Concerts: Compare and Contrast

Yesterday I went to Parkpop, a free pop concert festival held in Den Haag. I was attracted by the presence of Elvis Costello on the performer list and joined up with some friends for a day in the sun. The weather was perfect: warm and sunny but not too hot, and the company was great. I quite enjoyed the first two performers we saw: a Norwegian guy by the name of Thomas Dybdahl played some nice low-key sort of folky-pop, and then Belgian Gabriel Rios did some lovely latiny salsa/rhumba kind of dance music. Very pleasant. Other than that, I wasn't terribly impressed by anyone. Most of the artists there were into heavy, crashy kinds of music that I don't really enjoy.

But what this post is really about is how this festival compares with the Edmonton Folk Festival. Put bluntly, it doesn't. Which really ought to mean I don't compare them, but it's my blog, so by golly, I'm going to do it anyways.

Both festivals seem to do a good job of featuring a variety of performers in their chosen niche without pigeonholing themselves too terribly. Each has a pretty nice park area for a venue. Folk Fest is the luckier in this regard, however, as it benefits from both the natural amphitheatres of Gallagher Park and the venue separation provided by the trees. Sound bleed was a problem for the two main stages at Parkpop. There seemed to be a significant amount of space farther over in the park, so it looked like the stage could have been located better, but perhaps there were other issues I don't know about. Both festivals feature a pretty good selection of food and "stuff" vendors. Parkpop even had a bungee jump crane set up, which was an entertaining diversion when the music was bad. Each festival has a good transportation set-up, with frequent buses running back to a more central area. Parkpop might have the advantage in this area, as the buses ran to all the train stations, from which there are excellent bus and tram connections. This is more a factor of the Den Haag public transportation system being better than Edmonton's, however. For these factors, both festivals rate reasonably well.

Where I show my biases much more strongly are my appraisals of the audience and to some extent, the organizers. I have a much stronger appreciation of the Folk Fest audience and its organizers. Parkpop audiences are inconsiderate slobs. Although there were garbage cans located around the area (though more would have been useful), most people treated the ground as their personal dump site. Among the usual food booths were beer vendors, and sellers with backpacks of booze even wandered the crowd dispensing their wares into plastic cups which, once emptied, were simply tossed on the ground. We actually walked through one particularly bad area near the vendors that was ankle-deep in garbage. There was barely anywhere you could step that was actually bare ground. I was mortified.

Further, we arrived pretty early in the day and spread out a couple blankets reasonably near the stage, though not really close. It was a fine location through the first act but shortly thereafter we were surrounded by standing, jostling people dropping garbage on us, tramping across the blankets, drunkenly slamming into us and generally making it exceedingly unpleasant.

We (5 of us) picked up and moved considerably farther back on the field but unfortunately discovered that the sound quality wasn't that hot farther back. They only had one set of speakers and video screen (at the stage) and nothing farther back so when Elvis Costello finally came on at the end of the show, it was a little disappointing. We could have tried to move in closer but noone seemed very excited to brave the crowds again. Aside from the rude and often drunked people, there was also an incredible amount of smokers. I know this is pretty typically European, but I was sitting in a park and I felt like I was in a bar, for the amount of smoke I was inhaling. Blech.

Now we come to the toilets. As elsewhere in this country, it was Pay-to-Pee. Yes, they'll let you come to the concert for free, but it's 50 eurocents a time (or a 2 euro daypass) to visit the portapotties. Delightful. Couple this with a complete lack of foresight on how to manage the lines, and you've got 200 people pressing to get in, 100 people pressing to get out, and 3 or 4 staffers trying to moderate the whole works. It was disastrous.

Dutchies don't know how to do line-ups. This sounds like a terrible generalization, I know, but it's true. Check out the mobs of people trying to get in a train car here and you'll see what I mean. No wonder all the banks/government offices/large service desks/etc ALL have take-a-number machines. It seems to be the only way to institute some order on the population. With that in mind, I would have thought that the organizers of this festival (after 25 years experience) could have at least figured out they needed a separate exit and some sort of line-up fences at the porta-potties. Apparently not. A further irony around the outhouse issue is that they had all sorts of awareness-raising posters up about the cholera, typhus, etc, that runs rampant in places where they don't have adequate santitation facilities but they had no washing facilities whatsoever at the festival. There were two (half-litre sized) empty hand sanitizer dispensers tied to the wall. That was it. There were no washstands, and water was only available from the food vendors.

Contrast all of this with the Folk Fest: many, many garbage cans around the site, emptied frequently by volunteers. Most people pick up pretty well after themselves, and others stick around after the end of the day to grab the rest of the stray trash before going home. Drinkers are confined to the beer gardens and their cups also make it to the garbage. People are generally very polite and orderly about staked-out tarp space and it is considered exceedingly unmannerly to tread on someone else's tarp, unless it's the very edge and there's nowhere else to walk. Stuff can also often be left unattended on tarps without worry (though leaving valuables is still inadvisable). People line up for food, buses, toilets and bag checks without mobbing. Porta-potty use is free (though the 4 days of concert costs ~$100) and there are washstands nearby as well as a major watering center if the washstands run out of supplies. Though there is smoking in the crowd, it's not nearly as prevalent and there is even a non-smoking area in a decent part of the hill. All in all, it's a much friendlier, better organized festival with a well-trained audience. And boy, am I sorrowful that I'm missing it this year!