Festival@Home – How to Organise Your Private Glastonbury
Concert blues
2021 continues to be the year of cancelled festivals, shows and gigs. The hearts of live music lovers are broken so here we are. But not all is lost. With the right attitude, some basic gear and a stage-worthy imagination, you will be able to catapult yourself into any festival you want. Consult our step-by-step guide on how to get into the festival spirit anytime you feel like going to a show this summer.
Outfit
Instead of spending weeks figuring out the perfect, instagrammable festival outfit, you can decide to go comfy or wear the outfits you had planned for last year. Sparkling details, bright colours, funky patterns, cosy or flashy – everything goes at your own personal festival!
Food
The festival diet tends to be a fast, greasy and delicious one. In keeping with the needs of partying taste buds, we recommend ordering takeaway, cooking frozen pizza or flipping sausages and burgers on the BBQ grill. Get all the drinks you want, but make sure they’re at least lukewarm for the sake of authenticity. A couple of fold-up tables around your tent can function as your own personal bar.
Source decor
Festival equipment centres around the tent! Pop it up, but keep the tent commandment in mind: “Thou shall not leave the putting up of thy tent until 3 in the morning.” Hang up a bunting, colourful flag, fairy lights, you name it, to find your gaff when stumbling home in the dark. To glamp it up Coachella-style, add a mattres, blankets and carpets.
Activate your festival crew
Whether it’s by videocall or in limited numbers and at a safe distance at your place – activate your festival buddies and friends because nobody wants to party alone!
Location is key
Finding the perfect spot to pitch your tent is crucial at any festival. But first, you need to navigate the festival grounds. Create your own map in accordance with 5 golden rules
- Avoid pathways so fewer people will walk past your tent, make noise next to you or stumble over guy ropes!
- Consider proximity to toilets – it’s tempting for midnight loo runs, but don’t forget about the porta potty smell. Near enough but also far away enough is a good rule of thumb!
- Look for trees. You score big if you bag a nice, shady spot! Work out where the sun rises so that the trees protect you from the morning sun. Just be careful of camping directly underneath because of falling branches!
- Choose your neighbours wisely. Well, in your own backyard, that ship has probably sailed, but come prepared and bring earplugs!
- Avoid the bottom of a hill because rain could happen (this is the UK after all), and gravity will do its part to flood your tent!
Music
A festival wouldn’t be a festival without its acts. With the StreamR Splash, there is a plethora of possibilities to tune into your favourite festival performances.
- Connect your device via Bluetooth with your StreamR Splash and upgrade the audio quality of watching the livestreams of festivals from your phone or laptop in your tent
- Bathe in the ambience of past and future festival days
- There are also multiple radio stations dedicated to tune into festival sounds – some are even pop-up stations currently off air due to cancelled festivals
- Browse festivals around the world
Playlists
We have sourced some amazing playlists so your festival never runs out of tunes to blast:
- Experiencing what would have been Coachella 2020
- Bringing Roskilde 2021 to the living room
- Rocking through 50 years of Glastonbury
- Getting ready for Rock am Ring 2022
A festival history
1000AD: Celtic and Gaelic cultures held cultural fairs named Mods in Scotland and Feis in Ireland.
6th century: BCE music as part of a festival dates back to ancient Greeks dancing to the sound of music at the Pythian Games.
Since 1954, Newport Jazz Festival has been running the arguably most historically significant zazz festival with appearances by Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and even newer rock groups such as Led Zeppelin in the late 60s.
1959 Newport Folk Festival as a counterpart to the Jazz Festival has helped introduce Joan Baez and featured one of the most notorious appearances in music history when Bob Dylan chose to go electric.
1967 Monterey Pop Festival one of the first major rock festivals which paved the way for future festivals like Woodstock with major spectacles like Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire during “Wild Thing”.
1969’s Woodstock may be the most famous music festival ever and for sure a defining moment for music and pop culture history.
1970 Isle of Wight Festival: The unanticipatedly high turnout at the festival (more than 600.000 people/bigger than woodstock) led to the UK Parliament passing the “Isle of Wight Act”, which prevents gatherings of more than 5.000 people on the island without a license.
1971, the first Glastonbury Festival took place under the Glastonbury name. It featured performances from David Bowie and many more.
In 1986 a group of friends burned an effigy of a man in the name of radical self-expression. Four years later, Burning Man was founded as a free-form expression of community and creativity through music and art.
1991 Lollapalooza had Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Rage Against the Machine and the Violent Femmes. Originally a touring alternative music festival, it moved to a single location, Grant Park, Chicago, in 2005.
1999, the first Coachella took place and has since become one of the most prominent North American music festivals.
2022: The year real-life festivals will hopefully return to the face of earth.
