Over the last 11 years, I’ve been to the V Festival 10 times, so it’s not like I haven’t enjoyed it in the past. Previously, it’s been known as one of the best organised festivals, and up until this year, I would have agreed. This year, however, all of that fell apart. Barring my doomed visit to the godawful Reading festival a few years back, I would say that this year’s V was the worst festival I’ve ever been to.

This post is not about the music, which was patchy, but had some highlights; it’s about the festival’s organisation and how it’s become so bad over the last couple of years.

1. Capacity

It seems pretty clear to me that this year saw a pretty large hike in the number of people let onto the site. When we made it on-site around 1:00 on the Saturday, the crowd at the main stage looked to be about the size I would have expected 4 or 5 hours later. It’s this major issue that effected almost everything else. The site was constantly rammed solid. It made it difficult to navigate, slow to do anything you wanted to and increased the feeling that, now the organisers had extracted your hard-earned cash from your wallet, they didn’t give a toss whether you enjoyed yourself.

2. Queuing

I was pretty miffed already by the time we got onto the festival site on Saturday, due to the muppets in the campsite, but it was the queues to get beer tokens that really tipped me over the edge. Around 2:00, we decided that we fancied a beer. The first beer token queue near the entrance was huge (almost as big as the crowd in front of the main stage) so we kept on looking around to see if we could find one a bit shorter. It turned out that we couldn’t, so we joined the one near the Channel 4 stage around 2:10. I eventually had beer tokens in my hand at 4:40. Having paid to get in, and only wanting to exchange some more of my cash for a beer, I would never have expected to need to wait for 2 1/2 fucking hours in order to bring this to pass. It meant that I missed Martha Wainwright, who I was really looking forward to seeing.

One reason for this ridiculous queue was the increased number of people on-site, I’m sure, but equally as large a problem was the stupid reactions of the security people (more on them later) who policed the last section of the queue like the jobsworth, brain-dead idiots that they were. However, they seemed totally oblivious to the literally hundreds of people who were quite obviously pushing into the queue a few metres away from them.

The queues for beer tokens weren’t the only problem though. There were (smallish) queues at every last food vendor, at every toilet (hoping to be finished in time to see James, we queued for the toilets for a good half-hour, thereby missing the beginning of their set), and pretty much anything else that you might want to do. I realise that at an event like this, a little bit of queuing might be required, but at an event like Glastonbury, I’ve basically never queued for more than a couple of minutes for anything. As you can see from the graphs below, it queuing almost took up as much of my time as listening to music.

3. Security

As I mentioned above, the security people pretending to police the beer queue were idiots. So much so, that in front of the hundreds of people queuing for beer, two of them had a blazing row, culminating in one spitting at his boss and being dragged off by a couple of his colleagues. To be fair to them, this was probably the most entertaining thing I’d seen at the festival at this point, and made the last half-hour or so that I was queuing go marginally faster.

These jobsworth fools were certainly the norm rather than the exception. In the JJB Arena, where some of the most pointless barriers in the world had been placed, all around the edge of the tent, the security were trying to police an entrance/exit set up where you could only get in or out in particular places. Except they didn’t enforce it for everyone. I popped out (of the exit) to get a beer. Having got one, I tried to follow two punters back in through the exit. Despite the fact that they’d been letting people through the exit for ages, I got stopped, for no reason that I can make out.

All of them seemed like they were stressed and overworked, and yet most of them appeared to do absolutely nothing of value. They all just seemed to be getting a kick out of, as a friend put it, bossing around people who were “richer, thinner and smarter” than they were.

4. Arrangements

The stupid set-up in the JJB Arena that I spoke about above was particularly annoying, and just meant that everyone who used the arena seemed more pissed off than they needed to be. The entrance/exit set up had been arranged ostensibly, I’m sure, for safety reasons. I’d be willing to bet that’s how it would be sold to the punters, anyway. However, I have a different idea. Since the entrance was near the middle of the tent, and the exit was all the way over the one side, conveniently close to where the bar was, I think this played just as large a role. Leave the tent, then get herded into a small area where you can spend some more cash paying for alcohol. It’s also worth bearing in mind that, again at Glastonbury, none of the tents have this barrier system around the outside - you can just get into and out of the tent wherever you like. I’ve never witnessed any sort of a crush in any of these tents.

Although it wasn’t the first year for this set-up, I’ve also been really annoyed with the fact that, last year, they moved the Channel 4 stage. It used to be in a really handy position where you could nip between the main stage and the Channel 4 stage, and see bits of a couple of people’s sets. There were even relatively quiet toilets between the two. Now, however, you have to go through most of the rest of the site, and the toilets were all replete with queues about 10 people thick.

Finally, on the arrangements front, I want to whinge about the water situation. As far as I can tell, the organisers provide the punters with two (count ‘em, two), places where you can get water, or indeed wash your hands properly. I’m sure this has nothing at all to do with the fact that they charge £2 for a bottle of water all over the site (price-setting, us? Of course not).

5. Nothing else to do

The other thing you might notice from the graph above, is that, outside sleeping, at V you spend the vast majority of your time either waiting on the campsite, or waiting in the festival site itself. This is because there’s nothing to do. The campsite is closed off from the rest of the site (due to the fact that they sell day tickets for the festival, I’m sure), so at night, you have nothing interesting around you to do at all. The JJB Arena is turned into a cinema overnight, I’m told, but it was a pretty darn long way from our campsite (the only convenient campsite, the Blue one, is always full nowadays from about lunchtime on the Friday, if not before) and was showing some pretty shoddy films. None of my group could be bothered to make the journey.

On the main site, there are a few shops, and even a few charity stalls, always entirely devoid of people. However, if you’re not watching a band, or queuing for something or other, there’s basically nothing at all to do.

6. Commercialism

I won’t go on about this, since if you go to a festival called the “V” festival because it was set up as a large advert for Virgin, you can’t really complain about the commercialism. However, it’s done in such a way that you do feel like you’re being constantly ripped-off.

I also hate having to refer to everything by its sponsor - the Channel 4 Stage, the JJB Arena, The Virgin Mobile Union tent etc. etc.

7. Booziness

I’m sure that V being the sort of festival where the police bring sniffer dogs, and use drone airbourne CCTV cameras means that fewer people bring and use drugs on site. Well done the police.

However, this means that instead of having a load of happy, stoned, or smiley ecstasy heads, you’re constantly surrounded by boozed-up fuckwits.

I’ll take the druggies if it’s all the same to you.

8. The People

Finally, I’m going to have one whinge about some of the people that go to V. Because of the fact that it’s relatively easy to get to, and also, I’m sure, because it’s held in Essex, you’re surrounded by people that clearly have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to camping.

I know this sounds like a small problem, and it is, but when you’ve quickly and easily set up your tent, and you’ve packed your things into a rucksack, watching the poorly-prepared idiots around you does make you despair for the future of the human race. For example, you see hundreds of people dragging huge, huge, suitcases with wheels across the grass, apparently surprised that the wheels don’t seem to work as well when they’re not on an concrete airport concourse. The people in the tent next to us had bought bags of salad and hummus to eat (good camping food? Well, no). And a group of about 7 or 8 men had bought a brand new tent with them that, after 5 or 6 hours they had failed to put up, so abandoned and left. I really could go on.

So, this is going to be out last V Festival. Part of me feels like I should be sad. I have been going since I was 16, after all. However, the festival now is nothing like the convenient, well-organised event I used to attend, so I don’t think I’m going to be missing out. Bye bye Hylands Park.

(The Guardian, in slightly weaker terms, agree)
(The Times, who one can assume didn’t go, call it “The best-organised event of the festival season”)