Latitude

We first went to Latitude festival in 2011 and had the time of our lives; music, comedy, fun and laughter it had everything.  So we went again the following year and it was just as good again so it became an essential part of our summer.  I think what we loved was it felt like we were stepping out of society for a few days to spend time in a community of like minded souls unconstrained by convention.  When we reluctantly re-entered the real world on the Monday morning we’d reject its values, preferring those of the world we’d just left.  We would start looking forward to the next festival immediately, ‘only fifty one weeks…’  I have spent some of the best days and nights of my life at Latitude festival and hoped I would do so forever.  But this weekend the festival was held just half an hour away, we didn’t go and have no regrets.

So what changed, was it us or was it them?  Maybe a bit of both.  We’re certainly a decade older now, days of exercise and nights of madness take more of a toll but we know how to pace ourselves, in every sense.  The festival gets more expensive every year which you’d expect, I can just about deal with paying £500 for the weekend for two of us but there needs to be a line up that backs this up and this year it just doesn’t.  I know there will be plenty of people for whom Lewis Capaldi and Snow Patrol are a musical orgasm but for us they have the opposite effect. But there have been other years where the line up hasn’t been anything to get excited about but we’ve gone anyway and had a great time but at £500 its now a bit of a risk. I get that a modern festival needs to make a profit, I understand I’ll be paying over the odds for anything and everything I choose to buy.  I might not like it but I accept it’s what has to happen for a festival to take place, I buy into it and play my part, but I have a right to expect value for money.

I think that’s the point, value for money, for the last few festivals we just haven’t been getting it from Festival Republic.  Forget the musicians and comedians they choose to book because everyone likes their own thing, what constitutes VFM for me might leave the new average Latitude goer thinking ‘WTF?’ which is how it should be.  I’m talking about all the other little things that make up festival life, many of these being the basic things that we need to exist through four days and nights in festival land.  I can tolerate paying too much money for food but I should expect it to be edible and it hasn’t always been, also I don’t deserve to feel ripped off which I have been numerous times over the years.  As for beer, Jesus Christ that is just daylight robbery, last I heard it was six quid for a warm pint of watered down lager, its outrageous but people pay and consume it, because that’s what you do ain’t it?  No wonder people take drugs…  But as we’ve established, I can live with this.  What FR has denied us in recent years are the simple things; adequate working toilets, at times running water and above all else, space. 

The beginning of the end was the appearance of “Luxury Loos”.  With this FR was showing it was possible to have something decent on which to shit but we’d have to pay extra for the privilege.  Just fuck off!  I find the very idea offensive, on every level, it’s like taxing a turd.  If you’re the kind of person who will pay bog tax without thought then we aren’t ever going to be friends.  Now luxury loos have become a fixture, there is no incentive for FR to maintain the stalls the rest of us have to use, if they are failing then more punters will pay up for the posh bogs.  Now it goes way beyond that, there’s Pink Moon camping and even Latitude luxury where you can pay more cash and enjoy a different festival experience to the rest of us.  As I get older I could potentially be tempted by these options but on the other hand it all goes against the festival ethos, it creates division, it isn’t what a festival should be about.

I suppose this brings me to my main gripe, what has most changed about Latitude is the audience, nowadays the people aren’t necessarily music fans.  Latitude was always dubbed the middle class festival and FR have definitely been keen to exploit this.  The location is perfect, close to the Suffolk coast where posh London likes to spend its weekends, it has become the festival of choice of public school kids and their parents.  They are not here for the music, they are here to see and be seen because that’s what the cool people do.  This group of people have slipped through the gates and slowly taken over and become the majority, just like their own nightmares of immigration.  These people don’t want to sleep in a tent, if they are not paying extra for luxury then they arrive in a campervan.

Over the years the space taken up by posh camping and campervans has grown and multiplied and swamped the spaces where the ordinary campers once dwelt.  Family camping has also stretched and taken ground and judging by the space that’s left, far more than is actually needed.  The areas left for ‘general camping’ have reduced to a fraction of what they were a decade ago, hence those of us wishing to use it are battling for space.  So we end up corralled together; no space, dodgy toilets and inconsistent drinking water while on the other side of the metal fencing we can see people with too much of everything.  To add to the insult we now have to camp way back adding miles to the legs over the weekend.  To get to and from the arenas we have to walk through a corridor of steel behind which are the camper vans and posh tents.  Latitude has become gentrified, they don’t want us anymore.

There lies the truth, we’d been gradually marginalised bit by bit over the years but the last two festivals we’ve been made almost unwelcome.  It’s like “Okay come if you must but camp out of the way and behave yourselves, don’t annoy the beautiful people”.  The small stage hosting Indie bands has gone as has much of the festival’s diversity, the old tag line “More than just a music festival” has also disappeared, now it really is just another music festival catering for people who just listen to radio 2 and even then it’s just in the car.  These are people that don’t know how to party and it’s their kind that runs the world.  In the beginning when you entered Latitude festival you were taking a break from the real world but now its encroachment is obvious and it’s waiting to grab your cash.  The festival as we knew it is gone never to return but I still hope we return to Henham park, all it would take is the right band or musician and we’d definitely be tempted. 

Have I missed Latitude this year?  If we had tickets this year Little Simz would have been my one and only “must see” artist, followed by Groove Armada in the Big tent and that’s potentially a very good Saturday night which in hindsight I would like to have experienced. But that alone does not give me value for money.  In the beginning the Latitude experience was a magical weekend from beginning to end but the last couple of years it had become a few magic moments amongst a lot of physical toil.  But I am sitting here now thinking back to past festivals and remembering wonderful, beautiful, emotional experiences and I hope I’ll experience the like again.