If it was only rock'n'roll, I'd like it a lot more

James Kell • Published 2 Sep 2010 09:30 0 Comments

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WALKING through the Reading Festival site this year, two things struck me.

Firstly, the average age of the crowd now seems about the same as the audience for Peppa Pig, although maybe that’s just me feeling old. Secondly, the pitiless bombardment of fans by marketing.

It really is an unrelenting siege from entrance to stage - billboards, stands and hoardings everywhere, bludgeoning brands and slogans into young brains.

One brand of energy drink, which certainly doesn’t need another name check here, was more ubiquitous than mud and Axl Rose’s bad temper. In fact it surely can’t be long now before someone finds a way of branding the mud.

I’m not about to turn this piece into another debilitatingly tedious rant about festivals “selling out”. I’m very well aware of the many reasons why Reading Festival needs its bloated corporate lifejacket, I just find the inevitability, cynicism and sheer brazenness of the attack a little soul destroying sometimes.

I am of course the worst kind of hyprocrite, having used a press pass this year which allowed me to wander around the VIP guest area with impunity among those who were being gleefully “entertained” by clients and business associates, munching on parma ham and rocket baguettes and using the nice toilets.

I know that carping about the corporatisation of festivals from the guest area is like bemoaning animal cruelty with a factory farmed chicken sandwich in one hand and punching a kitten in the face with the other, but it still makes me uneasy.

It must be an absolutely irresistible opportunity for huge companies to create even more young consumers, spending their cash on your product, ensnaring them in a lifelong trap of ever more intrusive offers and promotions.

If I were a parent packing my bright young thing off to Reading Festival for the first time, exposure to some rock and roll bands and a cheeky smoke on something that smells a bit odd would be the least of my worries.

- OSCAR Wilde wrote 'there’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about’.

Anyone still watching the interminable contest for the Labour leadership will have noticed the spectre of a needy yesterday’s man desperate for one last headline (chance would be a fine thing).

Peter Mandleson has been in full on Norma Desmond mode (“I’m still big, it’s the Labour party leadership candidates that got small”).

Surely nothing would invigorate the contest and the Labour Party more than one of the candidates, particularly a frontrunner, stepping up to a microphone and telling them, as unequivocally as politeness allows, to button it and retreat into their platinum-plated retirement. Shame they are still so cowed by the men to whom they owe their careers.

- Maurice O'Brien is away

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