Stop me if you think you've heard this one before

The Easter weekend is coming up, and that means it’s time for music festivals. If you’re in KZN, or willing to travel there from wherever else you may be, you will be able to attend Splashy Fen, officially (apparently) the oldest music festival in the country. It turns 20 this year, and, if the universe works like it should (in my mind anyway), the original naked children of the first hippies that pitched their teepees and hauled out their guitars 20 years ago should be back on their own steam, wearing Ramones T-shirts and philosophising drunkenly around campfires. It’s a nice thought.

Splashy Fen is an institution. For as long as I can remember, friends have planned their Easter holidays around the trip to Underberg, and no-one ever seems to look at the line-up and say, “Hmmm … can’t be bothered this year”. It’s not that sort of festival. I mean, the music DOES matter, and there have been a great number of wonderful performances, but that only forms part of the “festival experience” that makes people promise to come back year after year. It’s not the most luxurious of festivals, and the line-up tends to be less flashy than Oppikoppi or Rocking the Daisies, but there is something that makes people forget about the mud, the cold, the anonymous drunken fellow that tripped over your tent pegs and into your tent at 4am, the queues for the loos, the sad realisation that you are drunk and hung-over at the same time, and the fact that on the way home you were forced to take the wheel of an unfamiliar car full of snoring boys because your stupid friend fell asleep in the sun and the back of his legs were so sore and red that he couldn’t drive. Despite all this, most people make plans to do it all again.

The same can’t be said, I am afraid, for Coke Fest, and that only lasts one day. I will be repeating myself if I voice my annoyance at the corporate hype surrounding the event, but this year that criticism has to extend to the fact that such a large-scale, big-budget affair has (seemingly) been so badly publicised. For a long time after the event was announced, the only updates I could rely on were from a blog that was eventually shut down because it was unofficial. I understand that some things cannot be avoided, but to announce that two bands have pulled out (Bullet for My Valentine and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus) two days before, and to move venues in both cities (CT and JHB) two weeks before the event, really shakes the audience’s confidence in the organisers. The Facebook mutterings of “I wonder who’s going to pull out next” says as much. We’ll wait to see what happens, and I will hold back on talking about the festival until it actually happens.

Please let me know what your experiences are, if you go to Coke Fest in Cape Town or Jo’burg.

And if you go to Splashy, please let me know what it was like, if you can remember any of it.