Fantasy Festival: The Return!

Florence + The Machine fans, and their phones, British Summer Time Festival, Hyde Park, London, July 2019

This piece originally ran as the editorial in last month's Sticks'N'Strings newsletter. I've tweaked it slightly, but most of the piece is the same.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or of my work for The F-Word, you’ll be aware that I’ve long had a bee in my bonnet about the lack of women playing UK music festivals, as well as concerns about the safety of those women who do get to play, or attend, said festivals.

Earlier this year, I belatedly realised that, while many promoters and event organisers seem to have come to terms with the idea that there aren’t enough women playing festivals, a lot of them also seem to be dodging the bullet (ie doing something about it) by saying “Oh I’d love to book more women but there just aren’t any to book, maybe in a few years or something when there’s more women making music?” What’s even more disgraceful about this response is that critics and music fans are letting them get away with this. 

One person who has challenged this reoccurring statement is activist Vick Bain, who came up with the ultimate response to this answer back in March when she compiled a database of UK female artists that those who were struggling to come up with any women to book for festivals could refer to.

I’ve looked at her database and, while it’s definitely a start, I feel like this is something activists are going to have to keep pushing on. With this in mind, I’ve decided to re-visit my 2017 Fantasy Festival project for 2020.

At first I wasn’t sure if now was the right time, what with us being in the middle of a pandemic and everything. It seemed a little inappropriate to be moaning about gender quotas while people were dying and losing all their income. But I’ve watched as the music world has responded to Covid-19 over the past two months or so, and I’ve been surprised by how positive a lot of that response has been.

True, terrible things are happening, livelihoods have been ruined, venues may never reopen, but the advent of online gigs and other initiatives have shown that people aren’t ready to simply give up and do want to continue to reach out and provide music to their fans. With this in mind, I thought a fantasy festival might be just the thing to cheer people up under lockdown this summer. 

The original 2017 Fantasy Festival project emerged as a result of me writing this piece for The F-Word, I then wrote a blog post about the article, and another one about the blogging project. There were seven festivals, and you can see the lineup’s here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. You can also read my evaluation of the original project here. 

This years fantasy festival will be bigger, with more than seven festivals, meaning it will begin in late May and continue into October, running for the entirety of the increasingly long festival season.