Festivals Can Still Be Radical Spaces, If You Want Them To Be
Photo by George Harrison

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Festivals Can Still Be Radical Spaces, If You Want Them To Be

But do festival organizers genuinely want to use their resources to change the world for the better? Or is it simply a matter of marketing?

Few festival line ups are complete without at least a nod to the political. While those who’ve never donned wellies and spent four nights partying in a field might believe the sum total of festival culture is dressing up, getting drunk and dancing, in reality organisers programme a host of social justice and campaigning activities, alongside live discussions, talks and debates every year, without fail.

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Of course, the extent to which this happens varies depending on how a festival markets itself, but it’s always there – to a greater or lesser degree. At Latitude this can be found in the Speakeasy; Glastonbury has the LeftField; at Bestival this year you might have looked at the Everyday Plastic installation, or popped your head into the Consent Tent in between sets. Festivals like Womad place politics at the heart of their programming, while in 2016, Reading and Leeds simply booked Guardian columnist Owen Jones.

Beyond the lineups, festivals also offer a glimpse of a more abstract, yet just as radical, vision of the world. For a few days, they’re spaces in which we build new, alternative communities. We leave our belongings in unlocked tents – only trust (and a smattering of disinterested security guards) protecting our possessions. We are allowed to dress as we please, free from the constraints of professional or gendered expectations. Cultures develop, friendships are made, we happily share tobacco, drugs and booze as we partake in a collective experience. Dancing through the night for four days on the trot is celebrated, not frowned upon. Dodgy phone signal and no access to electricity means we forget momentarily the harsh realities of the outside world. For one weekend, we’re offered a chance to consider what life would be like if it wasn’t defined by the drudgery of commutes and 9-5s. Festivals have the potential to be radical spaces where fresh and exciting political ideas can form.

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This isn’t new. Most people point to the first years of the Isle of Wight Festival – initially held in 1968, and heavily influenced by Woodstock, over in the States – as the UK’s first modern music festival. This was undoubtedly a political event. When some 600,000-700,000 descended on the island in 1969 for a weekend like nothing seen in Britain before, they did it not only to enjoy themselves, but also to join a movement which was revolutionary in its time. With a backdrop of the anti-Vietnam War peace movement, the campaign against nuclear weapons, free love, feminism, equal rights and environmentalism, performers and punters alike wanted to experiment with building something new.

All that said, seeing music festivals today as a space for political activity is fraught with tensions. Many of the UK’s biggest are run by a single huge international corporation – which independent festival organisers say is destroying competition. Then there’s the fact that a ticket to most British festivals will set you back close to £200, and that’s before you consider the cost of transport, camping gear, £7 pints and the rest of it. How radical can any event be when it comes with such an exclusionary price tag? Add to that the chilling number of sexual assaults reported at festivals year on year, and the inescapable whiteness of most weekend-long events outside of London, it can often feel that festivals are having their roots ripped out.

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Photo by Louise Roberts

Beginning life some 19 years ago as a party for 300 people in a field with some dodgy electrics, today Shamabala – held annually in the Northamptonshire countryside – attracts 12,000 punters to a weekend of “purposeful hedonism” and “adventures in utopia”, according to their marketing materials. Few festivals in the UK that I’ve come across still take their social and political output so seriously: take the fact they’ve grown slowly to keep their independence – something their audience are grateful for, and the site is powered by 100% renewable energy. So, I headed down last weekend to Kelmarsh Hall to understand how this spirit is being kept alive. After a shortish train ride out to Market Harborough, I set up camp, and head straight to meet Sid Sharma, one of Shambala’s founders.

“Twenty years ago it was more about the party and hedonism for us,” explains Sid, sat outside a quiet tent in the crew area, “but the fact we were charging only £5 to get in, out in a field? Even then it felt subversive. There was always a dose of counterculture and politics. Our audience was part of that world.” In the two decades that have followed Shambala has grown and developed, but if anything, says Sid, politics and social justice have only become increasingly important to the team. Unlike most other festivals there’s absolutely no corporate sponsorship at the event, whatsoever, and in a bid to cut down on waste, bottled water cannot be purchased at all. There’s not just a single stage dedicated to politics – they’re everywhere you turn: the Rebel Soul stage, the Imaginarium, The Garden of Eden to name a few.

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“Last year we also raised £88,000 for the various charities that we work with, this year we are working with Calm – the male suicide charity, and with groups like Oxfam too. But it’s more about developing people’s consciousness, especially young people. A lot of young people come to the event, and we want to give them a toolkit to be activists when they go back home. There’s a collective community we are cultivating. People come here and want to get involved. They’re not just being consumers of culture, they’re producers here too.”

While it’s hard to track what exactly attendees do once they pack up camp and groggily head home on the Monday morning, Shambala have even conducted research which shows how punter’s behaviours can change once the festival is over. After going meat and fish free on site back in 2016, follow up surveys found over a quarter of their audience made a sustained change to their diet by April the following year.

