Festivals used to scare me – then I found one that felt like home

After a depressive episode that pulled some existing character traits front and centre, Michael Hann thought festivals seemed more like purgatory than a party. Then a small festival in Wiltshire changed all that

Hann and fellow journalist Laura Barton DJing at End of the Road (Michael Hann)

I was always afraid of festivals. That’s not a great thing to say when you make your living writing about music, and have been obsessed with music since the first time you bought a vinyl album and took it from its cover and smelled the fresh paper of the inner sleeve and saw your face in the shiny black plastic. But it’s true. I was always afraid of festivals.

In my early twenties, I had a depressive episode that pulled some existing character traits front and centre. The one that had the most effect on my everyday life was my social awkwardness – misreading the room, an inability to make small talk, a hatred of meeting new people – transforming into social phobia. When you feel like that, the prospect of tens of thousands of people in a place from which you cannot escape feels less like a party than a purgatory.

I could manage single-day events. As a teenager, I would travel up to London for the free festivals put on by the Greater London Council or the Anti-Apartheid Movement (I feel as though summer Saturdays were constantly soundtracked by The Style Council playing Gil Scott-Heron’s “Johannesburg”, though it can’t have been that often). As an adult, I wholeheartedly approved of those Hyde Park events from which I could get home in half an hour, and be aware of the city – all that freedom to get away – all around me.

But the time comes when one has to be a bit bolder. So in summer 2007, at the age of 37, I went to my first proper festival – the first where I would stay on site, and be there for days. And I made it so I had no choice but to be trapped there, because the festival was in Norway. Now, I’ll be honest: I wasn’t going to camp, so the organisers – who flew in a bunch of British writers – put me up in a weird concrete bunkhouse in the middle of the site, where the festival crew were staying. And my reason for going was that my favourite band, The Hold Steady, were playing.

It was a little unfortunate, then, that The Hold Steady were playing, literally, as soon as I got on site, because after then I still had four days to fill. Most of my memories of that event are of a perpetual state of mild anxiety – watching very drunk Norwegian metal fans trying to set fire to innocent fans during one band’s set; hanging around with a bunch of people from the indie record label Domino who were every bit as glum as me; waiting for the four days to pass to get the plane home. And so I decided festivals were probably not for me.

The thing is, my wife really fancied going to a festival. I talked her down from Glastonbury (the one time I eventually went, for work, was five days of sitting in a cabin editing live blogs; I saw four bands the whole time. It was very much Not Fun). It had to be one where there weren’t too many people. The crowds had to be small enough that even for headline acts on main stages, I could see the edges. The site had to be near enough to other things that if I couldn’t bear being around people we could go off to do something else.

We tried Latitude in 2008, but I didn’t really like it that much. So for our first year at End of the Road – 2009, drawn by the presence, inevitably, of The Hold Steady – we stayed in a B&B. We went to Monkey World on the Saturday morning with our kids – then aged five and nine – and went to the seaside. We didn’t get to the festival site until mid-afternoon, and the start was not auspicious. The Broken Family Band were playing, and our son – the five-year-old – flung himself to the ground and started smacking his head against the grass, crying out at the top of his voice, “No! No! No!”

It got better. It couldn’t get any worse. In fact, every year thereafter – because we became regulars – it got better. We switched from staying offsite to camping. Boutique camping, I’m afraid. Come at me all you like, but I don’t want to repeat the experience of trying to erect a tent while I can hear a band I want to see playing in the distance. Actually, I just don’t want to repeat the experience of trying to erect a tent. We started to have our favourite food stalls, and our special treats.

I came to love the drive to the site through the countryside and the view over the Wiltshire plain from the high plateau on which Larmer Tree Gardens sits. I loved it more as our kids got old enough to do things on their own at the festival, and it became less of a childcare logistics challenge. I came to know my favourite musical time was not the big headline slots, but lying on the grass by the second stage on the Sunday afternoon, letting guitars wash over me. And I realised that I knew dozens of people who went every year, and that the festival was small enough to bump into them without arranging to do so.

My favourite memories aren’t of bands. My single favourite memory, perhaps, is of bumping into two friends I used to work with, but hadn’t seen for an age, and spending a couple of hours sitting on benches drinking and talking and feeling those old ties tighten again, while Michael Kiwanuka doodled away on the main stage in the background. This was the opposite of social phobia; this was feeling at home, happy and at one with the thing I always thought I feared.