Hell is other people yourself

I'll admit that when I first saw Marc Burrows' recent Quietus article plugged on Twitter, I feared the worst: yet another sneeringly superior dismissal of Glastonbury, a tedious hot take writ large about its all-consuming awfulness. But it isn't.

For a start, Burrows readily concedes that the festival is a wonderful place, with fresh delights to discover around every corner. The fly in the ointment? His fellow festival-goers, whose bad/irritating behaviour repeatedly blighted his enjoyment of this year's bash.

So far, so misanthropic. But the plot twist is that, on reflection, Burrows came to realise that the issue lay not in "the off-the-chain hedonism of the previously cooped-up given the space to roam" but within himself. He acknowledges the ridiculousness of being full of hate in the midst of such joy, silently and snobbishly fuming about those around him who are "blamelessly being blameless in their little bubbles of fun and freedom" - the root cause of his bitterness an envy of both youth and other people's happiness.

Suffice to say that all of this feels painfully familiar. I often catch myself internally grumbling at gigs along very similar lines - so the piece was a chastening reminder to snap out of it, lighten up, let those "things-were-better-in-my-day" thoughts go and simply take pleasure in the present.