Parklife Festival – A money-making dog poo in the middle of Platt Fields Park

I purchased my Parklife weekend ticket in April this year, as a pre-emptive present to myself for finishing my exams and for completing my degree at university. Unfortunately, the planned enjoyment merely turned to frustration and annoyance at the entire event and its organisers. I had intended for this to be a more positive review of the event but from the start of Mistajam’s DJ set in the Metropolis tent on Saturday afternoon, things began to spiral downhill and I would advise anybody against going next year, no matter how enticing the line-up will be.

Firstly, let me make it clear that there were some positive aspects to the Parklife event. There was the price, which amounted to around £65, including the booking fee for the event, which considering the enormous line-up of A and B-List dance music DJs and artists was an incredible price. (Here's the line-up in detail: http://www.skiddle.com/festivals/Parklife/lineup.html) Virtually every important dance music DJ from Britain was there, including Andy C, Erol Alkan and Skream & Benga who are all amongst the biggest names in their particular dance genre. Furthermore, there were an abundance of upcoming artists as well, including Katy B and Sbtrkt, all of whom delivered, in my opinion, very individualistic and interesting performances. Thirdly, there was the impressive abundance of noise resonating from the main stage’s speakers which was an encouraging sign when first entering the festival at midday on Saturday, especially after the bombardment of a freak hail storm. Finally, all of the artists I saw performed superbly – the DJs were constantly throwing in mixes left-right-and-centre and the majority of the artists I saw elaborated brilliantly on their release tracks to create a unique song for that performance, excluding Two Door Cinema Club, who merely played their album tracks in perfect succession and left the stage swiftly.

However, in the case of Parklife, I’m afraid the cons outweighed the pros and after several hours I found myself extremely frustrated with almost every other aspect of the festival. I shall outline the two most frustrating of these issues. Firstly, the sound systems in all of the tents were simply pathetic. At most festivals, the front of the stage should be bathed in an array of speakers and the pillars which uphold the tent should also be lined with smaller speakers in order to create a truly ear-blowing sound, coupled with a monstrously powerful bass. However, at Parklife, all of the tents had around ten speakers which doubled up, supposedly, as a treble and a bass output, and there were no speakers placed on the tent pillars. In the larger tents, there were two pairs of these same speakers at the back of the tent as well, but to my laughable surprise, during Skrillex’s set, I noticed that these were out of sync with the front speakers. All of these issues lead to a tinny, quiet and echoed sound, which is unforgivable given that dance music (which was the most represented genre at Parklife) requires a large sound-system to add to the ambience and power of the songs. 

At first, I did not notice this problem and during Jakwob’s set in the Metropolis tent, where initially there was a small audience, there seemed to be no problem, especially as my friend and I were beside the front set of speakers. However, as the tent filled out, during Riot Jazz’s differentiated, if a little dull, performance the sound quality began to deteriorate. By the time Mistajam arrived on stage for the start of his set, the tent was bulging with loyal followers of the Radio 1 DJ. As a fan of his more edgy dance music selection, I was excited to see what he could do with two decks, a Macbook and a mixer. However, the sound system was horrendously quiet by now and given the more aggressive style of music Mistajam had intended to play, this was ridiculous. I found myself able to talk at room-volume to my friend next to me without any misinterpretation. Mistajam himself demanded, on the microphone, for the sound system to be turned up and eventually rallied the crowd into a frenzy, chanting “we want it louder.” (http://www.twitvid.com/XUKHB) In response the sound engineer at the back simply shrugged his shoulders and gave a cheeky grin – pathetic. (This gives you an idea of just how quiet it was: http://www.youtube.com/user/ParklifeFest#p/search/0/LGhKLq8qvjs)  

This issue continued throughout the weekend. SBTRKT put on a great set on Sunday, but it was no louder than a whisper and Andy C and Nero’s sets in the Hospitality tent were fainter than a whimpering shrew. Speaking to one of the artists, I discovered that they had been promised that the sound systems would be turned-up after 8pm, in order to keep the Mancunian  neighbours happy, but this failed to ever happen. The only place where the music was loud enough was the small Desperado’s tent, in which marketing messages of the tequila-beer drink were aplenty, but unfortunately, good music was not.

The second issue I found with the festival, which to me, was even more inexcusable, was that many of the times on the programme were incorrect. When my friends and I first entered the arena we purchased two of the lanyard programmes which were £5 each. This didn’t seem an unreasonable price as it would help us get to the acts we wanted to see, when we wanted see them, offering times and places for the sets of different artists, but when you consider that it did not come with artist descriptions, as is usually the case at festivals, it wasn’t such a great deal. Furthermore, we came to realise, after about three hours, that most of these times were wrong, particularly for the Metropolis, Hospitality and Now Wave! tents, which I had intended to live in, during the first day of the festival.. As a result, we returned to the sales-booth to get a refund. The manageress began to state that at “all festivals” artists get the times mixed up and there are often mishaps such as this. In my experience of five previous festivals, this has never happened, excluding Chemical Brother’s cancellation during Gatecrasher 2008 – the worst festival I had been to, prior to Parklife 2011. She stated that, as a result of this “mix-up” they had placed the newly organised times on each of the tents entrances and speaker set-ups. This was true, but my argument to her was that if they knew that the times on the programmes were wrong, why were they still selling them at full price, not a reduced one and why were they not telling customers that there were these issues. She conceived no response to this argument other than to say that they are “expensive to print.” Brilliant. It seems that the customer-comes-first approach had been thrown out of the window by the organisers of Parklife. She did give us a refund, eventually, but at the same time was sending out three new orange-shirted sellers with hundreds of lanyards around their necks, ready to sell these pointless programmes to unsuspecting festival-goers. In my opinion, this was a deliberate and inexcusable attempt to mislead the customer in order to make as much money as possible.

So, if you like a huge line-up of artists who will give their all on stage, despite a pathetic sound system which almost eradicates any point of seeing that artist live, as well as being ripped-off for a dodgy programme of set-times, then maybe Parklife 2012 will be right up your street. All the artists I saw performed well over-par, but the sound system issue meant that half the point of seeing them was gone. In the future I will simply have to assume, in the case of music festivals, that if the price looks to good to be true it probably is. I would have been better off staying at home and listening to those artists' mixes and live performances on an iPod - surely that's the worst thing one can say about a festival?