Duran Duran finished at half ten and I could still hear the bassline in Camden, and I have thoughts about that

I live a genuinely inconvenient distance from Hyde Park to have any legitimate complaint about BST, and yet here I am, complaining, mildly, about a bassline that reached me somewhere around Camden Road at half ten on a Sunday night, because apparently that is simply what living in this city during festival season involves now.

What Actually Happened This Year

BST Hyde Park ran from late June through 12 July, with a genuinely stacked lineup, Garth Brooks, Maroon 5, Mumford and Sons, Duran Duran, Pitbull, Lewis Capaldi among others, drawing the kind of crowds that turn the surrounding tube stations into something resembling a controlled crush for a few hours each evening. I did not attend a single date. I heard four of them from my flat.

The Genuinely Difficult Bit

Here is my honest problem with complaining about this, and I think it is a fair one: BST brings genuine, significant money into the city, supports an enormous amount of local hospitality and transport activity, and gives several hundred thousand people a properly good night out across the run. Begrudging that from several miles away because a bassline occasionally reaches my bedroom window feels, even to me, like a fairly weak position to argue with any real conviction.

And Yet

And yet residents actually near the park, the ones on Bayswater Road and around Lancaster Gate, deal with considerably more than a faint bassline, road closures, crowd noise well past any reasonable bedtime, and the particular chaos of several thousand slightly merry concertgoers attempting to find a night bus simultaneously. Their complaints, when they surface in the local press, tend to get the standard response every year: the festival has a licence, the licence has conditions, the conditions are broadly being met, thank you for your patience.

A Word For The Organisers

To be fair to the organisers, BST has genuinely tightened its sound management over the past several years, and this year’s run drew noticeably fewer formal noise complaints than in previous seasons, according to reporting from The Standard, a detail that deserves acknowledging rather than ignoring simply because it complicates my mild grumbling.

What The Ticket Holders Say

Talk to anyone who actually went, meanwhile, and you get a completely different account, one involving genuinely brilliant sets, a lovely atmosphere in the park itself, and not a single thought spared for anyone several postcodes away mildly inconvenienced by a bassline. Which is, frankly, exactly as it should be. You do not go to a festival to worry about Camden.

Where I’ve Landed On It

I think the honest position is this: festivals like BST are a genuinely good, valuable part of what makes London London, and the modest, occasional inconvenience to people well outside the immediate vicinity is a fair price for that, provided the people actually living on top of it continue to have somewhere real to take their complaints, and provided those complaints continue to be taken seriously rather than filed away as an inevitable cost of doing business.

Next Year’s Plan

I am, provisionally, considering actually buying a ticket next year rather than just receiving the concert for free through my bedroom wall, which feels like the more honest way to have an opinion about any of this. More of London’s summer events calendar, as ever, over at my page on The London Prat.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com