Music

Chavs at V Festival?

On announcing to friends that I was going to neglect my personal hygiene for four days, start pissing in fields, and essentially be taking on the skills of a homeless person because I was going to V festival, I was met with a chorus of ‘V’s full of Chavs’!

V Festival was my first dip in to the festival pond so I was hoping my announcement would be met with jealousy and enticing V Festival tales of lost weekends. Instead I was quite surprised that Chavs would be such an issue. I had chosen V Festival simply because of geography and hadn’t taken class wars into account and only visualised camp divisions, certainly not class divisions. I was more concerned with how I was going to keep my hair straight, my beer cold and how much loo roll would I need for the whole weekend.

I had recently had a child so days spent with just a baby wipe wash and a spray of dry shampoo didn’t frighten me, but would spending a weekend with Jezza rejects put me off? I did my research and read through social networking sites and discovered that others certainly did have a strong opinion about the amount of pop tarts and Chavs that descended on Cha -V festival each year. I could only liken it to the invasion of aliens or illegal immigrants – how dare these people go to festivals!

Who would have thought that a festival, aimed to unite people in their love of music, could provoke such snobbery. Maybe I was being naïve to believe that festivals were a mass of like-minded piss heads, wanting to lose these heads on a cocktail of warm beer and hot bands. I wanted the romanticised version of sex, drugs and rock n roll, without the sex and the drugs! I wanted the peace and love, the Woodstock experience, the dancing, the camaraderie, the passing the loo roll when I had to wee up a tree. I pondered further about David Cameron’s ‘Big, Classless Society’. Did he know about V festival?

After all the scaremongering, I took my chances, packed my camping equipment of beer, loo roll and hair straighteners, just in case, and headed off to dance with the Chavs in search of social harmony. I can’t say I got the bohemian experience I had envisioned, but I got more than that, I got the best experience of my life, with the best people in my life. V Festival is an amazing life-enriching event, if you let it be. Maybe it’s because it’s a modern festival that doesn’t adhere to the traditional view of dancing hippies, although there were some there. Yes, the dance acts had attracted a more younger kind of audience, but when I passed a girl some loo roll after we’d both let nature meet nature, none of us were trying to ascertain our ranks in society. We were both just struggling with the same problems, the same difficulties, like how to have a wee standing up without pissing down your leg.

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