“You can have a party here,” sums up Sid, “but you can go home and you have learnt something. I go to other festivals and have a four day party. At Shambala you can do that, but you can also go home with new ideas.”

Camille, photo by Garry Jones

Over the next few hours I take a look around the festival site. There’s a workshop taking place on how to conduct a direct action, godfathers of rap and militant anti-racist The Last Poets are leading chants of “Fuck Trump” to rapturous applause. London based Lowkey is rapping about Grenfell, before performing his track “The Death of Neoliberalism”. A band called DreamNails are singing about life in the capitalist patriarchy. But I also clock both a Nigerian singing class and a Bollywood dance workshop being led by different white women, and enough bindis and culturally appropriated headdresses in the (almost) exclusively white crowd to make you want to scream.

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This year, Shamabala organisers have invested in The SanQtuary – the festival’s first queer space – led by, on the most part, queer people of colour. With the infrastructure at Shambala costing £1 million according to Sharma, it would be impossible to put the event on for free. Those without cash may well always be locked out. But another obvious barrier to creating a radical and progressive space – its diversity, should be able to be addressed much more easily. Camille Barton, leading The SanQtuary team, is determined to make that happen.

“I’ve been part of festival spaces for a long time,” explains Camille, as we have a herbal tea by the log-burner in the recycled-metal structure. “I started going to Womad as a child. It set me off on a path of being obsessed with them.” Having volunteered and worked on crews for years, Camille co-produced The Sisterhood back in 2016 at Glastonbury, putting intersectionality on the map in festival spaces.

“I’ve often noticed I’m one of the only black women, let alone black queer people, present. I didn’t see myself represented, and would often feel tokenised in spaces – the kooky black chick who wants to dance and get weird, but I wouldn't have support when I experienced racism or microaggressions. I’ve always dreamed about finding the space I would have wanted to visit at 14. It’s a space to centre and celebrate queer people of colour. We’re imagining what a place might look like where we can thrive, not just survive.”

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In programming the space, Camille and the team are imagining what the festival could look like: queer people of colour make up the majority of performers in cabarets and DJ sets, there’s a safer spaces policy enforced by fairy-light clad guardians, and photos of QPOC like James Baldwin and Marsha P Johnson are hung proudly on the walls. The day before, Camille led a workshop elsewhere on site on how to be a good, white ally. Guiding white folk in how they can support people of colour in the fight against racism is far more useful in this context than, say, a class on how to engage with the police if you experience racism – given black people are eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts.

“Most of us live hectic lives,” Camille continues. “We don’t have time to connect with our communities and develop them, to think about our ideals and how we get there. We come to festivals either on holiday or to work with a team, we can experiment and learn, and move this into the real world. Festivals were political, we can’t forget that, and even though there is commercialisation and issues around representation, we have places like this to push these possibilities.”

Photo by George Harrison

There’s no doubt that festivals offer those of us who don fabric wristbands an opportunity to explore, however fleetingly, another way of life. If you can afford a ticket, you get the chance, if you so desire, to engage in acts of radical politics, explore social issues, and totally rethink the way you live your life. But do festival organisers genuinely want to use their resources to change the world for the better? Or is it simply a matter of marketing: an effort to recreate “authentic” festival experiences like those at the early years of Glastonbury and Woodstock, and a commercial driven decision given that young people heading to festivals are likely to be progressive and left-wing.

Dr Adam Behr, Lecturer in Contemporary and Popular Music at Newcastle University, reckons it’s a little bit of both. “The reality is, if a festival wasn’t commercially viable you wouldn't be doing it for very long,” explains Adam, over the phone. “That’s the bottom line of it. But it doesn’t need to be all or nothing: Woodstock wasn't originally meant to be free. It was a commercial enterprise, they charged for tickets and erected fences – it was a paid-for rock festival. Its tagline was ‘peace and music’ because anti-establishment politics sells.”

Today’s festivals are definitely big money-spinners for international conglomerates. And sure – there is a limit to how revolutionary an experience can truly be when it costs £225 + booking fee + P&P. Many of the big ones make loads of cash while running on exploitative volunteer labour. There’s also certainly a long way to go when it comes to making sure festivals feel safe and accessible for women, queers, and people of colour. But that’s not to say they don’t still have the potential to be transformative. It might be an acid trip that makes you think differently about nature, or a conversation with a volunteer that sets you up on a path of campaigning. It might be through your reduced carbon footprint because festival organisers said no plastic, no meat and no fish sold on site.

At a time of mass political unrest and upheaval, it’s hardly surprising that our generation are looking to explore ideas and new experiences over festival weekends. The motivation of organisers is somewhat immaterial, although supporting independent festivals like Shambala who take their social responsibility seriously might well be preferable to sticking-it-to-the-man by giving said man a few hundred quid. Festivals are still spaces with radical possibilities: after all, there’s nothing like staring down into a weekend’s worth of strangers shit to remind us we’re all human, after all.

You can find Michael on Twitter.