The Worst Festival Ever

BY JOHN MCDONNELL

ILLUSTRATION BY DAN FREEMAN

I can say with absolute certainty that I have never had a good time at a festival. Festivals these days are for bloated marketing people in flip-flops and three-quarter-length shorts to prance about in a field twiddling one of their nipple piercings and pretending they like music so they can go into the office the following Monday and tell the girl in accounts how “fucked up” they got.

The worst festival I’ve ever been to took place on a beach in the Westcountry. It mainly involved loads of inane bands playing torpid noise to tanned surfers in Hawaiian shirts who looked like they’d rather be watching Sublime or high-fiving their reflection in the mirror.

As bad as it was, I am sure I can imagine a festival that’s at least 40,000 times worse than this. Let me now, in my mind, curate the worst festival the world has ever seen. It will feature the following..

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ABHORRENT PEOPLE

It’s often the people you meet and spend time with at a festival that determine how much of a good time you have. My festival (apart from bands, managers, hangers-on, PRs, grumpy oafs who stand by the side of the stage, etc.) will consist solely of human pondlife. It will be a post-travelling reunion, arranged via Facebook, for teenagers who have just arrived back from Thailand on their gap year. For the entire three days, each will try to outdo the other with stories of how many dolphins they swam with, how many henna tattoos they got, how many times they “found themself” and how many underage ladyboys they molested.

AWKWARD LOCATION

A large problem with hard-to-reach festivals is that if you decide you don’t like them after a few hours it’s very hard to escape. No one wants to thumb a lift to the ferry port alone with a local rapist and then take a two-hour boat ride before boarding a coach that takes 12 hours to travel 50 miles to a place that isn’t really that close to where you live.

My festival will be annoyingly hard to reach. It will take place on Muck, a tiny island off the north west of Scotland. After flying in to the local airport on the shaky light aircraft, festivalgoers will have to hike across the North West Highlands and then ride by donkey to the village of Arisaig, because all taxis will be banned for that weekend. From here, people will have to buy rowing boats from locals in the mainland village and embark on the three-hour row across the unforgiving Sea of the Hebrides, flinging viciously randy seals off the boat as they attempt to clamber onboard.

UNSUITABLE DRESSCODE

Festival fancy dress is so funny. Laugh out loud. Ha ha ha. My three-day marathon of mental torture will also have a dresscode: the Borat mankini and platform shoes. Every pleb who pays to come to my festival will have to wear these clothing carbuncles. Not so bad, you’re thinking? Well, the event will take place in the freezing depths of winter when the island is lashed with thick snow and battered by gale-force winds. The entire population of fun-seekers will have to huddle together in a gigantic pack in a desperate attempt not to die from hypothermia when attempting to move from tent to tent.

INTRUSIVE SPONSORSHIP

Most festivals these days are just a cunning vehicle for product endorsement and sponsorship deals. And my festival shall be no different; the whole thing will be sponsored by a new German energy drink brand, Schickerspeed. No other liquid apart from this sickening sugary drink will be allowed on site, including water. Schickerspeed will pour from every tap. You will have to wash your hands with Schickerspeed after doing a shit. You will be forced to have the Schickerspeed logo (a grinning German Riding Pony with massive breasts) tattooed on the palm of your hand before you are allowed into the festival. Every leaf of every tree on the site will have a Schickerspeed sticker stuck to it. Each act will have to spend the first quarter and the last quarter of their set chanting, “Schickerspeed! Schickerspeed! Schickerspeed!” over and over until the entire audience has been indoctrinated and stumbles about in a daze repeating this pointless mantra.

GROSS FOOD

No catering will be allowed on site. If you are hungry you will have to dig up vegetables from the ground and cook them in the microwaves provided until they become a soggy pulp, which bursts with boiling liquid when you bite into it.

CELEBRITY DJ TENT

As I entered Bestival two years ago I stumbled into a tent where ageing DJ Tim Westwood was spinning his usual set of overplayed hip-hop hits. I informed my gullible friend that the wrinkly rap-lover would be taking part in a 24-hour DJ set, and since he only played vinyl, he’d brought along a truck filled with records, which was manned by a team of helpers backstage who brought him each 12-inch as he bellowed the title through a megaphone. She believed every word.

Tim Westwood isn’t a big enough name for my festival, so instead I’ll have someone really famous like Kerry Katona headlining the celebrity DJ tent. Krazy Kez, as I like to call her, will play a 24-hour set of psy-trance Atomic Kitten remixes while her disgusting cockroach of a husband and almost-as-vile mother dance naked on podiums either side. With celebs, I find the more the merrier, so I’ll cram as many as I possibly can into this one tent. For maximum celebrity DJing enjoyment, at all times there will be two other celeb DJs playing songs during Krazy Kez’s set—all in the same tent so the three different sets of music clash horribly with each other. Hosting the tent will be Abs from 5ive, who will freestyle in a Jamaican accent.

The tent will be a makeshift church, with the celebs performing on an altar, and everyone who isn’t famous will have to kneel and pray to the celebs as they pump out their horrifying racket.

SOUND LIMITER

Every shit festival needs to have a pithy limit on the level of sound that can be emitted from on-site speakers. My festival will have a noise limit of 12db. Kings Of Leons’ headlining set will be drowned out by the sound of a strong gust of wind and Calvin Harris’s entire nine-hour set of his own material will be eclipsed by the sound of a low-flying moth.

WILD ANIMALS

Line-ups are pretty much the same at every festival, so each year organisers try to come up with crazy ideas to surprise and astound people, like having a festival in a zoo. My festival will be the craziest yet because I will release wild animals onto the site. To see Faithless (who will be one of my headline acts) you will have to first bludgeon a pack of polar bears to death with a bottle of poppers. To catch Zane Lowe’s DJ set you will have to dive into the piranha tank that he will be chained to the bottom of.

COKE-SNORTING COMPETITION

The basic premise here is that all of the bands’ managers will (very willingly) take part in a competition to see who can snort the most coke backstage during the course of the day. The winner will be the cheeky chappy who can talk the most bullshit about their utterly fourth-rate indie band to the biggest number of complete strangers, or the first person to drop dead from a heart attack.