Music

Music festivals have hit crisis point, just look at Wireless festival

With all-male headliners and precious few female bookings further down the bill, this summer's music festivals stand for a sad - and dangerous - loutishness. It's time we staged an intervention
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At the start of this year a festival bill went viral for all the wrong reasons – as we’ve come to expect from the term “viral”.

Wireless Festival, in London, featured just three women on the lineup, all weekend. When Lily Allen tweeted a doctored version of the event’s poster, with every male artist erased, the retweets swiftly accumulated like a Lottery rollover. The three women’s names hovered in isolation. Mabel’s looked tiny on its own on the Friday. Saturday there wasn’t one woman. Sunday there were just two: Cardi B and Lisa Mercedez. “The struggle is real,” Allen wrote. DJ Annie Mac called the situation “appalling”.

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It’s a growing trend that festival bills are more likely to be shared for their lack of diversity, rather than their headliners. It’s a “Look What You Made Me Do” reaction to growing monotony and predictability. And you can empathise, particularly when you learn that Muse are the most headlined festival band of recent years. Of course they are. Think about it. At almost every festival I’ve been to they’ve been there warbling on for seven hours about black holes like a petulant Brian Cox. When I was covering festivals as a music journalist, I ended up seeing Muse more than my own mother. According to an investigation by the BBC of more than 14 festivals from 2008 to 2017, Kasabian and The Killers also dominated festival headline slots. Rihanna was the only female act to total four top billings, followed by Florence And The Machine and Grace Jones, with three headline slots each.

Dated white male rock bands sell. The reason why is another matter, but they do. It means that many mainstream festivals play it ultra safe. They end up regularly booking the buoyancy aids of headliners – those who float off into the distance, hoping for no new waves to knock them off course.

The strange thing about Wireless is that it’s pitched as young and clued-up. It’s known for championing cutting-edge artists and rising stars in grime and R&B, the ones who are relevant, the ones people are actually streaming. If you were going to call any festival “woke” – the term that took off on social media to describe being socially aware about racial and social discrimination, injustice and inclusivity – Wireless wouldn’t have been an unreasonable choice. But to feature only three women this year shows they’re in as much of a slumber as the rest of them. Think of the big acts: Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lorde and Lily Allen herself are all on tour this year. Janelle Monáe’s new album is out, so a tour must be on the horizon. Then think even harder about the rising stars, the future headliners, the trendsetters, the record breakers: Dua Lipa, Stefflon Don, Jorja Smith, SZA, Camila Cabello, to name but a few. They need as much exposure as they can get.

Hannah Braid, co-organiser of Festifeel, the annual music festival that raises money for breast cancer awareness, calls this year’s Wireless lineup “mind-boggling”. She says, “Curating a diverse lineup for any genre shouldn’t be this hard. I worry there’s a misconception that there’s just not enough female artists, not enough girls making good enough music. Ridiculous in my opinion. Even more ridiculous is the fact that those able to showcase new talent are disregarding a huge sector of our industry.

“Many suggest that sidelining does not exist, yet time and time again we see festival lineups appear with an abundance of male acts. Those who suggest it’s merely genre preference are even worse.”

As time goes on, news breaks and conversations change, festival bills are like iPods in an era of streaming. Industry dinosaurs are clamping their headphones ever tighter to cancel out the social media noise. Lineups should reflect what’s going on culturally and they’re not. It means being bold in a climate where a backlash is inevitable and highly public, and it means being zeitgeisty at a time when the zeitgeist isn’t marketable. It’s easier to not know what year it is. It’s easier to keep booking Kasabian – preserve them in carbonite, cryogenically freeze them, do whatever they have to do to keep ticket sales steady.

Alan Edwards, chairman of PR firm The Outside Organisation – which works with Rock En Seine, Y Not and British Summer Time, the latter of which has had Taylor Swift, Kylie Minogue, Debbie Harry, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, Corrine Bailey Rae, Ellie Goulding, Patti Smith and Grace Jones play in recent years – says, “Agents and promoters are very canny in this day and age and they know what’s likely to sell and what doesn’t. Seeing as most of them are working on a commission basis it’s surely all about booking the acts most likely to create a successful event and bring in the crowds.” He adds that it’s “hard to believe gender is part of the decision-making process”. Cornbury Music Festival’s organiser, Hugh Phillimore, agrees. “Most of the big mainstream festivals are run by the big corporate players in the live business and they only really care about the profit.” He feels that audiences don’t “consider the sex of the artist”.

