Fergal Kinney has been going to music festivals since he was a teenager. But when Kinney, a 29-year-old British music journalist, attended Primavera Sound in Barcelona this past June, it was the first time he had ever feared for his safety in a festival setting.
Kinney sensed that something was off soon after arriving at Primavera, which has long been renowned for its stellar lineups and beautiful setting. The festival grounds were dangerously overcrowded; bottlenecks and cramming rendered it difficult to move from one stage to another. Water points were few and far between, with music fans struggling to stay hydrated. Lines for the bar tents were absurdly long — 45 minutes to an hour. And when one of Kinney’s friends felt unwell, the friend informed the bar staff, who simply told him to get in line for bottled water.
“I’ve been going to festivals for 12, 13 years. I’ve never witnessed overcrowding as worrying as that,” Kinney says. He describes one particularly grueling crowd crush coming out of Gorillaz’s set, during which he worried that fans might literally get pushed into the Mediterranean Sea. “When I say grueling crush, I mean spending easily half an hour not really moving, and you’re very densely packed in with people,” Kinney says. “The fact that nobody died was really down to the goodwill and moderation of the people who were there. It was extremely apparent on day one that something was not right.”
“It was all anyone was talking about,” says Daniel Dylan Wray, a freelance music journalist who has been attending Primavera since 2009 and tweeted that this was the worst organization he had ever seen. “Normally you’d be immersed in the music, and the communal talking point might be: ‘What have you seen tonight?’ But instead it was: ‘What a fucking nightmare it is to do anything.’”
“In some parts of it, you could barely move,” says Ally Chapman, a music fan from Bristol, England. “Everyone just kept saying, ‘Astroworld, Astroworld, Astroworld — remember Astroworld.’ It seemed like it was gonna be very similar to that. It was dangerous.”
Fortunately, Primavera unfolded without similar tragedy, and sources say conditions improved significantly after the first night, with standout performances by the National, Fontaines D.C., and a newly reunited Pavement. On June 3, the festival acknowledged and apologized for “problems in the bar services.” “We added three points where we were giving away water bottles for free, and we rearranged the bar staff so they could attend the most crowded areas,” says Marta Pallarès, the festival’s head of international press, in a statement. “After the first night, the rest of the days ran as usual.”
Yet the chaotic clusterfuck that was Primavera Day 1 feels like more than a momentary stumble. Rather, the frustrations that greeted fans there seem representative of a festival season widely marred by overcrowding, crowd chaos, and surprising organizational blunders by ostensibly seasoned organizers.
Few big festivals have been immune. At Revolve Fest, an unauthorized, Coachella-adjacent event aimed at influencers and fashion bloggers, would-be attendees complained of being stranded in the desert sun for hours without food or water. In June, Bonnaroo mostly ran smoothly, though its first day was hindered by reports of lengthy lines leading to a single GA entrance. Later that month, Pharrell Williams’ Something In The Water fest was described by USA Today as a “logistical nightmare” spoiled by “inexcusable delays.” (“Too many people fainted, too many wrong set times,”…
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