It’s now one two weeks after this years Latitude festival and I’m currently reliving the memories through the long and arduous process of scanning some film from the event. In this post however I will leave the photography behind to talk about what I think makes a great festival.

So starting with Latitude, on my third visit to the festival I think I’ve finally got it. My first two times I treated it as just a music festival; it was still a special music festival to me, but it went no further than that. This time though I was in the arena with plenty of time to spare on the Thursday, and what that meant is I was forced to check out Latitude’s non-music offerings.

Latitude’s now famed coloured sheep in the evening sun.

What separates Latitude from all other festivals I have been to, is the wealth of other forms of culture available to be enjoyed. As well as being a music festival, Latitude has a theatre stage, a comedy arena, a cinema, a cabaret tent, and last but not least apparently has the title of “largest poetry festival in Europe”.

It was at the poetry arena that I had my main cultural epiphany; loads of modern poetry is awesome. The majority of my highlights at this stage involved at least one member of the literary arts collective Aisle 16. Particularly lovely was the work of John Osbourne. Lovely enough in fact for me to purchase his first pamphlet of poems What If Men Burst In Wearing Balaclavas?

From then on a conscious effort was made to really experience the wealth of what was available rather than just enjoying the music; later that evening I ended up seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company perform a non-shakespeare work commissioned specifically for the festival. It was funny, short, sweet and incredibly well acted. At the end the lead actor gave a short, rather more shakespearean monologue, just to remind the crowd who they were watching I expect.

Latitude’s second stage where I spent the majority of the music parts of my Latitude weekend.

All this culture has put me on a real downer about other festivals though. I was thinking, before going, that I’d probably skip latitude next year, favouring End of the Road as my festival of choice. End of the Road is much smaller than latitude, but musically gets acts in that get me equally if not more excited than latitude’s crop (by not going this year it looks like I’m missing out on Mountain Goats to say the least).

The problem I have with festivals of Latitude’s size and above, is the frequently annoying features of their commercialization; long queues to enter the arena because they want to search your bag to make sure you have basically nothing with you, the shoving of the latest trendiest band up the bill even though they’ve only got 35 minutes of material to play, the ludicrously expensive food and drink, of which the drink is normally sponsored by some large conglomerate drinks manufacturer.

One small part of the now pretty large Latitude site.

Smaller festivals are just more straight forward, End of the Road especially; take your own food and drink into the arena, take cameras into the arena, in fact, just do what you like.

So yes I suppose the answer is that someone needs to make a small festival with excellent music (read: music that I like), that also includes a wide variety of other art forms, from cinema to theatre, and poetry to dance. Fat chance I realise, but wouldn’t it be great.