Croatia: Going overground

A dishevelled Geordie, who looks like he's drunk his own body weight in beer, is standing at the front of the vehicle, mic in hand, alternating between telling the same joke over and over and just plain screaming. With the driver powerless to halt him, his nonsensical drivel continues until he halts himself –by falling into the aisle and proceeding to vomit and piss himself.

Next to me sits a guy who has lost his T-shirt and shoes, while a group of girls wonder aloud how the hell they've managed to forget where they live. But this is not the night bus in Glasgow, or the last flight back to the UK from Magaluf. No, this is an early evening shuttle bus to a festival in Croatia.

This summer, Dubrovnik Airport reported their sixth consecutive year of growth, with 1.6m passengers estimated to have passed through its gates. And while we can't attribute that solely to the country's festival boom, it has undoubtedly played its part. But as more and more festivals, promoters and clubbers arrive on the Adriatic, are the more established and commercial festivals being hijacked by the lager louts, lost on the way to Magaluf or Zante?

Once at the festival, the mix of people on the dancefloor is nothing short of spectacular. Packs of wide-eyed lads maraud around looking for their next extortionately priced hit, hard-faced pickpockets meander through the drunken, randy rave, scoping out their next victim – "I lost my purse, my phone and everything last night, I don't know what happened" is the most overused phrase of the festival.

Elsewhere, a slew of young, overbearing Cockney dealers, complete with mandatory Gucci manbags and painful sunburn, are spying their next sale. The girls, primed to perfection, attempt to add a much-needed touch of class to the scene. Anyone seeking a little respite on the beach has to be selective with where they sit due to the piss, empty bottles and takeaway wrappers.

The scene described here is not representative of every rave in the 'land of 1000 islands', but is it a worrying sign of things to come?

Continues below

Croatian festivals seem to be split into two camps these days, with tight-knit, small-scale, underground events – which first announced the country as a dance music destination – now joined by festival behemoths like Ultra Europe, which hosted almost 150,000 people over three days in July. There, the focus of the action was a football stadium in Split, rather than an abandoned fort in some idyllic coastal corner of the country, and had likes of Alesso and Afrojack topping the bill.

But isn't this what happens anywhere that, thanks to enterprising and creative young promoters, artists, DJs or musicians, gets brushed with the veneer of cool? Compare Shoreditch now with what it was like 15 years ago when a thriving creative scene had just begun to revive the area; compare today's Ibiza, all VIP culture and high-rise, high-price hotels, with the island Oakenfold and Rampling first visited over 25 years ago. While it's inevitable that the money men and less desirable clientele will move in, what's surely key is that people keep the original spirit of the place alive.

And in Croatia there are plenty of people doing just that. Tom Paine, co-director of the now finished Garden Festival and forthcoming Love International, speaks of the importance of growing an event organically to maintain that element of magic that attracted people in the first place.

"Traditionally (for Garden Festival) there was not a lot of promotion, not a lot of big acts. If people liked it they came back the next year with a couple of mates. It grew like that; that's the way your clientele stays on-point in terms of everyone being on the same vibe and having the same attitude."

The same goes for Johnny Scratchley, creative director of Outlook and Dimensions, who says the line-up and marketing are key to attracting a diverse international crowd. "We have to find those people through the small club nights that happen all over the world, like the two hundred people in an underground venue in Prague. If we can get ten thousand of them together in one place, the atmosphere will be electric."

It's not all been lost to the sick-on-their-shoes brigade yet – but promoters need to stay vigilant.