The big idea: are we all beginning to have the same taste?

Music seems to be at the forefront of a rush to uniformity. It’s time to rebel

As this year’s festival season begins to wind down, I find myself stuck on one particular memory. At Glastonbury, I stood by the bins at the back of the West Holts field, behind thousands and thousands of people, straining to see and hear three tiny Sugababes on the distant stage. After a while, I asked my partner if we should leave. “Wait until they play Overload?” she said, while they were playing Overload. We stuck it out for a bit longer, then gave up.

Overcrowding was a bit of a theme. Access to the enormous Other Stage area was restricted while Avril Lavigne played. And unless you had the foresight to get there early, you had no chance of seeing Barry Can’t Swim. Bicep had to pause their set due to safety concerns. In a thoughtful piece for the dance music site Resident Advisor, editor Gabriel Szatan wrote that crowd-control issues indicated that the festival had lost touch with “how dominant electronic music has become among its current clientele”, suggesting that the wrong acts were on the wrong stages at the wrong times.