If you’re in a band that regularly submits for festival gigs, you have some ambition. You’ve most likely been having regular band rehearsals, and you have enough gigs under your belt that you feel your band can handle the particular demands of a festival set.
What demands, you ask? A festival set is usually under an hour, while the typical bar gig runs 3-4 hours, so if you can do regular bar gigs, you’re ready for festivals, right? Well, not necessarily.
Longer gigs have a different pace to them, and while the bands play much longer, they are paced differently. Also, the audience will have more turnover than at a festival gig. The band is entertainment, yes, but it’s just part of a fun night out for most of the patrons, and they often do a considerable amount of talking amongst their friends during the performance. So, as a result, the bar band’s set will feature more songs that don’t require rapt attention to be enjoyed. There’s an ebb and flow in the energy over the 3-4 hours, and within each set.
A festival set, while considerably shorter, places much more demands on the band, because you have to be able to impress an audience immediately, and within the relatively short space of the set, win them over and provide a memorable experience. And the audience is out there, facing YOU in their chairs. They’re daring you to entertain them. You don’t get to “dial in” your harmonies or get your licks going during the set – that has to be done backstage, before the set.
During a 3+ hour set at a bar, an occasional clunker of a note or a missed cue is just a passing concern. If one song comes off as a stinker, there’s always the next 4 to make up for it. Heck, nobody was really listening anyway.
At a festival, if you crash and burn on stage, you’ll not only create a lasting negative impression for your audience, the promoter will notice too, and trust me, as stated in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, nothing in the universe travels faster than bad news. You lay a big egg at a festival, it takes a long time before the talent decision-makers will overlook it.
It’s not fair, really. Even a good band can have something go awry during a set. If you’ve proven yourself, this would likely be forgiven. But if it’s your band’s first performance in a certain town, at a certain festival or for a certain promoter, you’ll find that first impressions can be persistent, and the chances to make a second impression hard to come by. It’s also not fair that there are more good bands than there are festival slots to accommodate them. This means at that level, you are competing with your friends in other bands.
So, with ambition comes pressure, and while the rewards are great (although they’re more spiritually gratifying than financial), the disappointments and letdowns are galling. For some, they can take the fun right out of playing music. If your band is passed over for a festival’s lineup, and you really felt you belonged on that festival’s stage, it hurts. But if you really belong on the big stage, you just have to push back the hurt, and try even harder to make your band impossible to ignore.
