What's Parklife like sober?
More and more young people are going sober, but are festivals picking up on the trend?
I went to Parklife to find out
It took 42 minutes for the girl to cross the festival ground to the medical tent 200 yards away.
Her face was fixed into a garish grin as she flung herself repeatedly to the ground, rolled over several times, launched herself at bystanders and wriggled out of the hands of the baffled group of friends trying to escort her to safety.
Two security staff and a paramedic looked on, puzzled and seemingly powerless.
She’d taken too much of something - MDMA, maybe - but not enough to pass out and be hauled away on a stretcher. And so, she was convulsively frogmarched by her friends across the field while the hundreds of festival-goers around her barely batted an eyelid.
As I watched this spectacle unfold, any shred of envy I might have felt about the people around me throwing themselves onto dance floors with drink and drug-fuelled abandon instantly evaporated.
I was at Parklife. Sober.
Festivals in Britain are synonymous with alcohol and drug culture. Around 80 percent of festival-goers dabble in some form of intoxication or other, according to the latest data.
At the same time, sobriety movements have been on the rise among younger generations since lockdown ended. Is this trend visible in festival culture?
Is it getting easier for sober people to join the party?
“I would love to say it’s gotten better, but it just hasn’t,” said DJ Paulette, who performs regularly at Parklife and has been sober for more than five years.
“I really want to bang my drum for those who want to party but not drink. There are a few of us, you know. And quite a few DJs, too.
“And none of these events really caters for sober people.”
Parklife was no exception to this, Paulette told me.
The city festival, which takes over Heaton Park for two days each June, is the biggest non-camping event of its kind in the UK.
Organised by Manchester nightlife veterans The Warehouse Project and entertainment company Live Nation, Parklife hosts a pick-a-mix range of genres, from Hip-hop to House and Dance to DnB.
This year it attracted the likes of Little Simz, Aitch and The 1975, along with more than 170 other acts.
It is one big party.
When I arrived at Heaton Park on June 10, I was one of 80,000 people who made their way through the security barriers that day.
It was just past noon, an hour into the festival, and a young man with a canister of laughing gas was being handcuffed next to a long line of police vans by the entrance. Parklife had warned about its “zero tolerance” policy for drugs and legal highs, but it was clear attendees had other plans.
Inside the festival grounds, thrumming basslines competed between the two largest of the eight Parklife stages, a ferris wheel attracted squeals of excitement and the bar tents teemed with ice-lolly wielding partygoers.
And everyone in sight was busy getting on it.
Whether it was the neon-clad teens smelling their house keys, or shirtless twenty-somethings carrying a round of drinks painstakingly calculated for maximum percentage-to-price ratio, there was certainly no sign of a ‘sobriety trend’.
Here, drink, drugs and drum and bass reigned supreme.
As a first-time sober partyer, I felt suddenly out of my depth.
But statistics told me that around nine to 24 percent of attendees don’t drink at festivals. Even at conservative estimates, I was one of approximately 8,000 abstainers in Heaton Park that day.
“You can feel a bit of an outcast because everyone else is drunk and you’re not,” said Charles Cornall, 26, one such sober Parklife attendee.
It was the first time he’d been to a festival without drinking since 2014.
“Three of the friends I was with were drinking, so they were kind of asking, 'Why aren't you? And is this going to limit our fun because you're not drinking?'"said Charles.
"But as soon as you get over that hurdle, it's fine.
“There’s a certain placebo effect as well. You can stay on their level - to an extent.”
However, every now and again, the difference in experiences makes itself known.
“Maybe five whiskeys in, they’re wanting to hear some different music to someone who’s five waters in,” said Charles.
“And if you’re sober, you’re surrounded by people walking out of portaloos - they’ve obviously just gone and sniffed something -, there’s people lying around that’ve had too much to drink and are throwing up, and you’re like, ‘Woah, this is chaotic.’
“If you’re drinking, it feels so normal. But when you’re not, it’s like you’re walking through a battlefield.”
On a quick stocktake of my surroundings eight hours into the festivities, I counted three girls drunk-crying, another starting a fight and two people retching behind the bins.
Just another day in the park?
Dillan Rafferty Jagdev, 24, an experienced sober raver, said: “I don’t find it hard being around these really drunk people. I just think, ‘Thank God I'm not like you right now.’”
For DJ Paulette, it’s not the drunks that are the problem - it’s the drinks.
DJ Paulette in Albert Schloss' disco toilets
DJ Paulette in Albert Schloss' disco toilets
“I know if I go to the people's side of it, I will find it really hard to get anything other than a Coke, or water or a Fanta. And I don’t like fizzy drinks, so I’ll just be stuck with water,” she said, sipping demonstratively on a mocktail of her own invention, a few days before Parklife.
“At camping festivals, the tea trucks go home at midnight, and then you can only get alcohol. That's really not fair. Where’s my drink?”
Even as a VIP, her choices are limited.
“On my rider (the request list performers send to event organisers), I’ll have alcohol for my guests and then I’ll have my non-alcoholic drinks,” said Paulette, 56, who started her career at the No1 and legendary Manchester club Hacienda and has since played everything from Ibiza to Glastonbury.
