I’ve been watching a lot of video on HDTV from music festivals at Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight. There are almost always at least a dozen audience members in the prime viewing area in front of the stages waving flags. The flags are at the ends of long poles and there are generally enough of them waving around to block the audience’s view of the performers, except on the extreme left and right where the sound quality isn’t nearly as good. The flags don’t block the jumbotron screens, but wtf?
Why is that allowed? Why do people whose views are blocked tolerate it? You won’t see that kind of crap at concerts in the USA.
I took this picture (and this one and this one) at Bonnaroo 2008, which is four day festical held about a hundred miles from here, in Manchester, Tennessee. It was hardly the only flag I saw at either this year’s event or last year’s, and I expect I’ll see more when I go for a third time next year.
I almost put this in the Pit because I could deliver quite a stinging rant against people who are so inconsiderate. I’ll limit myself to saying they are ass-hats of the first order.
Think it’s got much worse just in the last couple of years. It didn’t used to be that bad. The depth of these people’s lack of consideration for others is breathtaking isn’t it?
Think how many people’s view one flag blocks - a line extending backwards all the way to the back of the crowd. One person with one flag probably blocks the view of a hundred people. If you’ve got twenty flags - that’s 2000 people. Probably more because when you have a number of flags, like at Glastonbury, they all join up and become effectively one big flag blocking the whole stage.
Well, this seems odd. In my Glastonbury days (mid to late 90s) we’d have a flag and a flagpole at our camping area. Sometimes we even had a flashing light to attach - the idea was to allow us to find our tents when it was dark and we were drunk. Scottish Saltire flags weren’t all that common, so easy to spot.
But take the flag into the performance areas? Hell no. Why would anyone want to do that?
Glastonbury has changed considerably since they put the Super Wall up. Where it used to be (mid/late-nineties) a crazy free-for-all, flooded with drugs, containing any ruffian who happened to wander through the fence, it now seems populated by insular Stella-swigging bastards who wouldn’t know a communal festival spirit if it looked them in the face. They can’t bear the idea of losing their friends because that would necessitate communing with music and strangers alone, so need a huge flag or wacky umbrella to get in everyone’s way, and signal to their equally needy chums.
I was at Leeds festival this year. We had the same problem with the flags. It was my first time at the festival, but from speaking to others I gather that there are more and more flags each year. Why? I have no idea.
