Big Chill 2002 Review

The post-modern platitudes of deodorant advertising tell us that first impressions, spurious and curious though they may be, count, and as the car wound its way down into deeper country seclusion I felt that there was something decidedly different about this festival. It wasn't until we had scaled the dusty road to the campsite (causing one of our entourage to wittily pun, "Big Chill? Big Fucking Hill more like!" Oh, how we laughed as we sweated our way to the summit...) that I realised what it was. Like any deodorant, my first impressions were clean. This was to be a lovely, sun-filled weekend in the grounds of the only-to-be-seen-from-the-hillside-obelisk Eastnor Castle, a charming corner of England and an idyllic little nook perfectly befitting the poshest, cleanest, most polite and most highly sanitised festival I have ever attended.

The ninety quid entrance fee and previous experiences at the bigger brand festivals (Glasto, Reading, etc.) led me to believe that the site would be densely populated with people and mayhem, but this was not to be. Quality, not quantity is the name of the game for the Big Chill. 24-hour hot showers complete with Mini Cooper sponsorship-cum-sound-system and bedoiun-esque entrance parlour room. Vast arrays of idiot-proof recycling bins. A Tanqueray Gin palace. A cocktail bar with breakbeats, funk and a more than passable Bloody Mary. An art trail winding itself up the hill towards an enchanted forest, and the aforementioned hilltop obelisk. Where am I? More akin to some hyper-green, hyper-hip enclave of London than to its summer festival brethren, the Big Chill is, well, downright civilised.
And its not just in the arrangement of stages and brands, or the expensive jewellery and global cuisine on sale for the sought of prices you can charge to a captive market. It's the clientele. The young people who have the disposable income to pay those prices, on holiday no doubt from the stresses of the multimedia industries or Goldman Sachs. For arguments sake let's refer to them as the 'Gazebo Generation', for this is their primary festival totem.

The gazebo says, 'I am reasonably upwardly mobile', it says, 'I am here with a small clan of companions and we may be drinking Pimms', and perhaps most of all it says, 'I am in no hurry, so let's get the wine and cheese from the cool-box and chill.'  The campsite is tidily littered with deckchairs, hampers, foot-pumps and other accoutrements of a comfortable experience in the countryside. The Gazebo Generation are not the mythical 'kids' chasing big name bands and the authenticity of festival primitivism. They are more refined, having traded in NME/Mixmag for the Guardian, and in no hurry to run from stage to stage, or for that matter, in any hurry to do anything much at all. This is, after-all, the Big Chill. I suppose it's the 'kid' in me that feels a little cheated, but it's the gazebo in me that hauled arse to Herefordshire and besides, I really like Pimms.

All that said it seems only fair to review the festival itself, and not just its technophilic inhabitants.