Did we all forget how to festival?
Messy revelers seem to be spoiling the return of music festivals.
A couple of weekends ago, I did something that I’d spent the past 12 months dreaming about: I went to a music festival. It was bliss! I drank beer in the sun and wandered between stages and talked to random people and generally loved every second of it. And then something happened that soured the occasion. Let’s go…
Look at that photo. That photo right there is something special. It was taken on a sweaty Saturday afternoon spent in Auckland venue Shed 10, a claustrophobic brick building on Queens Wharf that was packed with punters enjoying some sparse, relentless noise.
Look at fog, that haze, and all of those beautiful people. Over the past 12 months, I and many other music lovers could only dream of being amongst all that again. Thanks to Covid-19 lockdowns, festivals seemed like an impossibility. In Auckland, we went a full year without one.
But, on a joyous recent Saturday, we had three to choose from: Splore at Tapapakanga Regional Park, Island Time on Motutapu Island, and the one I was at, Beacon Festival, an electronic event on Auckland’s Waterfront.
Once I got there, it honestly took me a while to get my bearings. Beacon Festival is on a tiny site, a thin stretch of concrete on the wharf past the ferries. Being around that many people after 12 months of fear and longing in Corona-vegas had left me wary of big groups of people.
But it didn’t take long to relax, and it was so, so good to be back amongst like-minded friends again. It was overcast and warm and Behemoth beers were $10 so I downed several of them while taking in the afternoon’s acts: DJs like the grimy Bbyfacekilla, the pummeling duo Chaos in the CBD, and hectic Dunedin performer Vanessa Worm.
It was all going great until the early evening. That’s when the trouble started.
It seemed like many were enjoying quite a few more of those beers than they probably should have been, and things started getting messy. I saw one security guard flexing his muscles to pick someone up and carry them out of the festival. A short while later, a fracas erupted in Shed 10, with security manhandling someone out who could barely stand.
It seemed like things were heading south, so I left a little early. On my way home, things got worse. Crowds leaving Beacon Festival were spilling right into crowds emerging from the Craft Beer & Food Festival at Spark Arena. As you can imagine, they were pretty inebriated themselves. People were being absolutely ridiculous.
I saw drunken groups of swaying lads playing chicken with oncoming cars, hurling abuse at them as they drove past. A few steps later, I watched another group attempt to break into a building site, pulling at the padlock and attempt hilarious flailing karate kicks on the door handle that was never in danger of budging.
I crossed the road several times to evade other, larger, louder groups.
At this point, I started asking some questions. Did we forget how to behave in public? Have we forgotten how to act when we’re out en masse? Did we all decide to drink way more than we used to? Excuse my English, but did we forget how to festival?
It doesn’t seem like I’m the only one feeling this way. On a recent episode of Mediawatch, host Colin Peacock admitted he had been accosted by “a few young, drunk gentlemen” fresh from Wellington’s Homegrown music festival. I heard from others at that festival that levels of drunkenness were high there too.
Then, at Peachy Keen, a Wellington music festival held at the Basin Reserve over the weekend, RNZ reported one man was arrested and charged with assaulting two security guards. There was also an unconfirmed report of a sexual assault.
Apparently they also ran out of doughnuts…
None of this is good. Music festivals are awesome. We’re lucky to have them. While many other countries are planning for the return of music festivals much later in the year, and even that is optimistic, we’ve just had a summer full of them.
So let’s remember how to behave. Enjoy yourself. Drink those beers. Wear sunscreen. Mosh. Eat two fried chicken burgers. Also: Don’t drink too much. Have some water every once in a while. Keep your hands to yourself. And above all, don’t attempt to out-muscle a car coming towards you. You’re never going to win that one.
These aren’t things you’d think grown-ups need to hear, but apparently we do.
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