Why the festival bandwagon has stalled

What is happening to Britain's music festivals? One minute the infrastructure is creaking as half the nation tries to nab a Glastonbury ticket and the next, festivals are cancelling and people are joining Facebook groups demanding refunds.

That is what has happened following last weekend's Z008 Festival in Port Lympne Wildlife Park, Kent, and which seems to have caused more anger among festival-going punters than any other this summer.

Internet forums have been awash with vitriol after many acts including Dizzee Rascal, Athlete, The Rascals and Wiley pulled out at short notice.

Frank Turner, another who didn't play, wrote on his website, "The deal is this: I'm a working musician, I earn little money and my budgets are shoestring. I can't afford to take risks with running a whole paid-up band and crew and fuel down to Kent for a risk of not getting paid", while Dizzee posted that he had pulled out for "contractual reasons", though an earlier post – now removed – claimed that his agent, Primary Talent, had advised him not to appear because they had not received payment. The Rascals' departure also meant fans missed seeing Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner, who had arrived to play Last of the Shadow Puppets material with the Rascals' singer, Miles Kane.

"Our biggest problem was one of miscalculation over cash-flow", said Danny Blanche, ZOO8 Festival co-director, in an official statement. "This required us to make the pragmatic decision to cancel a few acts." There was "some significant dissent from artists regarding payment", he added.

Festival-goers complained of a lack of drinking water, the second stage being closed for most of the festival as it was unstable, a lack of lighting on campsites, wildly inaccurate stage times, "full to overflowing" toilets, no announcements when bands changed stage, pitiful staff numbers and confusion over how to gain wristbands for entry.

Blanche issued an official apology to fans: "Obviously, none of this was ideal or planned – and not the quality of experience that we had aimed to deliver." They had "learned some painful lessons", it continued, which is unlikely to appease the refund-chasers. The Facebook group ZOO8 – We Want A Refund has about 500 members, and Boo Thousand a similar number.

Elsewhere in Kent, Sunday's Hop Farm Festival was going swimmingly – great line-up, fantastic sound, no sponsorship or branding as promised – then managed to turn thousands of happy punters into tired and physically aggressive ones. All it took was having the main car-park unstewarded after headliner Neil Young had finished, at about 11pm. This created a motoring free-for-all, albeit a static one, that lasted into the early hours of Monday.

The Hop Farm responded by saying: "We did experience some unpleasant scenes in the car parks and several members of staff were assaulted. This resulted in our having to temporarily withdraw the marshals prior to reassigning them in a monitoring and reporting role."

"However, we have taken on board comments that we have received about the apparent lack of marshals within the car parks, the apparent failure of the designated traffic lanes leading to the exit routes and these will be considered further with regard to any future events on this site."

This followed the Mighty Boosh-curated event also at the Hop Farm on Saturday which, although not experiencing the same problems as Sunday, irked the Sun's Bizarre columnist Gordon Smart into writing: "It was a long way short of selling the 30,000 tickets available because punters failed to get a handle on the odd line-up," asserted Smart. "The logic of having tubby Yank singer Har Mar Superstar second on the bill was mystifying. And German shrieker Peaches was another strange choice. Her afternoon DJ set baffled the punters."

But there is a further problem with the world of festivals. In the last two years, a lot of people with a biggish back garden have suddenly decided that a music festival looks like a quick, easy buck.

The editor of efestivals.com, Scott Williams, says: "There have been a high number of festivals on this year, and more cancellations as well. It seems a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon but I think the bubble has burst.

"Some festivals we list every year, and every year they cancel, but this year a large number of new festivals turned up and the people behind them didn't seem to have the expertise or organisational skills to do it. They end up with having not enough food, not enough alcohol, big queues."

He adds that, in some cases: "There are six or seven stages, but only one with any big names on it, so you're really overstretching yourself. You need to get big names at the other stages as well, otherwise everyone will just go to the main one. The best festivals do this, and also have a five-year plan in place and some serious investment."

Perhaps you can forgive a landowner for acting out a fantasy, but instead of dreaming of staging a Nirvana at Reading 1992, Jimi Hendrix at Isle of Wight 1970 or Radiohead at Glastonbury 1997, it is too often the quick buck that motivates. This, of course, leads to either corner-cutting or outright liberty-taking.

