Journalists are notorious windbags. If they’ve got no story happening now to write about, it doesn’t take them long to write a speculative story – and Mixmag have just done precisely that.
They’re keen to find out how many festivals they’ll have to go to this summer, mostly in the hope that it’ll be higher than the 2020 total of zero. Glastonbury have already announced they’re not going ahead – getting 200,000 people together in a country with one of the worst Covid death tolls in the world is probably not a good idea, no?
The responses given are interesting, but they mostly strike me as a strange form of willy waving. How can they be so sure so many months ahead? The truth is they can’t. And deep down, they can’t be sure either.
That said, I can’t blame them either. They’re working under the most ridiculous conditions. In Germany, the government is backing them up with insurance – so if they later discover they can’t go ahead, they’ll recoup most, if not all their money.
No such reassurances from the useless Boris Johnson government…