Ah, January. A soggy, sad, skint sort of a month. When travel agents traditionally seduce consumers with images of summer escapes to faraway sun-drenched beaches... and booking agents convince rock fans spend the summer in a soggy field, spending themselves skint at mobile bars and burger vans, and all for the sake of seeing a bunch of old farts on a faraway stage. SinZine's columnist casts a critical eye over the crowd-pullers of festival season 2012 and gets the feeling we're being cheated.
So this week saw announcements of key headliners for this years 10th anniversary Download Festival, and the accompanying delight, disappointment and debate from the fans. And you know what? It’s the same old same old. Emphasis on the old.
Once again Download is the home of the dinosaurs, the has-beens, and the never should have beens. Prodigy are good sure, I had a great time seeing them ten years ago, but arguably even then they’d passed their peak. Metallica doing The Black Album? Yeah a great record, but that came out 21 years ago, and arguably they’ve not bettered it since. Black Sabbath reuniting with Ozzy again could be interesting, but Paranoid came out 42 years ago now – the average age of the band is 64, one year away from a free bus pass. And so it goes on down pretty much every name on the lineup.
I love my old stuff, it’s important to know your roots, and just because it’s an old record it doesn’t mean its any the worse for time. But is this really the best we have to show in rock and metal in 2012? A bunch of stale decrepit old men who’s heyday was in the last century, playing songs about youthful rebellion despite being closer to pension age themselves?
And it’s not a phenomena unique to Download. Sonisphere suffers much the same, and I remember being struck last year when they announced the Reading 2011 lineup - it was almost exactly the same as Reading 2002. I was there in 2002, I missed most of Pulp in the scramble to find a raincoat in the pouring rain, and the ticket was less than half the price it was in 2011. If you’d told me then that nearly ten years later it would be practically the same lineup, I would have laughed in your face. And then try and bum a fag as mine were soaked.
Anyway, I’m straying from the point somewhat. The question is, where is the new talent? Where are the big new bands of today? Worryingly, no-one seems to have an answer for this. Maybe the industry aren’t fostering new talent the way they used to, maybe bands are just not as good as they used to be, maybe home taping DID kill the record industry, I don’t know.
My recommendation? With the major festivals hitting around £200 a ticket for a three day nostalgia / irrelevance wankoff, pledge to spend your money better elsewhere. For £200, you can go to 20 bar gigs at £5 a go. Yes, TWENTY gigs for the price of one weekend of stale old cunts in a field. You (probably) won’t get any pyro, but if you look hard, you will find new and real bands playing their hearts out with a living vitality and integrity that you’ll never get from a bunch of dinosaurs playing it by numbers for the fattest paycheck.
