Having survived the rain, the wind and the mud, Peter Moore muses as to why British people are drawn to muddy music festivals

Like it or not, us Brits just have to put up with the fact that we are no longer one of the global big boys. In the event of Russia or China sending up a few scuds, or the Indians taking a fancy to skittling us with some carpet bombs, the best we can hope for is hiding behind the skirts of the Americans.

These days we gather our self respect from rather different quarters. Because whilst the mines of Wales have been trumped by Middle Eastern oil, English factories have been squashed by the Chinese and Scottish shipyards have fallen empty with the emergence of Eastern European ports, there are few countries in this galaxy or any other that can keep pace with the British music scene.

I’ve just returned to my clean, cheerfully furnished office from the deepest throes of the English countryside, where all weekend the mud sat around my ankles, the wind ripped through my ears and the rain collided viciously against my face. That is to say, that I have just returned to London after a music festival.

What is it, you might ask, that compels otherwise sane individuals to such levels of insanity as a stint at a festival with 30,000 others dangerously close to the beginning of autumn. Some tents flooded, others collapsed, a number of people were hospitalised with hypothermia, mobile telephones faltered by the thousand, and those who forgot their Wellington boots have now got trench foot.

Indeed, by the time I left our ramshackle campsite yesterday it resembled a cross between an African refugee camp and the Third Battle of Ypres. I half expected to see Field Marshall Haig on the way out asking me ‘how it went.’

The reason we Brits put ourselves through such horrid conditions is quite simple: we love our music and we are passionate about it. Over the past half century we have given the world a million bands from the Shadows to the Klaxons and for all their cultural superiority the Yanks have never come up with a band that is half as good as The Beatles.

Indeed, the British musical legacy only begins with our bands. Just think of the dance music, the funk and the punk, there are singer songwriters by the bucket load, we’ve more indie bands than we have NHS doctors and the urban music scene has gone off in an atomic mushroom.

All of these wonderful things have sprouted, quite literally, from the minds of those that are willing to spend a weekend of their lives getting drenched in a field. If you think of it, music festivals combine many of the things that us Brits hold dear: our unpredictable weather, vast quantities of drink, silly dancing and music that is fit to rock the world.

Tags: Digital TV, Music //