaned every three hours.

Impractical?  Have you seen the price of tickets for festivals recently?  Never mind Madonna playing your festival, for the sort of money you could pay her, the woman would be on with the marigolds and forming a supergroup with Kim and Aggie.

If you had sensational toilet facilities at your festival, then I don’t care if thanks to Time Lord technology you had the original line up of the Beatles headlining, all everyone would talk about when they got home was that after a three day diet of lentil burgers, tofu shakes and whatever the fuck kale is, which is the only sort of thing permitted by law to be sold at a music festival instead of food, nobody had a bad word to day about the cludgies.

Want to enjoy music festivals?  Well, it used to be that wags would suggest you watch on telly, put the telly down the end of your garden to simulate a stage not just in a different post code but in a different time zone, charge yourself ten quid for a warm lager and fifty quid for a bag of something that comes in a baggie that still bears the ‘Barts’ logo on the side.  Then spend three hours trying to find the tent you have pitched in your garden.  That’s all very well except that if you actually attend the festival you don’t have to contend with teevee presenters doing live links.

Jesus.  What is it about deejays and live telly.  Presumably, these people should be quite good at live broadcasting, as most radio shows are live, allowing the deejay to react to news, read out tweets and make emotional farewells, promising their listeners they will be back after their trial where they are confident they will be acquitted.  Maybe it’s the camera, deejays look into the camera like members of the public from 1950s Pathe films who had never seen a camera before, they are hypnotised, or off their faces.

The best way to enjoy a festival is to cover it as a journalist, as this means that no bad the acts or how disappointing it is that a singer you really liked has turned into one of those massive dicks that think it’s acceptable to hold their microphone out to the audience when performing a song (and oh, how we yearn for 10,000 people to chant Wanker! Wanker! The second they do so), you’re still getting paid, and you get to leave mid-afternoon on day one, which is about the time when the toilets turn.

If you can’t photoshop a press pass using the ‘Tattler’ logo and a home laminating kit (trade secret…invest in a convincing lanyard, one that says ‘Chelsea FC’ is unlikely to fool even the dimmest security guard, who is probably a fanb and has one of his own at home) then the best way to enjoy is to up your accommodation budget.  This is available in several packages:

Bronze – a day pack, 200 wet wipes and a carton of pro-plus.  Who needs to sleep, or regular bowel movements for a week afterwards.  Just white-knuckle three days of festival fun.

Silver – a yurt.  If you’re an absolute cunt, this is the festival accommodation for you.  Make sure to bring your own dreamcatcher.  Today’s yurt dweller knows that when it comes to wifi and being able to bang on endlessly about a spiritual experience, nothing beats a yurt.  If, however, you arrive to take possession of your yurt not in a hybrid people-carrier but at the head of a rabble of restless Mongols and a herd of yak ready for slaughter and barbecue, then that is a different proposition entirely.

Gold – (always believe in your soul!) helicopter.  In, bop, out.

Platinum – ahhhh, here we go.  Motor home.  Do you know what the difference between living as God intended and living like an animal is?  Six inches.  That’s the distance separating the ground from the bottom of your camper van.  Drive up, park up, plug in, barter some steaks from that nice Mr Khan in the yurt paddock, then turn on your telly and watch the festival with a finger covering over the ‘mute’ button in preparation for the arrival on screen of the lackwits who present the thing.  As for red button coverage, if I press a red button I expect to see a surface to twat missile streaking away from the launcher on top of my camper van and vaporising whatever cultural excrescence has offended me, most likely somebody who wears sunglasses indoors and says ‘like’ too often.

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about wristbands.

Different tribes have different markers for honour, success, experience.  In the military, your medals show the world that you have a nodding relationship with heroism.  In the racing world, the form is to suspend your enclosure passes from your field glasses, resulting over time in a rather pleasing multicoloured effect not unlike a paper lei.  If you are a regular festival goer, then your scars are your wristbands.

A wristband is an easy way to ensure that only the people who are supposed to be in a place are in that place.  By the way, if you are anywhere where you have to wear a wristband, you might want to think about what you can do to become the sort of person who doesn’t need a wristband to be at that event.  My advice?  Photoshop.  Home laminator.  A very small loom that can produce a lanyard that reads ‘Reuters’).  They are popular with festival organisers because once they are on, thanks to the wonders of modern synthetic materials, the person wearing them is going to rot faster than the wristband, essential given the need to establish if somebody had paid the £800 entry fee or tunnelled under the fence, and essential given the festival microclimate.

In most circumstances, those allocated a wristband can’t wait to cut that fucker off the moment they leave hospital, which is about the only other place where knowing somebody’s identity is really really important and they are not always drug-free enough to tell you.  Not so the festival wristband.  For some reason, festival goers like to continue to wear their wrist bands, and these are wrist bands that didn’t even give them fast-track access to the executive cludgie, long after the festival has finished.

Harmless, probably.  Decorative, possibly.  Twatty, definitely.