“But people just think I’m taking the p*ss, or that it’s a test, or a trick.
“So, invariably, the non-alcoholic stuff - the teas, the Nozeco, the apple juice - will not get ordered, but the vodka, the beers, they’ll be there. It’s a massive frustration.”
Paulette thinks festival organisers could do more to accommodate people who don’t drink.
“How long did it take for people to start offering vegan food? And now you can get it everywhere. Whatever the mentality was behind starting to offer plant-based options on every menu, (the senior management) needs to apply it to the drinks options too.
“Of course, it needs to be financially viable - I get that. But there’s a discussion to be had here.”
Perhaps those discussions are starting to be had. Parklife didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article, but there were more non-alcoholic drinks on offer this year than ever before.
A zero percent beer and a Paloma-flavoured mocktail, two of the no-alcohol drinks on sale.
At £6 each, they didn't come cheap - and were only 20p less than beer.
As well as soft drinks, the festival bars offered three tins of no-alcohol substitutes: one vitamin-infused Erdinger beer and two 250ml tinned mocktails.
The Bacardi stall also offered No-jitos, there were separate soft-drinks stands set up across the grounds, and a number of the food trucks sold teas and coffees.
Did the level of variety compare to the 18 alcoholic options at each bar stand, the Smirnoff ice slushy bar, the choice of seven cocktails at the Toucan Bar, eight at Casa Bacardi, or the duo of (questionable) concoctions offered up in the Jagermeister tent?
Well, no.
But it was the first sign at the festival that habits are changing.
Statistics show growing numbers of people are cutting out alcohol. This is especially true among millennials and Gen Zers, though the reasons are not generation-specific.
Teetotallers list religion, cost and health as key factors. But motivations range from personal preference to self-preservation.
For sober raver Dillan, it’s a simple matter of “I just don't really like the taste of most alcohol”.
While Sara*, 22, a teetotaller who recently started attending festivals, said: “My mum was very dependent on alcohol when me and my siblings were all very young. So, I just have bad associations with alcohol.”
Charles, who is just launching his own health drink company, added: “It’s mostly so I can focus on that. But also, I don't think I can just have one or two drinks and enjoy it. So I'm pulling myself out of the drinking culture until I can.
“I don’t actually see anything wrong with drinking. But I see an issue with it when you've necked 10 cocktails and you don't know what your name is. Binge culture is so prevalent in society.”
Sobriety is often backgrounded by negative encounters with alcohol, especially following the first pandemic lockdowns which saw an uptick in harmful drinking and dependencies.
The ONS measured a 27% increase in alcohol-specific deaths between 2019 and 2021, which UK drinking charity Drinkaware described as “absolutely devastating”.
DJ Paulette said: “Most of my friends went straight into the bottle. I could hear all my neighbour's bins clinking. Mine was the only glass recycling bin on my road that was never full.
“It was scary watching people disappear into alcohol.”
Her sober journey started in 2016 for health reasons, but the last time she drank was in 2018 - at Parklife. The hangover that hit her was “brutal - it was savage”. It also had a huge impact on her mental health.
Which was what ultimately crystallised her conviction to stay teetotal.
“When you’re not sober, you don't know whether it's a comedown or if you're actually really depressed. You don't know if it's a hangover, or if you actually want to kill yourself. You have to get rid of those things, so that you can see what you're dealing with.”
However, Paulette is keen to stress she’s not trying to stop people drinking altogether – rather she wants to encourage them to give sobriety a go from time to time.
“I'm not one of these ‘everybody mustn't drink’ people. I work in hospitality, I'm kind of here to encourage people to drink,” she said.
“But I do think people should give it a try every now and again. Your biological health and your mental health and everything just changes drastically when you stop drinking.”
*Name changed for privacy.
Partying sober was a very different experience, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy festival culture. I just found I had to carve out a space for myself.
That realization dawned on me a few hours into the festival, as I stood in Parklife’s Glitterbox tent watching DJ Paulette’s set.
Plumes of dust kicked up by dancing feet hung heavy in the air, catching the light from pink and purple lasers that emerged from a labyrinth of disco balls above the stage. Dancers and drag performers vogued in front of the DJ deck. The beat of the music pulsated through the room, and despite being someone who usually needs the aggressive reinforcement of a tequila shot to attempt a gentle two-step, I found myself… dancing.
Not drunk-dancing.
Joy-dancing.
“Going sober, it’s just an alternative way to enjoy the music and atmosphere of a festival,” Sara said.
“You get to see more,” Charles added. “I saw every act I wanted to see in a day! Personally, I think you might even get to enjoy it more.”
Dillan agreed. “I pay more attention to the music sober,” he said. “And we're all there for the music, right?”
People go to festivals to feel free. The dressing up, the drinks, the drugs - they’re all a way of loosening the usual restrictions that govern our lives, of roaming wild.
Doing this all without the crutch of external substances isn’t easy, but it is powerful.
And I certainly didn’t miss the hangover on Sunday morning.
“Parklife, it’s a playground, it’s a full on playground,” said DJ Paulette. “What it offers for non drinkers is not the same.
“But what I would say is: go for the music.”
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