I recently went to All Together Now, marking my third festival with zero alcohol or tobacco and my second festival with no alcohol, tobacco or drugs of any kind (I had a hilariously bad experience with a brownie at Another Love Story last year). Since quitting alcohol two years ago and smoking last year, I honestly thought that experiences like music festivals would not be the same, and the effort of going to one would be heavier than the potential joys I would experience.
I don’t want you to go into this article thinking I’m some joyless freak, who probably gets off on not doing anything fun. Let me rhapsodise briefly, because I really want to impress upon you how much I appreciate the joys of smoking and drinking, especially at a festival. There is nothing I can romanticise harder than lighting a rollie in a sunlit field, sitting on dry summer grass. Cracking open a can of beer as you begin that stomping trudge to the next stage. When you have a Deep Meaningful Conversation (DMC) with your best friends at 2am, lying under the stars and somehow avoiding getting stepped on by your fellow festivalgoers.
In recent years, these moments had petered out, even with alcohol and tobacco in the equation. I couldn’t stay awake long enough to get drunk enough to have a 2am DMC, but I could certainly get drunk enough that I battled horrific anxiety and sickness the following day (or two).
As for smoking, I began to notice that the romance of lighting a rollie was almost instantly extinguished after my first inhalation. The nicotine craving now quenched, all that remained was a dry throat and a bad taste. As I looked at the ashtray on my balcony, at all the half-smoked rollies, 5-10 per day on the balcony alone, I realised that I don’t actually like smoking anymore. However, there was more to that decision, as there was to my alcohol cessation (that story involves several days of diarrhoea).
In summary, I’m not a joyless freak, but I could no longer pretend that there was any joy in drinking or smoking for me anymore. I hate to be the one to tell you, but generally being alcohol-free is the best thing ever. If you’re wondering whether or not it has made me smug, it absolutely has.
So, those decisions brought me to All Together Now 2025 with no alcohol and no tobacco. What’s that like?
In short, grand. If you’re feeling generally grand, and if you enjoy festivals, then it’s grand.
One great thing is that being sober doesn’t stop you from being “Festival You”. One reason that people go to festivals to be released from their normal social inhibitions. They often assume, as I always did too, that this will require a bit of Dutch courage.
Most people are drunk or high, and so assume that you are as well. Their judgment is impaired, therefore you lose your fear of being judged. You can do your silly wavey dancing and show off what I referred to as “ass cleavage” (actually, more of an “underboob” equivalent, wearing a skirt short enough that the bottom of your cheeks is just about visible. “Ass cleavage” would be showing crack, and I’m too millennial to wear anything that isn’t high-waisted). Essentially, you get to be drunk without the hangover, and you can instantly snap out of it the moment it stops being fun.
Being sober is the best cure for anxiety, and not just for straightforward chemical reasons. When you’re sober, you can clearly see how little anyone else notices or gives a shit (in a good way) about you or what you’re doing. And, after a certain point in the night, you see how most people don’t seem capable of seeing anything at all.
It’s a bit disconcerting, seeing hordes of beautiful twenty year olds with glassy eyes and legs like baby foals stomping towards you, clutching big cans in their tiny hands. You feel that, if you don’t dodge, they will bounce off your stolid thirty-one year old body and, before you know it, you have created a twenty-child pile-up. They will lie in their pile of jerking limbs, still staring with giant pupils, thinking they’re still stomping their way to see Bicep, until someone comes and untangles them. Or lads lads lads, in one great shoving mass. Trying for big man energy but they are striding for all the world like Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte on the streets of Manhattan.
However, with the vast majority of your fellow attendees being totally legless, you realise that you could do all the things you want to without fear of judgement. For me, that involves taking my annual Wild Wee, barely visible among some trees. Dream big, you say? You’re underestimating how much I love an outdoor urination. And how long festival toilet queues are after 9pm.
All of that nice stuff said, there is a definite feeling of disconnect for the sober festival attendee. Because that thing about people not noticing or giving a shit about anyone else has a bad side (as you might have suspected).
Now, what a lot of people feel at a festival is togetherness, community. This festival is literally named All Together Now. To be fair, you do feel it sometimes. You feel it when you’re lying out at the bandstand, half-listening to the performer but mostly just dozing off in the sunshine with hundreds of other people. You feel it when you turn to the person behind you in the toilet queue to first roll your eyes, then loudly complain about the person taking upwards of ten minutes to take a dump or do a line of something, neither of which need to take ten minutes.
But you start to lose touch with your fellow man when you see that someone has taken all the fresh toilet roll out of the portaloos and strewn them on the grass. Or you pass the tent where shit music has tinnily been blasting for 12 hours, with five or six people sitting in a circle of camp chairs, near comatose except for a guy in a weed-patterned bucket hat who is almost shouting. Or the dreaded 11pm influx to the festival grounds of people who have been in those camp chair circles for the entire day, only now surging to see whatever is on, dead boys and girls walking. Now, that’s what I call joyless.
Or, horror of horrors, the final morning. People clear out, leaving vast scatterings of rubbish in their wake. Tents, cans, waterlogged pillows, boxes, camp chairs, vapes. Fuck these people, fuck them five ways to Sunday and comfort yourself with the thought that the skag they are about to experience is worse than anything you’ve felt in years. These specific people are the worst, and if you’ve ever done this, I hope that you are suitably ashamed, turned your life around, and now volunteer with young people who are at risk of becoming as shitheaded as once you were.
