After being in London, I sneezed and – if you’ll excuse the disgusting imagery for just one second - what came out was black. I hadn’t even been on the Central Line. Instead, I’d been at Victoria Park for my first time at All Points East for its Outbreak edition headlined by Deftones, with IDLES, Amyl and the Sniffers, JPEGMAFIA, Salem and more on the bill.
Like virtually every other park or grassy scrap of land across the country, the definition of ‘green space’ has been stretched after a cavalcade of heatwaves and a dearth of rain. What should be green is now a feeble yellow and brown. I could have been walking on the beach.
Choking clouds of dust were kicked up by almost 40,000 people trudging from stage to stage. Some people who’d thought ahead – or knew of just how dusty All Points East can be – were wearing bandanas. Some wore Covid-style face masks, adding an eerie tone to an otherwise joyous day.
It underlined a pattern I’d witnessed ever since the May Bank Holiday weekend, when the punters of Slam Dunk wilted in unseasonable heat that built into the first ever May heatwave. As I mentioned in this newsletter previously, Glastonbury chose a good year for a fallow year, as if it had taken place as normal, it would have unfolded in temperatures of up to 37 degrees during a red alert for extreme heat. That weekend, I was at Outbreak Festival in Manchester, but the heat remained so oppressive even inside that one friend soaked through three t-shirts with sweat. He ended up spending around £100 at the merch desk buying new ones.
I also experienced camping at a festival in a heatwave. 2000trees was a beautiful occasion this year, but every morning I was woken by the glare of the sun burning through my tent. It was impossible to sleep in past about 8am. At one point, an already intense day of reviewing bands became a little much and I needed a lie down, but after some rehydration and halloumi fries, I was okay. I considered myself lucky, at least, that I’ve built up a tolerance to the heat that some people don’t have.
This is just a collage of my own experiences this summer. I’ve spared a thought for the punters of Boomtown, who also battled punishing heat and dust during the heatwave earlier this month. By contrast, Creamfields has been battered so severely by rain and thunderstorms that DJs had their sets cancelled due to the resulting power cuts.
Further afield, the picture becomes gloomier. The most striking of them all was in the US, when the artist Poppy was unable to come on stage at Upheaval Festival in Michigan due to the unsafe air quality caused by smoke from the Canadian wildfires over the border. Her band played on without her in gas masks.
I’ve discovered this summer that it’s possible to doomscroll with the weather forecast. In the two weeks in the run-up to a festival, I’m watching the weather reports, clicking multiple times a day, willing the temperatures to go down or at least not go up anymore. What does summer fun even mean when climate anxiety blights it like this? Will we be holding our breaths for three months at a time now, hoping reservoirs don’t run dry and food can still be put on the table?
The idea that there is no music on a dead planet has come to be more than a slogan. For me now, it no longer just means that if the planet dies, and humanity dies, music dies with it. It means that when climate disaster hits, and it’s hitting now, music feels it as much as the rest of us. It’s bans on camping stoves at festivals, emptier crowds – as I saw at one festival – by the time the headliner arrives because the fans can’t hack the heat anymore, even down to cancellations and disruptions for those events affected by high winds or thunderstorms. In fact, in 2024 alone, 1 in 10 outdoor music festivals that were cancelled that year cited extreme weather as their reason for not going ahead.
I am not, and would never encourage doomerism. Pessimism is dangerous, and I endorse the idea that to claim that we are already doomed as a planet is as dangerous as climate denialism as both, technically, perpetrate misinformation. At this point, however, ignorance is not an option. Just as music holds up a mirror to our world, festival season has held up a mirror to the climate crisis. It lays it out so plainly that it’s impossible to look away from.
Conversely, music can also be a frontier for climate-based innovation. Look at Forwards Festival in Bristol, which took place this weekend, and whose two stages have been driven by a zero-emission compact hydrogen power plant. Neatly, it's located in the same city where local legends Massive Attack put out their Act 1.5 gig and produced the lowest carbon emissions ever recorded for an event of that type and scale. Further afield in Winchester, Boomtown Fair also had a hydrogen-powered stage this year, aptly named HYDRO XL.
Music can always gives us hope. When it comes to the climate, that is no different. On the flipside, it stops us from ignoring the gravity of an already grievous situation, quietly, but poignantly. If music is the thing that radicalises you to fight for the climate, that can only be a good thing.
THIS WEEK'S PODCAST
Last week we caught up with Steven from Blood Red Shoes about their forthcoming album. This week is quite different to anything we've done before but overlaps with so many of the themes of the nearly 100 episodes of the podcast. It's a story involving AI, rap, Spotify, algorithms, social media, the far right, and the power of journalism. DiS founder Sean Adams caught up with Harriet Williamson from Novara and Effie Webb from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism to find out more about their reporting into Danny Bones, a creation of The Node Project who have amassed 5 million plays on YouTube.
Listen on Apple | Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | or wherever you get your podcasts.
Read Their Reporting
Effie Webb
Drowned in Sound is proud to be partnered with Qobuz, the pioneering high quality music streaming platform.
Each week, we create a companion playlist for our podcast. This week the journalists behind the investigation into the AI rapper beloved by the far right share some of the tunes which make them proud to be British.
IN THE NEWS THIS WEEK
- A Russian stadium has refused to host Kanye West, meaning yet more concerts cancelled for the disgraced rapper. Incidentally, the two planned October gigs in St Petersburg would have been the first major concerts to take place in Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
- New research from the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator has revealed that ticketing fees, resale upcharges and 'junk' fees cost music fans $11.3 billion. This is a combination of a price tag of $6.8 billion in excess fees charged by online platforms and $4.5 billion in inflated prices by scalpers.
- A new government report has identified just how deep the damage of Brexit on EU touring goes. Between 2022 and 2024, the UK is estimated to have lost 2,490 full-time equivalent jobs within the touring sectors, while the EU has lost 17,010. Smaller and mid-size touring operations have been the worst affected, and reduced touring activity has strangulated opportunities for cultural exchange, audience development and future export growth.
Dolly Parton, we will always love you
Country icon and doer of all good things Dolly Parton died this week at the age of 80, leaving behind a rhinestone-encrusted legacy that shines brighter than most people's ever will. She gave us Jolene, 9 to 5 and I Will Always Love You, but she also gave children in poverty a free book every month until they started school, funding for Covid-19 vaccines and love and hope to marginalised communities. She was pro-trans, pro-queer, anti-racist and pro-people, giving so much money to charity that it kept her away from billionaire lists. We should all be more Dolly Parton.