Festival fever

Despite another sodden summer, Disability Now’s intrepid reporters Paul Carter and Cathy Reay pulled on their waterproofs to attend two of the most popular music festivals

READING FESTIVAL 2008

Cathy Reay

Despite my extensive gig calendar, which dates back many years, I am still relatively new to the festival circuit. Until this time last year, I’d only ever been camping with the Brownies. And that was in a cardboard box.

Reading had always been the festival for me. Where the crème de la crème of alternative, rock and indie music performers and their fans unite in one big, brilliant gathering. Watching my friends come home year after year with streaks of dirt across their faces and a thousand in-jokes between them, I couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous of the incredible experience they’d shared. But I was always worried that the mud would swallow me up or that I’d get lost or crushed in huge crowds. I’m only 4”1’. What if someone tried to put me in their rucksack and run away?

When the opportunity came for me to stay in a hotel for free and work backstage at the festival – away from the grimy campsites and maniacal public furore – I happily obliged, thinking that all my concerns would no longer be an issue.    

Of course, that was just a little naïve. Upon arriving, I had to walk half a mile just to find the guest entrance. The ground was incredibly uneven, increasingly sodden and the grass hadn’t been cut in quite a while.

Although walking around the site was tiring, actually accessing things like toilets, food stalls, bars, and, perhaps most importantly, stages, was surprisingly easy. At every stage entrance was a disabled porta-potty, which was almost always vacant and much cleaner than the nasty latrines regular festival-goers had to use. Beside each toilet was a ramp which led to a raised viewing platform, located at the rear of whichever tented arena you were in. They were very useful, but sitting right at the back made me feel surreally disconnected, almost like I was watching the show on surround-sound TV, and not right there experiencing it live.

On the final day, Sunday, we had to check out of our hotel early, which meant that I had to lug my sleeping-bag and heavy backpack to the festival and then home again. For someone of my short stature, that was quite a task. The best part of that morning was spent searching for a locker, a cubby hole, anything to store my darn stuff in, but to no avail. By 7pm I was so tired that I decided to go home, dumping my sleeping bag (and, accidentally, £100 worth of makeup) in a friend’s tent, never to be seen again. As I staggered away from the festival site, I noticed a small sign which read “lockers”, and beneath it a long queue of young adults clutching their worldly possessions. Great.

Aside from the lack of storage space and bumpy ground, the festival surprised me with its dedication to disabled customers. There were many workers scattered over the site simply for the purpose of tending to those in need and I generally felt very welcomed by anyone I met. Though whether I would be telling the same story if I had camped with the scrum is another thing...

V FESTIVAL, CHELMSFORD

Paul Carter

I’ve been to the V Festival more times than I can care to remember. It’s been at least six, maybe seven, but to be honest they’ve all melded together in a haze of alcohol, mud and badly-erected tents.

After a particularly horrendous experience last year at my first-ever venture to the Stafford site (having only previously attended Hylands Park in Chelmsford), I vowed I would never go back to V again. The mud was at a level I had never seen, and got so bad that even the trucks that come and empty and pressure-wash the toilets could not get up the boggy paths.

Now, festival toilets aren’t nice when they have been cleaned, so when they’ve been left to fester for nearly three days they rank well up there with the most unpleasant things on earth. Add this to the fact that I had to rely on on-site security’s Land Rovers and ambulances (yes, ambulances) to transport me from the campsite into the arena, my festival spirit had finally been broken.

Needless to say, that didn’t last long, and the promise of a return to the relative sanctity of Chelmsford lured me back for another year.
Things were slightly different this time around, because for the first time in all my festival visits I decided to pitch myself up in the “disabled campsite” rather than slumming it in Red or Yellow with the rest of the badly-dressed hoards.

This was something I’ve traditionally resisted, for a number of reasons, but mainly because I always felt like I was being segregated. Besides, I might have missed something, like the toilets being set on fire. I must be getting old, though, as this year the lure of a row of toilets exclusive for us disableds, a shower(!) and the promise of being able to pitch next to the car proved too tempting.

All in all, it was an extremely positive experience – having the car so close is an absolute boon as it means not having to carry tents, food, and more importantly beer long distances from the carpark to the campsite, and also means you can store things much more safely when you leave the tent behind for the day.

The toilets, while still likely to kill anyone without an iron-clad immune system, were the cleanest festival loos I’ve ever sampled, meaning I could go more or less when I wanted, rather than having to plan my visits like a tactical invasion.

It did pose some difficulties, one of which was that other people in the site decided to use their car stereos to provide the additional entertainment of dance music for 22 hours a day.

But if you’re thinking of making your first festival visit and are willing and able to get yourself around adequately in the main campsites, then I would definitely recommend it to get the full festival experience. If, however, you’re a jaded old hack who, like me, can’t quite keep up with the kids and their rock-and-roll these days, the disabled campsite is a welcome retreat.