But I’m being unfair to the vast amounts of drunk young people who do not leave their shit everywhere for someone else to clean up. The vast majority of these babies are good, normal people. My own personal baggage around drunkenness is mine and not theirs. I’ve noticed a puritanical tendency, even a compulsion, in me since I quit drinking, and a feeling of panic at the thought of inebriation that is certainly a sign of this being my problem. In short, these kids are triggering me.
One morning, I lay in my tent trying to nap as I heard a young lad approach the tent beside mine.
“Well lads what’s the fuckin’ storEEEEE!” came the voice. I rolled my eyes and got ready to listen, to try to remember all the heinous things that this young man was about to say so that I could repeat them to everyone for the next few weeks. What I heard instead was a pleasant conversation, and weirdly his chatting comforted me so much that I dozed off.
It’s clear that there is something addictive for me in judging these kids. Maybe it’s as intoxicating as alcohol used to be. Intoxicating in the sense that it stimulates me, and it poisons me. It makes me meaner, less charitable. In the tent, listening to the young fella, I stopped trying to be outraged by him. A comfort descended, soothing me to sleep.
As an aside, I remember once telling my therapist about two separate issues that were bothering me. One was that I was feeling incredibly insecure and felt as though people were judging me everywhere I went. The other was that other people were really irritating me, especially strangers, everywhere I went. My therapist brought me to the now-obvious realisation – if you’re spending all that time hating and judging others, you assume that they are doing the same to you. Your meanness towards others makes you mean to yourself. After all, you’re the only person actually listening to your internal vitriol constantly.
What I see at the festival is a mob, off their faces and rendered totally antisocial. What I neglect to see is that this mass of arseholes is made up mostly of individuals who are temporarily messy, and who are not permanently these people. (TW: mentions of getting sick until end of paragraph) I have certainly puked at festivals (even as recently as my Another Love Story whitey, though I actually managed to get every single drop into a bin bag). In my twenties, I gurned and I chomped my jaws and weaved through crowds, bumping gracelessly into indignant people, pausing occasionally to chunder. What I remember about those messy times were the sweet strangers, often people in their thirties, who rushed over to pat my back and make sure I had friends or I knew where I was going. (End of getting sick TW)
This brings me to my biggest learning of the weekend. Perhaps it’s age and not sobriety that is the greatest contributor to my feeling of disconnect. Generally, people in their thirties and older do not have to spend too much time in the company or sharing the same resources as people in their late teens and early twenties. It really isn’t much fun having to do this. I find myself wishing there was some premium ticket where I could choose to be in a different plane of existence from twenty year olds.
I had already had a taste of this intergenerational clash in June, at Charli XCX at Malahide Castle. On the train, two teenagers were charitably saying to one another “It’s nice that there are so many older people going to this”. They then began talking about who in their friend group would be “on the bag” at the concert (spoiler: most of them. Except “Aideen. Aideen never does coke.”). At the concert, it appeared that all of the infant worshippers of Miz XCX had been raiding Urban Outfitters. Bedecked in sunglasses that looked like something that would have come free with Sugar Magazine in 2005, with giant belts on tiny skirts, mixing their 00s references bafflingly (you can be boho chic OR you can be Playboy bunny on her day off in Von Dutch, you have to pick just one), these children thought they were the cat’s pyjamas.
As Charli flung herself around the stage for an energetic hour, several what we call d’young peeple near us were unable to stand, and others were coke-ignorant of personal space. My bitter millennial brain had an epiphany: being brat is only subversive if you’re too old to really be a brat. brat is about the tension between wanting to grow up and wanting to stay young. It’s about liberating yourself from the maturity of this seeming next stage of life, unsure as you are to embrace it just yet.
A young person trying to be brat is literally just a brat. They stomp around in tiny skirts, thinking that they’re being subversive by being ignorant, when in fact they’re acting as God intended. Also, when discussing the youth, I keep invoking a God I do not believe in. I keep saying “God love them” or “God be with the days”. I never felt older than I did overhearing someone that night, as we surged through the crowds in Malahide to get the Dart home: “It’s giving queue.”
The age tension is the real difference here. Kids will overdo it, get legless, say stupid things. They also might not, but they will still be treated like a potential mess by the older people around them. Their elder festival attendees judge them to be drunk babies whether they are or not.
But this is not fair, and, young as these people are, they’re not idiots (or, at least, they have similar idiot-to-non-idiot ratios as older demographics do). They sense the underlying and sometimes blatant disrespect. I always sensed it. I remember, years ago, you’d get chatting to an older woman in a bathroom or a smoking area. They’d pretend for a few seconds to listen to whatever you were saying, then interrupt and ask your age, only to laugh ruefully and give you some shit like “Oh my God, you’re twenty-four, you don’t even know anything yet.” You are instantly dismissed.
I resented them because I had silently chosen not to judge them for their blatant out-of-dateness. I had thought that I should be chatty and respectful in a “respecting my elders” kind of way. Maybe they sensed that. Just as I sense it now, when a young person is very chatty with me. I feel my hackles raise slightly, at the thought that they think I need this.
We’re all just trying to protect ourselves. So here is my solution.
As an over-30-year-old, I hereby vow:
- Not to act like your age is somehow an insult to my age
- To see you as a distinct person rather than a “young person”
Please allow me to continue mocking your weird Gen Z/Alpha fashion.
Will all young people please vow:
- Not to give me compliments solely because you think I’m sad to be older than you
- To sometimes consider the volume at which you speak
I will allow you to continue mocking my weird millennial high-waisted clothes and matte makeup.
I’ll leave you with another moment that stuck with me from the Charli XCX concert.
That night in Malahide, as a train finally approached, a girl near me said, to the general agreement of her peers, “It’s giving train”.
