Tom Aylott is our Editor. This is his Editorial column. Think of it as the Editor’s letter at the start of a magazine but appearing at random intervals and less cohesive,
I’ve been writing for Punktastic long enough to know that this is the time of year that things getting really busy when you write about music. I’ve just spent the weekend in Stuttgart playing and attending Pirate Satellite festival with my good friend Rob Lynch and loads of the other guys here have just been to Groezrock (keep an eye out for the videos from the Etnies stage). This means we’re all looking directly at Slam Dunk as the next major stop now, and also looking cautiously at our overdrafts.
The amount of small festivals (we called them all dayers back in my day) cropping up in recent years has only compounded how lucky we have it here in the UK. Amazing line ups are everywhere all summer in all corners of the country. It’s so easy to check out bands ahead of time and catch them before they end up at major festivals. I’ve seen bands go from strength to strength as they reach the main stages – take Gnarwolves and Apologies, I Have None as an example. It’s really exciting to see it all happen.
An offshoot of this is that some of us have gotten a little spoiled. Someone once told me that people in the UK immediately think of three reasons NOT to attend something, and I’d say that this actually seems to be a pretty low estimate when it comes to festivals. Some people wouldn’t be happy unless a festival was free, on their doorstep, played only by bands they love and attended by only people they could imagine hanging out with. And that’s pretty sad.
It seems we’ve gotten a little narcissistic about festival line ups as a nation, and the hoops people seem to want organisers to jump through is often absolutely bonkers. Even if it’s a festival people will never attend, there’s probably a few people you know that feel inclined to express their feelings on the (in)significance of the line up and the running order of the bands, and it’s just boring after a while.
In the end, I feel like the pickier people and mainstream magazine coverage are catered to a little too heavily when selecting bands (despite it not always representing reality), and it does sometimes feel like our mainland European counterparts are much better at curating line-ups at smaller festivals because they seem to give less of a shit about that.
Anyway, here’s to the festival innovators and the people who get out there and do something. This summer is going to be amazing and I’ll see you all over the place (hopefully in two senses of the words).
TOM AYLOTT