It's about time we got our holiday camp weekenders back

What’ll your festival destination be in 2018? A far-flung island paradise, or a cruise ship traversing the high seas? Perhaps somewhere with a secret forest rave and audiophile soundsystem? Chances are it won’t be a dilapidated holiday camp on the edge of a down-at-heel British seaside resort. That’s because the last few years have seen the slow and steady decline of a great British institution: the weekender.

The first such event of any real note was the Southport Weekender, which began in 1987 and catered to fans of soul, jazz and the then emerging Chicago house scene. For more recent generations, Tidy Weekender in Prestatyn, Bloc Festival or Bangface Weekender in Southport were probably their first real introduction to the joys of the weekender and the strange delight to be found in watching DJs in a hall more used to bingo and mother-in-law jokes.

My first was the inaugural Bugged Out! Weekender in 2012, which took place in Bognor Regis, a town that unfathomably manages to be significantly less glamorous in reality than even its name suggests. A bunch of us from Mixmag went down and saw Julio Bashmore, Hudson Mohawke and Ben UFO play in a theme pub, and Kevin Saunderson and Green Velvet bang it out in a bingo hall. Then we went back to our chalet and nailed shots of coffee Patrón until midday before heading to the freezing beach at two. One of us was eventually found face down in a plateful of Papa John’s pizza, with only sunglasses to protect their eyes from fusing with the pepperoni.

A few years later we threw a party at our Bugged Out! chalet and Jackmaster came to DJ, banging out Prince and Arctic Monkeys while the likes of Dusky and Skream clamoured outside to get in. Speaking of Jackmaster, it was his Numbers label that threw the brilliant Pleasure Principle weekender in a caravan park in Cornwall back in 2013. How many times in your life do you get the chance to watch Robert Hood, Floating Points and Omar S by night and hotbox a static caravan by day? I’ll never forget the moment I came up while walking through the arcade at 2am and spotted Aphex Twin languorously leaning against the teddy picker. It felt like I was in some kind of low-budget, West Country-set version of the ‘Windowlicker’ video.

There’s some kind of weird alchemy going on at UK holiday camp raves. I went to Oasis Festival in Morocco last year, and it was bloody lovely. Set in a lavish boutique hotel on the outskirts of Marrakech, the line-up was quality, the sound was great, the sun shone, the people were beautiful and the whole place smelt divine. Honestly, go – you’ll love it. But anyone can have fun in a beautiful location like that, whereas raving in Butlins in January for three days, fuelled mainly by vodka and supermarket sausage rolls, requires far steelier stuff.

You could argue that in 2018 the natural home of the weekender is abroad, with Croatia alone playing host to a number of events that cater to a niche audience with capacities around the same as a holiday camp rave. But while sun, sand, sea, seafood and quality European lager is appealing, there’s just something brilliantly perverse about getting trollied in a coastal holiday camp at winter’s lowest ebb, and with a soundtrack of cutting-edge electronic music to get you through. And the fact is that as a generation spared the rigours of National Service, we’ve relied on these strenuously debauched yet rewarding experiences to build character.

Have a quick glance at the Butlins website and you’ll notice they’re hosting 70s, 80s and 90s weekenders – but Bloc or Bugged Out! these events ain’t; in fact, they’re little more than weekend-long versions of Saturday nights at Reflex. Have the Powers That Be decided that dealing with coach-loads of middle-aged nostalgia nuts is somehow preferable to having ‘our sort’ wandering around the arcades after having not slept for three days? Well, we’re honestly sorry for the state we left the place in every year, but please, we want our chalet crack-ons back!