Why Are Festival Line-Ups So Dull This Year?

As Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders once sang: “Don’t get me wrong”. I LOVE festivals, they are lots of wildly unpredictable, life enriching and bizarre fun.

So- what is going on with the line-ups, in particular the headliners this year?

This is bad for my health- it actually induces a narcoleptic sleep attack every time the Killer Kings Of Oasis are confirmed to headline. When did festivals become an inseparable generic mess? 

Come on- Your Grandma could have won a bet on who would be headlining Glastonbury about six months before it was announced. Actually, many of the bands playing there might be more to her taste than yours - I guess Eavis really wasn’t messing when he said that he was reverting back to ‘traditional’ headliners after the so called Jay Z controversy, a genuinely thrilling moment that won’t be happening anywhere this year.   

The only explosive thing about Leeds / Reading will be when those fuckwits inevitably blow up the portaloos again; a sad ritual that now echoes the desperate state of the line-up.     

Bloc Party are playing again in EXACTLY the same slot as last year, always the penultimate bridesmaids. There are two problems with this:

A)I know that we’re not exactly living in Halcyon days for the music industry and everyone needs to get paid but I can’t help but feel that we’re not getting anything unique or exclusive.     

B)They are the dullest, most heinously vapid live band I’ve ever seen, an absolute charisma vacuum so wide that you shouldn’t go near the main stage for fear of falling into a massive black hole and having your personality sucked from you by vampires with asymmetrical haircuts.

Even the likes of Latitude have seemingly given up trying to conjure up a sense of occasion and ATP dropped the ball with their ‘vs. the fans’ event by not allowing people to vote for bands who had played an ATP event before. Which is fine, except hold on- every underground rock band on the planet have already played so everyone started voting for acts that ATP apparently “Couldn’t afford”. Really? Where did that £150 a head go, then? Did Butlins need waterslide maintenance or something?

Dear festival organisers: Please get back to taking some risks or the closest we’ll be getting to your fields of splendid noise will be the grating, featureless hologram voice of Edith Bowman. And nobody wants that.