Music festivals are hitting crisis point, with bad behaviour being condoned and reports of sexual assault on the rise

One of the biggest tours of 2018 will be Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On The Run II, but if they were to headline a major festival this summer, the backlash would be inevitable. When Kendrick Lamar was announced as a headliner for this year’s Reading and Leeds, a great coup for the festival, the tweets rolled in. “@OfficialRandL no Glasto and you still don’t get Arctics or Foos!? It’s supposed to be a rock festival not a ‘BBC Radio 1 pays me festival!’ Dua Lipa and Kendrick Lamar. Behave will you,” wrote Twitter user @tomSharrison. From the 2008 uproar when Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury, to 2015, when a petition launched to ban Kanye West from headlining the same festival and gathered 135,000 signatures, the resistance to change is a longstanding tradition. It’s no surprise @tomSharrison felt the way he did. If you’ve ever been to Leeds or Reading you’ve meet a lot of @tomSharrisons, sticklers for the genre. But when the festival bends to the will of the @tomSharrisons, it becomes an echo chamber and time continues to stand still.

There’s a ubiquitous object at those festivals, a status symbol that becomes weaponised, turning artists and punters into targets. It’s a bottle filled with a substance that you wish was cider, but know all too well isn’t. That shining beacon of male toxicity is pretty emblematic of a few of the bigger music festivals to date, which exist in a bubble of misogyny and bad behaviour all contained within a weekend – a time to put on luminous sunglasses and vest tops and act like a frat boy vying for a job in the Trump administration. It may seem harmless, but music festivals are hitting crisis point, with bad behaviour being condoned and reports of sexual assault on the rise.

Between 2014 and 2016, eight sexual assaults were reported at Reading Festival. In 2017, the Swedish festival Bravalla cancelled 2018’s event following reports of four rapes and 23 sexual assaults that allegedly happened on site. In response, a festival in Sweden is now taking place in August that forbids men attending and features a predominantly female lineup. Statement Festival will be the world’s largest women-only festival. It was funded on Kickstarter and organised by Swedish comedian Emma Knyckare, who originally wrote on Twitter following the Bravalla attacks, “What do you think about putting together a really cool festival where only non-men are welcome that we’ll run until all men have learned how to behave themselves?”

She has a point, but can things move forward if men aren’t around to see things change? Hannah Braid tells me, “I’m all for a women-only festival, although I don’t think that’s the only solution. Yes a female-only festival would solve some problems, but I think it’s a wider discussion about how to make them safer so there doesn’t need to be women-only festivals.” Banning men is an extreme, but other solutions seem pretty limp in comparison. In February, 45 music festivals, including the Proms, Liverpool Sound City and Kendal Calling, pledged a 50/50 gender split in their lineups by 2022.

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Glastonbury’s co-organiser Emily Eavis doesn’t agree with the idea. “We have certain stages, such as The Park, which have already had bills with more than half the acts featuring females, but I don’t think we need to set a target in the form of a fixed percentage, as we’re doing all that we can year on year. We’re making serious progress. But, as one of the only female bookers for a major UK festival, believe me that gender balance is a subject that is very close to my heart and will always inform how we book the thousands of acts that perform here. Everything at this festival is underpinned by women.”

Festival quotas feel like a sticking plaster to a larger issue, which is the promotion of women in the music industry. But knowing all of this, how can festivals move forward? Alan Edwards tells me, “Promoters and agents can only book what’s in front of them, so it’s possible that any imbalance starts earlier, with the development of acts in A&R departments and clubs.”

Initiatives such as ReBalance appear to be more on the right track. The programme by Festival Republic provides studio time to female artists, along with apprenticeships to women who want to work in sound engineering and production. Braid explains that, “Small changes make a huge difference. As a nod to the hot topic of the lack of female artists on UK festival bills and to mark International Women’s Day, Huw Stephens’ Radio 1 slot was recently made up solely of female artists – no male vocals allowed. I’m pretty certain people wouldn’t have turned off the show because they hadn’t heard a male vocal.”

Shouting from the rooftops about quotas won’t change things, but if festivals worked harder, if they became more mindful about their decisions behind-the-scenes and on their posters, diverse lineups would happen more naturally. Only when these subtle changes happen will lineups start to more closely resemble the priorities of our time. Until then, more festival bills will be doctored to reveal female disadvantage, more retweets will accumulate, more artists and ticket buyers will be enraged and more music festivals will remain fast asleep.

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