Why we’re quietly, cautiously dreaming of a festival summer in 2021

What would it mean to have festivals back? More than just a fleeting euphoria
Glastonbury dreamin’: Festival-goers watch the sunset at Worthy Farm in 2014 
Getty Images
Jochan Embley7 January 2021

If you’re anything like me, your most cherished summer memories are punctuated by music festivals. In my mind, the season is broadly split into two parts, Glastonbury BC and Glastonbury AD, with other festival jaunts forming further sub-divisions. Was that pre- or post-Field Day? Did that happen around the same time we were raving under a motorway bridge at Junction 2? And, hold on, was this before or after we were a few pints to the good and did a little cry when Johnny Marr played There Is A Light That Never Goes Out at All Points East?

The amorphous time blob sometimes known as “2020” was depressingly free of such beer-addled delineations. There were no main-stage epiphanies to cling to, no warm-cider singalongs to hark back to, nothing — just a whole lot of unremarkable sameness.  

Will 2021 be any different? Will the UK festival season resurrect itself and return to its former glory? As it stands, the answer is an extremely tentative maybe. The House of Commons culture select committee convened earlier this week to work out whether major music events might be allowed to return for the warmer months, with widespread vaccinations, government-backed cancellation insurance and rapid testing seeming like the brightest hopes for now. But the clock is ticking. According to Steve Heap, general secretary of the Association of Festival Organisers, smaller events could feasibly wait until April to make a final decision on whether or not they’ll go ahead, but for the major players, the deadline may well be the end of January.

If we were to suffer another festival wipeout this summer, the financial blow to the sector would be catastrophic. The UK’s festival scene was worth £1.76bn in 2019. That money all but dried up last year, with countless jobs for musicians and freelancers evaporating as well. With this in mind, the return of a full-blooded festival season seems a necessity. But what about the impact an empty festival calendar would have on public morale?

It’s hard to quantify just how important festivals are to our collective wellbeing. The physical components are pretty simple — a field, a few stages, some tents, food, drink and lots of people — but taken together, they provide something far greater. It’s a sense of camaraderie, escapism and life-affirming joy that few other things can conjure. It’s something you have to experience to understand, and something I’ve been lucky to feel on so many different occasions. Even just in 2019, I had that gut feeling again and again; as Nubya Garcia soundtracked the setting sun behind her at We Out Here, or during the careless euphoria of Mike Skinner doing Weak Become Heroes on the John Peel Stage at Glasto, or watching Shabaka Hutchings and Ezra Collective absolutely tearing it up in a tiny treehouse at that same festival.

It’s almost too painful to think about just how glorious such a thing would be this year, and how brilliant it would feel to shake off all the anxieties and heartbreaks of the pandemic at a fully fledged festival. Maybe it’s unwise to get our hopes up, running the risk of them getting dashed if this most unpredictable period takes another wayward turn. But quietly and cautiously, if all else is well and it’s safe to do so, I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe the music will return this summer. If it does, I’ll see you there.

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