Young at heart ... Julian Casablancas of the Strokes gets to know the crowd at last year's T in the Park. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA
This weekend sees the return of the best music festival in Britain. It's somehow fitting that as Live Earth broadcasts its hypocrisy to millions of confused bleeding hearts worldwide, the real action will be taking place in an old Scottish airfield witnessing immeasurable acts of youthful debauchery. T In the Park - with an attendance of 80,000 - is now the only enormo-event that actively encourages and celebrates the participation of the demographic that used to be regarded as music's prime constituents: the 16-25 age group.
Boutique festivals offering Robert Plant, clog stalls and wall-to-wall fruit kebabs offer little for the average 18-year-old, while Glastonbury has been co-opted by the kind of people for whom it shares space on the calendar with a week's skiing holiday and ordering in for Wimbledon. That there are no travellers and precious few ethnic minorities to be seen is bad enough, but where are the teenagers? Well, that's what you get when you schedule an event slap-bang in the middle of vital exams, charge nigh on £200 a pop, weight the line-up heavily towards thirty-something rock acts, and then insist on ID requirements that would make John Reid blush. It would be hard to conceive of a more thorough means of squeezing out the very people for whom music arguably resonates most profoundly.
Though it claims (quietly) to be the world's first carbon neutral festival, thankfully there's nothing smug, self-congratulatory or aggressively organic about T in the Park. It holds no truck with the fashionable delusion that we are somehow improving ourselves - and, by extension, the world - simply by being there. Instead, it's rowdy and unapologetically hedonistic, full of kids from all over Britain and virtually everyone from the local area, there to drink, laugh, get off with each other and see their favourite bands. It was purpose-built for such behaviour: scheduled for the first week of the Scottish school holidays, it allows the cash-strapped a sliding scale of ticket options with various prices rather than insisting they shell out for the full weekend, and it has a youth-centric line-up that's easily the equal of any festival in Britain.
So don't go to Balado if you want to sit in a tipi with no roof and pretend to convene with your inner Native American; don't go if you want to indulge in inverted snobbery or 'guilty pleasures' by sitting through a creaking set by some ageing has-been added to the bill in a fit of ironic inspiration. But do go go if you're 17, full of beans and looking for something that makes you feel part of a festival community, not an unwanted adjunct to it. Except it's too late now, because it sold out months ago.
