Zen bias

It might seem unusual to today’s festival troops, but during my formative years, spent not so long ago at a deeply uncool rural high school, only two types of people seemed to go to festivals. Namely, crusties with a heart of gold, and music nerds with a pocket full of pingers. Nowadays there’s a festival for everyone, and Craig David is at all of them. The new wave of festivals are ‘chill’, comfortable, safe and yes, gentrified. They coax you in with ease and incense, then spit you out with debt and blisters. But has the ever-expanding scene lost its edge along the way?

Festivals have been getting increasingly more comfortable, more thought-out and generally nicer places to be since the boutique festival revolution was ushered in by the likes of Bestival and The Big Chill well over a decade ago. But the newest additions to the calendar seem to have put the idea of comfort front and centre as the main selling point of their events. Take Obonjan, launching this summer in the current promised land of rave, Croatia. Less a festival, more like Center Parcs reimagined by Bez, it marries the dancefloor-focused positive energies of DJs such as Four Tet, Optimo and Gilles Peterson with relaxing diversions like qoya, roaming massage and one-on-one ‘healing sessions’, all taking place in a sustainable island paradise. The focus is on ‘wellness’, which is not something you tend to find much of on the shuttle bus back from T In The Park.

The ‘wellness’ industry is currently valued at somewhere around £210 billion, so it’s no surprise to find that festivals such as the achingly middle-class Wilderness are happy to combine a two-hour set of pumpers from that well known child of the earth, Jackmaster, with archery lessons, ‘woodland runs’ and shamanic yoga. Oh, and pregnancy yoga, free-style yoga, every bloody type of yoga under the sun, before or after you’ve paid a tenner to eat a small bowl’s worth of fresh noodles out of a delicious, if distinctly non-magical, mushroom.