Music Festival Stag-Do – Good Idea Or Not?

The huge boom in outdoor music festivals over the last ten years has inevitably led to the rise of the Festival Stag Do. This is understandable – there is no better place to bond with your best mates over a cider or ten, you can travel to them all over Europe these days, and the music is going to be pretty special. However, there are also massive crowds, thieves, wasps, and the ominous Threat of Mud.

Whose fucking idea was this?

Just getting into these things (with all your camping stuff and booze), and then organising everyone to arrive together, camp together and stay together can be like a military operation – I’ve earned the nickname of The Brigadier because I’m the only one in my crew willing to shout, order and nag enough to get this done. Also they are far from cheap – tickets alone can be anything up to £200, and once you add transport, food and a weekend’s worth of overpriced beer, you’re looking at the cost of a week in Greece.

However, the key reason why it might not be a great idea to have your stag at a festival is the same reason why it’s best not to try drugs for the first time at these things – it’s really not a good place to be if things go Tits Up. You want your stags to have a weekend to remember, but not because they lost their wallet, phone, Rolex and sanity in a muddy ditch.

Even in the U.K., the nearest A&E can be a helicopter ride away, and that’s if you can find the St John Ambulance guys in the first place. I’ve seen whole festivals ruined by relatively minor campfire-related burns, so how you would cope with a drink-related broken limb doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s also very hard to keep clean, and even the best showers in the world aren’t going to help if you ruined your only trousers when you fell over in the portaloos. Even in dry weather this can be an issue – I’ve had an in-growing hair on the inside of my leg that was threatening to turn into an abscess by the end of four days of Glastonbury heat and sweat. Nice.

The accommodation was disappointing

But the closer for me is the fact that festivals aren’t for everyone. While all my stags will need to be hardened drinkers and fairly outgoing and broad-minded, this does not necessarily mean they will be up for a weekend in a muddy tent.

While I have had some of the best weekends of my life at festivals, I know they are not for everyone and I would never sneer at anyone who doesn’t really fancy it. At the end of the day, the whole thing can turn from a sunny summery cidery happy afternoon to the Somme overnight. With no guarantee the weather will be kind, there’s no guarantee everyone’s weekend will be fun. That’s a hell of a gamble to take.

So next year I plan to go to Glasto as usual with the festival crowd, while offering a warm and dry hotel in Germany to my stags. This also means, for the less dedicated potential stags, there is one less excuse for non-attendance. Although I suspect my useless brother is already working on his…

Related Posts:

• Five of the Best Cottages For Stag Dos
• Real Stags: Chris Timson
• You Are Cordially Invited To The Staggered Stag-Do
• Stag-Do confession (part 2)
• Stag-Do Confession (part 1)