Ten years ago, V Festival announced its headliners, and, if nothing else, it was a staunch statement of intent. Morrissey had made a two-fisted comeback with You Are the Quarry and Ringleader of the Tormentors, respectively, and was, thankfully, a long time away from writing a trashy, disjointed novella. Radiohead had been buried underneath a cache of demos and environmental pleas, and were readying their follow-up to 2003’s maligned Hail to the Thief (however, it wouldn’t come until the end of the next year). The rest of the line-up was an arms-aloft appreciation of guitar-based music – Beck, Razorlight, Kasabian, Paul Weller, Bloc Party, The Charlatans…it was an exhibition of what British brawn and stateside synergy had to offer.
So let’s go back in time and say you’ve just bought tickets to V 2006. After witnessing the zeitgeist-baiting rock of the noughties, let’s imagine you stumbled out of Weston Park and fell, like Bush on his Segway before you, into the crater left behind by Johnny Borrell’s ego. You’re comatose for ten years. In that time, Kanye West has become the world’s most pretentious pauper, Calvin Harris scraped the Scottish off his stomach and Ian Brown was retiring his strange solo soldier dance. Surely, though, nothing could prepare you for this. This is a joke, surely? Sorry, sir, it’s not. I’ll pull the plug now.
The elephant in the room is made of titanium, dancing on a California king bed. For at V 2016, the headliners are Justin Bieber and Rihanna, further cementing V’s place in the festival pantheon as one for those with who simply don’t like festivals. V has been on a downward trajectory ever since Radio One throw out their copies of Louder than Bombs, but this line-up is surely a death knell in a Paul’s Boutique coffin. Instead of ‘festival favourite bands’ padding out the afternoon and evening (I’m thinking your Ocean Colour Scenes, Mystery Jets’s, Libertinesssssss), we’ve got Tinie Tempah, Little Mix and Rita Ora (her sister, Kia, is DJing).
It’s a sad summary of V 2016 that the rockiest band present is Scottish slumber-merchants Travis. I haven’t got a problem with Fran Healy’s wistful croons and the band’s Beatles-esque melodies, but when I attend a festival I expect something a bit more pulse-raising than a crowd surf to ‘Driftwood’. Kaiser Chiefs and Jake Bugg are playing, but this feels like a pathetic attempt to placate the purists while blasting out Galaxy; it’s like putting your Spotify on silent to show you’re spinning Sleater-Kinney, when in reality you’re YouTubing The Best Of Bizzle.
Noel Gallagher has never been one to shy from a barb, and when Glastonbury announced full-time mogul and part-time musician Jay Z was headlining in 2008, he wasn’t afraid to voice his concerns. To paraphrase one G, festivals are for rock bands. To paraphrase another G, festivals are for music. I have no problem with a line-up that is diverse and eclectic, as it aids discovery of new groups and keeps things interesting, but V’s latest amalgamation almost feels like positive discrimination – we can’t keep those who like Bieber’s beefy couplets outside the fences, it’s just not right, so let’s put a festival on to make them feel part of it, too. Slowly, this festival has taken inclusion to a delusional height.
Allow me to use an obscure reference – there’s an episode of Daria, a show devoted to proud pariahs, in which the school’s airheaded cheerleader Brittany attends a grunge club (which actually resembles The Sunflower Lounge). She’s like a giddy child allowed to stay up late to watch Grease, and can’t wait to tell people she’s “lived through it.” Slowly, V Festival has turned this into a reality, in which those that viewed festival-goers with scorn and secret envy can now be among them…without actually having to be in the same field as them. It’s a way for some (and I mean some) people to feel like a typical festival-goer (one that has a backpack from Thailand, a top made of hemp and a BRMC tattoo) without having to listen to that god awful festival music. And then they can return to their offices and say “wow, I’m knackered…but that’s festivals for you.” It’s like when someone proudly states they love indie music, and then rattles off the chorus to ‘Sex on Fire’.
Come August 2006, I was eagerly awaiting Morrissey and his bequiffed aura. In August 2016, I shall be trying to avoid a clutch of sleeved, meat headed frat boys bounding around to ‘What Do You Mean’. I won’t be there, of course, but I live so near Weston Park I’ll be hard pressed to avoid the traffic, the noise and, god forbid, the Example. My only worry is maybe this is a sad sign of things to come – I nervously await Zayn at Reading.
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