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| Image courtesy of Adam Menzies |
There’s not much else so intertwined with British summer than music festivals. You only have to scroll through your Facebook feed to realise that festival pics are important social signifiers. Posting a selfie on Facebook in a camping chair is the way retail workers demonstrate they’re still alternative, and trainee geography teacher demonstrate they still have personality. Festivals and the culture that surrounding festivals have come to represent our breaking the monotony of our everyday life, it’s for this reason that inner-city festival holds a awkward position within festival culture.
City centre festival represent a deviation from the camping festival norm, because not having a camping sites means we are unable to truly get away. Maybe this is why whilst prices at camping festivals boomed in the noughties off the back of our buying into the ‘festival experience’- Carlsberg guitar bands, teddy-bear onesies and £10 posh showers- inner-city festivals have remained relatively cheap.
Where camping festivals are insular, lawless places where everything goes and nobody's around to tell you no, at inner-city festivals festival-goers still have to stumble past parents pushing buggies back from Primark and coppers on horses. Students with dreadlocks might play bongo drums round campfires at Glastonbury, but at inner-city festivals blokes in check shirts still drink tinnies of fosters round the back of tesco metros. Maybe it's in this way that inner-city festivals better reflect British life than the modern British camping festival.
With this in mind that I headed to Sheffield’s Tramlines festival, the north’s biggest city centre festival, to see what I could learn about myself, the music and whether going without camping would offer me anything different.
Here are the five lessons I learnt whilst I was there:
If you keep playing long enough you’re gonna get cut off
Playing on Saturday afternoon, Northern hip-hop act Clubs & Spades lap up their hometown reception, announcing themselves as from the ‘city of the owls’ and rolling through a selection of tunes that demonstrate a big future.
Either caught up in the atmosphere- or not giving a damn - their set overruns, eventually brought to abrupt end when a festival organiser takes to the stage to tell them enough is enough. They look disappointed, wishing they’d had enough time for one more song. But with the crowd cheering, they leave the stage with smiles on their faces.
Politics at festivals is always pointless
Public Enemy still bring the noise, their 5pm Saturday performance being one of the highlights of Tramlines. From classics like ‘Harder Than You Think’ to newer tunes like ‘Rise’ the crowd is stoked throughout, but things take a turn for the worse when they decide to offer the crowd their views on the Gaza conflict.
Public Enemy have spent 25 years spitting power fighting recording records against segregation and racism, but this doesn’t save their post-performance tirade against war being as vacuous as any speech by Bono.
“Fuck the war”
“Fight the power”
“Say it with me- peace”
At the other side of the world Palestinian civilians lie cold in their grave, but having 5,000 fucked Sheffieldians raise their hands in salute achieves nothing besides easing their collective consciences. In future leave the sloppy international relations stuff out Flava - but stick to the tunes and everything will be fine.
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| Image courtesy of Adam Menzies |
Having to sleep in a Costa Coffee is rough
Caught between the last train home and watching Annie Mac later in the night, me and the magazine’s photographer make ad hoc plans to stay at the house of a friend of a friends.
After Annie’s set - run through of student anthems - Sheffield becomes the Sheffield it’s renowned for: Niche classics and sleazy chavas. Amid the bright lights, fists pumping and bottles being swigged I lose the photographer. I want nothing other than a sofa to sleep on, but the friend of a friend renegs on the promise of a sofa leaving me drunk and alone. I head down to the railway station and find it’s a four hour wait for a train.
Desperate for warmth and having no luck prostituting my body for a bed via Tinder I give up and find a bench to sit on, three hours later I head to a Costa Coffee and find some shut-eye on one of the sofas. Give me a blow up bed and a rain soaked tent any day - unless you book a hotel or live nearby sleeping arrangements at city festivals are a living hell.
Bad acoustic music is rougher
Hungover and terrible, with an hour and half’s sleep, I wonder around Sheffield city centre trying to find an act that inspires me. At the peak of my hangover I wonder over to the Main Stage and find Lewis Watson- a grown man who makes his living from making teenage girls weep. His music is not just insipid, it draws me into an existential crisis.
Does Lewis believe his own lyrics? Surely his heartfelt whimsical is just a put on for the $$$ and the teenybopper… but the longer the set goes on, the more I begin to doubt that Lewis is self aware to me making it up. What is life? What is love? If god exists why would he allow such music to be made?
To me The Cribs are Yorkshire's ending for a Sheffield festival
“Yorkshire, Yorkshire, Yorkshire”- the crowd expects and the band delivers. The final night crowd might be hungover from the days before and know they have work in the morning, but as the Cribs reel off their best tunes - Girls Like Mystery, Men’s Needs, and fan favourites like early b-side You’re Gonna Lose Us - nobody cares about tomorrow.
Any thought that the crowd will disperse early to catch the last trains home is quickly dispensed of. For my part I spend the set jumping around with a bottle of rum, remembering that while guitar music have died with landfill indieb- The Twang, The Wombats, The Enemy - some bands resonate beyond that… for me the Cribs will always remind me of being a teenagers, so when I see them live they will always kill it.
“I’m a realist, I’m a romantic.”
And for one night, as they sing along, so is everyone else in Sheffield.
