Are you, perhaps, a fan of George Ezra? Who isn’t! Who can fail to be both charmed and moved by the old-voiced warbler’s numerous hits and his love of an inscrutable hashtag (#petan)? Nobody. That’s just as well, because he’s playing at least nine UK festivals. You can barely chuck a brick through a tent flap this summer without hitting a follicle of his lovely hair.
A decade ago, when there were only four big festivals, life was hard for the would-be festival-goer. Little crossover between acts meant that the choice of festival would dictate the artists experienced. Headliners were signed to exclusivity deals, but mid-ranking acts such as Faithless and the Zutons became as much a part of the festival furniture as unscented wet wipes. What’s changed is the number of festivals on offer. In 2015, deciding which festival to attend is a question of deciding which motorway service station you most fancy popping into on the way there. (Tebay Services, off the M6, comes highly recommended.)
Ezra aside, Rudimental seem to be this year’s most ubiquitous festival act. They are playing at least 11 in the UK, including Glastonbury, T in the Park and Lovebox. This ubiquity is well earned: their music crosses genres and their fans cross demographics. They’re credible and popular enough to play a mainstream festival just as easily as a boutique effort. Crucially, they also have an extraordinarily good live show that offers the dance-music-and-actual-instruments combo that outdoor audiences enjoy so much. They are, as bookers have evidently realised, the perfect festival band. And yes, they might once have said that about Terrorvision, but times change.
Rudimental’s Amir Amor laughs when it’s put to him that the only major outdoor event not guaranteed a Rudimental invasion this summer is BBC Proms in the Park. “Can you get their details for us,” he asks, “so we can play that one as well?”
Right now he’s holed up in an east London band space with the rest of the group, “rehearsing for the summer”. It’ll be a busy summer. “We’re doing about four shows every week,” he says, having also factored in continental European festivals. “Half the time you turn up and you don’t even know where you are, but a couple of hours before the show, the adrenaline starts kicking in.”
Rudimental love festivals so much they’ve even, alongside Disclosure, invented their own: the sold-out Wildlife festival in Brighton. Amir says the topic of ubiquity didn’t affect Rudimental’s own booking policy. “It basically came down to this: if we’ve seen them and we like their music, we’ll ask them to play.”
Up in Manchester, Andrew Brooks, who has organised June’s inaugural BL9 festival, has found his own way to address this year’s alarmingly generic festival scene. “There are so many festivals now that you do get the same acts doing their festival tours,” he admits. “But I wanted to do it differently. So I had a look at what was missing.”
The result is a bill that includes Happy Mondays, X Factor Twitter vigilante James Arthur, and an exclusive appearance from Coolio. “We had a hitlist of who we wanted in an ideal world,” Brooks says. “Actually the Sunday headliner wasn’t our first choice.” First choice, he explains, was Paloma Faith, who had to pull out in favour of an appearance at the V festival, so Razorlight stepped in. Still, Andrew seems happy with his lineup. “You might think, blimey, that’s a bit random,” he says, “but I had a really clear vision of what I wanted to do.”
The balancing act for artists is this: you don’t want to be the band who will turn up to the opening of a farmer’s envelope, but as money drains out of recorded music and into the live arena, it’s no longer the hallowed Q4 period, in the runup to Christmas, that guarantees big money. Hay is now made when the sun shines, during the summer’s four-month-long festival payday.
But this does raise the question: is it possible for an act to play too many festivals? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Amir from Rudimental says no. “We’re still pretty excited at the moment,” he says. “Maybe give it another five or 10 years and ask me again.”
