TRAVEL SPECIAL: Music festivals 2008

SOMETHING strange has happened to the rock festival. Like a mobile phone that can take pictures, surf the net, e-mail and go shopping for you, the festival is now also a literary event, comedy show, film season and night at the theatre rolled into one.

It is smaller (“boutique”, sweetie), smarter, and as middle-class as membership of the National Film Theatre.

Latitude, the Southwold gathering that bills itself as “more than just a music festival”, is the best example of the summer mudfest's gentrification.Set in rolling pastures near pretty woodland and a lovely lake, it offers a smorgasbord of top names in music, comedy, literature, theatre and film.

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This year features, among others, Franz Ferdinand, Martha Wainwright, Bill Bailey, Iain Banks and the Royal Court Theatre. In fact, there is so much to see at Latitude, you end up feeling guilty all the time about what you're missing in another tent.

At £130 a ticket, it's fantastic value, but not much of a party. A great festival is about letting your hair down, drinking too much, dancing with complete strangers; forgetting, for a while, your age, your job, your worries and that your life is, frankly, pretty dull. Festivals are there, whether you are 16 or 66, to make you feel young.

You won't feel young at Latitude, even though everyone there makes a big effort to look it. The people are pretty, in a designer-boutique, boho, Botoxed sort of way, and looked as if they had been teleported from Primrose Hill. Some, with their foldaway chairs, Sunday papers and picnic rugs, looked as if they had taken a wrong turning from Aldeburgh.

It was all mildly disconcerting. We saw an endless queue of exhausted thirtysomething yummy mummies in Cath Kidston wellies, hubbies in tow, filling up bottles from a single dripping water tap. A pre-fab supermarket with half-empty shelves and a mob-like atmosphere inside was a glimpse into a Ballardian dystopia: this will be Islington's local Waitrose when the world's food runs out.

And then there are the prices. If you are going to Latitude this year, raid the bank account. I was a little taken aback when I went to buy the programme, and was told it cost £8. I felt the same way when I bought two egg and bacon baguettes, with two bottles of water, for £16.

Beers and wine were standard for a festival, at about £3.50. A mummified burger, minus any chips or leaves, cost £6. For all I know, it was probably just a pan-fried programme.

Most festivals are a rip-off once you get inside, but something about this one jarred. Latitude's organisers have created a more highbrow cultural event, marketed it to a Hay-on-Wye crowd and yet not bothered to raise the stakes when it comes to the food and the state of the toilets - which were disgusting. Far bigger, less pretentious festivals, such as the 50,000-strong Isle of Wight, offer better-value food and usable loos.

I left Latitude feeling worthy, mildly stressed (it's hard work, you know, rushing around to tick off everything in that bulging programme), but short-changed in pocket and in the fun department. Thank God, then, for Secret Garden Party, which I went to two weeks later.

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