'The V You Don't See': Dangerous Crushes, Diva Demands and Exclusive Beyoncé Pictures

The allure of the large, outdoor music festival has always eluded me. The few sprawling, open-air gigs I've been to over the years have been rather soulless affairs. The sound is often poor and most of the audience end up watching on TV screens because they can't get anywhere near the stage.

Atmosphere has always been curiously lacking. The visceral experience of a live gig is lost in the expanse of the setting - any funk or soul which may be emanating from the stage seems to just sort of waft away into the sky before it ever reaches anybody beyond about the first 10 rows. Beyond that invisible barrier, the only people having a good time usually appear to be off their faces on drink, drugs or both. My ethos is, and always has been, that if the gig is so crappy you have to be on drugs to enjoy it, why bother going?

Bootsy Collins' road manager had me admitted to the O2 Wireless festival for free in 2008, when Bootsy performed there on his James Brown tribute tour. I only lasted a few hours. I was surrounded by ridiculous hipsters, sporting bow-ties and fluorescent plastic sunglasses frames with no lenses in, and quickly tired of being constantly offered pills by tweaking ravers.

The thought of stretching that experience across two days, adding into the mix a complete lack of showers and only a few hundred increasingly grim portable toilets for comfort, is pretty much my idea of hell.

It is for this reason that despite living only 25 minutes from V Festival - an enormous, two-day, outdoor event which is screened every year on Channel 4 - I have never even considered going. The line-up has never excited me, the tickets are incredibly expensive and the entire thing just sounded exhausting.

It was an amusing twist of fate, therefore, that this year I was awarded a V Festival press pass. It was one of seven that was allocated to my newspaper after it agreed to publish a 12-page commemorative pull-out about the event. I had to think long and hard about whether or not I wanted to go. I was leaning towards 'not', but my editor was proposing a fantastic journalistic exercise; a photographer covering every act on the main stage and six reporters roving around the event, interviewing crowd members, reviewing acts, collecting amusing news items and blogging about their firsthand experiences. I told him that if he needed me there, I would be there.

To recount the entire weekend would take a lot of time and a lot of words. What I will say is this: It was an eye-opener. Our press passes gave us almost complete access to the festival; the right to use staff entrances and exits, free entry to a garden full of celebrities, and a fleet of airport buggies to ferry us wherever we wanted to go. Despite this, it was about as unglamorous an experience as you could imagine (even if we did have our own luxury toilets).

Being backstage gave us almost zero access to celebrities, but full knowledge of all their ridiculous diva demands. For instance, Beyoncé - upset by some unflattering pictures taken of her at the Superbowl - banned all photographers from taking pictures in front of the stage (the only act across the entire two-day, five-stage festival to make such a demand) and forced them to take pictures from about 100 yards away. She - along with Jessie J - also forced photographers to sign away the syndication rights to all of their photographs, preventing them from earning any money from their own work.

A band called The Heavy demanded that their agent personally approve every single picture taken during their performance before they could be published. Photographers boycotted them as a result, meaning they got no coverage at all - so it's fair to say that particular celebrity whinge backfired somewhat. Elsewhere, nobody was allowed to move (literally) in the backstage area when Beyoncé decided to leave her dressing room - and journalists were told off in a press area for looking at UK pop singer Olly Murs.

I documented much of this insanity in a pair of blog posts. In the first, I described almost being injured in a dangerous crush ahead of Beyoncé's performance. I was compelled to write the piece after witnessing dozens of fans being pulled from the squeeze either in tears or barely conscious. In my personal opinion, unless organisers find some way to prevent this from happening in years to come, it is only a matter of time until somebody is seriously injured.

In the second blog post, I recounted the farcical incident in which I and other journalists were reprimanded for looking at singer Olly Murs in the Media Garden.

After the crush on the first night, I swore I would never return. My stance has since softened slightly, although if I do ever go back, it certainly won't be as a paying customer (caveats, such as a headline slot by Prince, may apply).

At the end of the second day, my news editor asked me what had been my festival highlight. I really struggled to think of anything. I had enjoyed some acts - The Stereophonics, Laura Mvula - but none had left me especially excited and overall, it had been an exhausting and slightly disturbing experience.

Then, it suddenly came to me; my highlight had been writing about it. For all the craziness - the frustration at the celebrities' outrageous demands, the dangerous crushing in the crowds, the audience teeming with drunken and possibly drugged lunatics - it had been fantastic to have that unique combination; enough access to know about the backstage madness and enough freedom to write about it. Traditional media outlets never write about that stuff. They're scared to be critical in case they jeopardise their access to free tickets the following year. I, conversely, didn't give two hoots whether I was ever invited back again, so I laid it all out for the reader; showed them - as we later coined it in the news room - 'The V You Don't See'. I got a lot of comments on Facebook and Twitter which suggested to me that people had enjoyed reading about the hidden side of music festivals and what it's really like backstage.

If I do go back next year, it will be with a view to producing more of the same.

I took a lot of photos at the festival, which didn't get used anywhere - so this blog is going to serve as a sort of V Festival Scrapbook. Enjoy.

