The Idler

The Big Chill

10 August 2005

I did a talk at the Big Chill on Sunday. I was a little bit hungover, as the previous night I’d been on stage at the Garage in Islington, singing “Teenage Kicks” at their weekly punk rock karoake night. It was a friend’s engagement party and very enjoyable it was, too.

No punk rock at the Big Chill. It is a weekend of mellow dance music for 30,000 chillers. All very lovely, but somehow lacking… edge?

I was booked in to talk at 2.45 and made my way to the library tent. There is quite a nice libraries promotion going on right now. They are trying to make libraries cool, which seems like a good idea, and my son Arthur and daughter Delilah duly covered themselves in stickers which read “Libraries Rock!”

The talk was great fun, largely because I had a very intelligent audience. There was a guy who’d been on the dole for ten years, plus a cynic who accused me of hypocrisy for criticising the industrial world while benefiting from it.

I put forward the idea that festivals such as the Big Chill and Glastonbury fulfill a human need to turn everything upside down for a few days. The old medieval calendar was full of such blow-offs.

But perhaps we need to think about organising our own festivals and making them free, rather than forking our vast sums to other people to do them for us?