Some organisers are quick to acknowledge their errors. Last year's Field Day festival in Hackney's Victoria Park and – in an early augur of newbie festivals getting out of their depth – Secret Garden Party 2006 are two which quickly offered disgruntled punters cheap tickets to the following year's event (and, to its credit, SGP quickly upped its game), with the grovelling promise that they would get it right next time round. But, for some, there wasn't even a "this time round". Zapfest in Oxford this week joined Tapestry (south Wales) and Wild in the Country (Knebworth) on the scrapheap, hastily cancelling with poor ticket sales largely to blame. In the case of Wild in the Country, the decisive moment seemed to be when Björk pulled out, citing, on her website, "significant problems with the event, including its staging, sound and lighting ".

To return to Glastonbury, which saw the slowest uptake of tickets since the early 1990s, let's not tar all with the same brush of shambolic organisation. In its case, there were a host of reasons (masked by the myopic debate on Jay Z) such as the mud of recent years, a tepid line-up across the main stage, the increasing popularity of new "boutique" (ie small) festivals and foreign ones such as Benicassim (Spain) and Roskilde (Denmark), the cost (£155 plus fees) and an inconvenient registration process.

Note the lack of organisational gripes in that list. The festival site in Pilton, Somerset, is only navigable by winding country lanes and, should Prince or Coldplay so wish, helicopter. And yet its capacity has grown to 177,500 over the years, so it is only right when caps are collectively doffed to Michael and Emily Eavis for taming this logistical lion.

But don't expect the new crop of festivals to give up at the first hurdle. Blanche insists that his event will return next year, saying ZOO8 was a "qualified success".

And its troubles are after all, small fry compared to some of the most profound festival disasters. Glastonbury 2005 revellers awoke on the Friday morning to a sky like Judgement Day which proceeded to dump a deluge of record levels in just a few hours. About 100 tents were washed away, a stage was hit by lightning, one of the bars sank in the mud and, to show how cruelly indiscriminate Mother Nature can be, even Jo Whiley had to abandon her live broadcast for Radio 1.

But the weather recovered handsomely and by Sunday the earth was scorched and the punters delirious. And there was Oxford's 2007 Truck festival, which was cancelled entirely but rescheduled to later in the year.

Much further down the line was Woodstock 1999, which was less a festival and more a war-zone. Organisers naively tried to emulate the peace-and-love-man vibe of the 1969 event, but only succeeded in creating a "loot and fight, man" atmosphere. Police investigated four rape allegations, and the enduring images of the event are of violence and fire-starting.

But the Altamont Festival of 1969 is comfortably the worst of the lot. Queueing three hours to pay £5 for a highly dubious meat product suddenly seems acceptable when you know that a man was brutally stabbed and kicked to death here. Meredith Hunter fell at the hands of Hells Angels after he pulled a gun on them during an altercation. It was captured on film and included on the 1970 Gimme Shelter documentary on the Rolling Stones, who were onstage at the time.

Back in the accountable Noughties, festival organisers suddenly have somewhere to turn for help. The Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), launched in June by Bestival founder Rob da Bank and Graphite Media's Ben Turner, is open for anyone to join and share knowledge and tips on how to stage a festival.

Da Bank recalls that he was no less naive than some of the new crop of festival organisers when he began Bestival in 2004: "We didn't know what we were doing. Anything could have gone wrong. It was OK but the tent thefts in the first few years originally made me think about [doing] this.

"Festivals have changed a lot though. I went to Glastonbury 10 years ago and it was quite dangerous. That was before Mean Fiddler revolutionised things. I thought last year would be year zero for festivals, maybe some of the bigger ones might take a year off, but even more have come back and maybe they shouldn't have.

"I think it has reached saturation point, and it has come at the same time as the credit crunch which has obviously had an effect on ticket sales. The UK has the best festival market in the world, and the more the merrier, but hopefully some of them won't come back."

The AIF has 12 full members, including big-hitters such as Big Chill and WOMAD – even though they have probably got the whole thing sussed by now – and smaller affairs such as Field Day. Twenty more have applied for membership.

Da Bank adds: "The main reason we set this up was so we can share knowledge and be advisors and make the experience better for everyone."

But all this is too late for ZOO8, Hop Farm and the growing number of cancelled festivals, not to mention the disappointed people who had tickets for any of these. What chance that next summer they will be ditching the tent and wellies in favour of a week on the Med?

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