The Calm Before The Storm

The Gates Open

James

The Comedy Tent - Josh Widdecombe and Shappi Khorsandi

Beyoncé

Seasick Steve and Olly Murs spotted in the Media Garden

Laura Mvula

Emile Sandé

Stereophonics

Kings of Leon

Common sense prevails in X Factor final while snobbery prevails on Facebook

For a brief moment during tonight's X Factor final, Joe McElderry's victory seemed to be in question. Before Olly Murs performed the winner's single, Simon Cowell introduced him to the stage with a knowing smile. "Singing for what could be his last time on the X Factor, although I've got a feeling it won't be," he beamed, "Olly Murs."

I wondered: 'Does he know something we don't?'

He didn't. Olly promptly murdered the winner's song - 'The Climb' - although Cowell, who was apparently experiencing the performance through a haze of mushroom-induced hallucination, proceeded to heap praise upon it anyway.

Moments later Joe McElderry took the stage and made Olly's performance look like amateur hour, giving several of the night's ropey guest performers a lesson in vocal dexterity while he was at it.

With his soaring vocals and his cheery disposition, Joe had to win this year's competition. The show was a one horse race from beginning to end, McElderry being the only stand-out vocalist of the series, easily outshining the competition every week. That he found himself in the final with a wobbly-legged Austin Drage impersonator was indicative of this year's talent drought. Even the real Austin Drage didn't make it past week four.

Newly released figures reveal that Joe ranked highly in the phone polls every week and won the last five shows of the series by a large majority, eventually beating Olly in the live final by a margin of almost 25%.

But already McElderry has been the target of overwhelming cynicism and nasty abuse on various blogs and social networking websites, much of it laced with subtle homophobia; Joe "belongs in musical theatre." The winner's single "suits Joe better because it's a girls' song."

Olly is a geezer; a snappily dressed Essex boy with a couple of dance moves under his belt that might be passable on a drunken night out in Bas Vegas. With tabloid coverage of his serial womanising and frequent mention of his apparent football skills, he's become a hero to blokey blokes up and down the country.

Joe, by comparison, is young and a tad effeminate. A drama school student, Joe is self-confessedly bored by sports, prefers to hang around with girls and tends towards ballads. He has reportedly not had a girlfriend since his early teens and a friend today claimed that he "was teased for years about his sexuality." While the friend states that at the time Joe 'was adamant he wasn't gay', the friend never states outright that he's straight.

Olly's fanbase has seemingly come to view Joe as a sissy and apparently feels that its jack-the-lad hero has been robbed. Seems to me like just another case of pointless belly-aching. Perhaps if Olly's fans had picked up their phones and voted a couple of times each then he wouldn't have lost so spectacularly.

As for Joe's tendency towards ballads - that apparent fault only served to highlight how much more talented he really was than his competitor. While Olly chose to hide behind big productions - chasing girls around the stage to loud backing tracks which disguised his often breathless vocals - Joe wasn't reliant on gimmicks. Tonight his talent has been deservedly rewarded.

Congratulations Joe - a worthy winner.

Elsewhere, the X Factor has been targeted in recent weeks by a series of vindictive campaigns to prevent this year's winner from taking the Christmas number one spot.

One such campaign, started on Facebook, aims to send Rage Against The Machine to the number one spot this year. Very christmassy. What exactly do they think they're striking a blow for? What will be achieved by sending an already filthy-rich act to the top of the charts? In what way is that combatting the supposed capitalist conspiracy they're campaigning against?

Cowell's label Syco is a branch of Sony. Sony owns Rage Against The Machine. So the money will end up in Sony's coffers either way.

Another campaign aims to send Dame Vera Lynn's 'We'll Meet Again' to the top of the charts instead of this year's X Factor winner. Why? Dame Vera Lynn didn't write or compose 'We'll Meet Again', so what exactly makes her a more legitimate artist than Joe McElderry?

The campaign is predicated on nothing more than snobbery; an assumption that anybody who enters the X Factor is a fame hungry mongrel and anybody who watches the show or buys the singles is a moron, incapable of independent thought. Such campaigns are mean-spirited and condescending.

The campaigns purport to be striking a blow against Simon Cowell's capitalist regime. However, in reality these campaigns will still favour the rich, lavishing cash upon already famous acts rather than sending it into the bank account of a young, working class lad whose only opportunity to achieve his dream is to enter a competition like the X Factor. That Christmas number one spot could change Joe McElderry's life, affording he and his family a better quality of life and opening doors that would otherwise have remained forever closed.

If the X Factor single were to lose a Christmas number one battle fair and square, that would be a different matter altogether. But these campaigns actively encourage people to buy music not because they want to listen to it, but for the specific purpose of crushing another person's dreams. Such campaigns are not only unfair, they are fundamentally spiteful.

Should any of these campaigns succeed in their aim, the impact on Cowell will be non-existent. He will still celebrate another carefree Christmas in his LA mansion. All they will achieve is to crush the spirit of a young boy who has spent much of this year working hard towards his lifelong dream.