Britain has never been good at drive-ins. Historically our cars have been too small for comfort and unsuitable for making out. At British drive-ins the answer to the question, “Is that a gear stick, or are you just pleased to see me?” has always been, “It’s the gear stick.”
This summer things are going to change. Now you’ve watched everything on Netflix, written a terrible novel and made a matchstick replica of the Hagia Sophia, you’re looking for a cultural fix beyond the front door. The answer? Follow Boris Johnson’s injunction to support the economy by driving to Newark show ground next month for what’s billed as the UK’s first drive-in music festival. It could be like Glastonbury with air-con.
True, you’ll be despoiling the planet just to get there, and, yes, the 10-day festival involves tribute acts impersonating Take That, Elton John, Billy Joel, Abba, the Killers and Elvis from a giant stage whose audio is pumped through your vehicle’s speakers, while you take receipt of street food from staff in PPE.
Is hand jiving to Dancing Queen from inside a stationary Ford Focus on your bucket list? Mine neither. Yet Steve Marson from organisers Nightflix (see what they did there?) looks forward to proving me wrong: “We are delighted to be in a position where we can offer a safe form of entertainment to the public while practising social distancing.”
Up and down the country, drive-ins are opening as canny entrepreneurs see a business opportunity. It’s going out but staying in at the same time, and only a cynic (that’ll be me) would suggest it combines the worst of both. Cinemas, concert halls, theatres, galleries and standup gigs are closed, festivals abandoned. And yet we yearn for live art and entertainment. Hence recent drive-in gigs at an airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and at a car park in Bratislava, Slovakia. Across the world, people are leaving lockdown, getting into their cars and chasing down what passes for live culture at this difficult time while still socially distancing.
This would have looked like a world gone nuts to 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” But what did Pascal know? He never parked his Vauxhall Tigra at a race track outside Bratislava repurposed as a hip-hop drive-in and wigged out (while responsibly upholding social distancing parameters), as young Slovakians did earlier this month.
Hence, too, what is billed as the world’s first drive-in comedy gig in Glasgow. “Buy a ticket for Rotunda Drive-In,” goes the blurb, “and we will give you a parking space, a pizza, and access to our show feed, which you will hear via your smartphone Bluetoothed to your car stereo. You will also be able to see the comics on our stage or on your phone.” A ticket for a standard car containing two people is £30 and £10 more for each extra passenger, while if you want to park your car at the VIP front section, it’ll set you back £80. How do you heckle? Flash headlights or horn honks in morse code?
From late July to September, Live Nation and energy company Utilita will be hosting a drive-in concert series at 12 venues, including racecourses, airports and Bolton Wanderers football ground. Talent includes Ash, Lightning Seeds, the Streets, Tony Hadley and Ealing’s leading contribution to acid funk, the Brand New Heavies. “We we believe the drive-in format is a thoughtful and fun way to safely bring one million Brits out of entertainment lockdown,” says promoter Peter Taylor. Bring folding chairs if you want to sit in the designated area around your car and enjoy images from hi-definition LED screens and what is billed as concert-quality sound from the live stage.
The first drive-in opened in New Jersey in 1933 and by 1958, the peak year for the phenomenon, there were 4,063 across America. Today, according to the United Drive-In Theatre Association, there are only 305 drive-ins and 549 screens in the US. By contrast, Britain’s first outdoor cinema company, Luna, only opened in 2007, and what is thought to be Britain’s only permanent drive-in, Route 66, opened in Manchester in 2012. As that name suggests, the business model of the British drive-in has mostly involved plundering 50s Americana. This summer, for instance, an outfit called @thedrivein will, the blurb says, offer “a retro experience with a modern touch”. Waiters on roller skates will bring snacks ordered online through a mobile app to “a drop-off point by your car”.
In that retro context it’s hardly surprising that Grease – one of the movies @thedrivein will show – is a staple of the British drive-in. In one scene in that movie, lubricious bad boy Danny (John Travolta) puts the moves on prissy good girl Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) at a drive-in as they recline in a superb convertible fitted with an automatic transmission the better to facilitate, you’d think, in-movie legovers. Outraged, Sandy climbs out, denounces Danny’s “sin wagon” and slams the door on his genitals. Thus was American drive-in culture pastiched in 1978. And thus, reheated, it is served up again to us in 2020.
It’s going to be a summer of drive-in firsts. Here comes a sentence I never thought I’d write. Britain’s first ever drive-in, red-carpet premiere will take place at Brent Cross, London, on 22 July. While I feel about Brent Cross the way Elvis Costello felt about Chelsea, the movie in question, Break, sounds like a riot. The blurb describes it as a life-affirming Britflick about an inner city kid (Sam Gittins) wasting his life on drugs and knife crime until he meets a former pool champ played by David Yip, and a tough club owner interpreted by Rutger Hauer in his last screen appearance, in a movie that involves a prestigious snooker tournament in Beijing. I’ll be donning my face mask and catching the 210 bus across London , if only to see the socially distanced talent strutting on that red carpet. Only Britain would carpet a drive-in at a grim shopping centre off the ring road and pass off the event as glamorous.
The premiere is organised by the Drive-in Club, which is also putting on other film screenings and comedy gigs both in Brent Cross and in Dagenham, east London, during the summer. Shappi Khorsandi, Reginald D Hunter, Adam Kay, Bill Bailey and Rachel Parris are confirmed to perform, while socially distanced children will be entertained by Rastamouse and Basil Brush. Whether comedy can work with the audiences in their cars remains to be seen. The risk is it will be, like the premiership without fans, a spooky experience for all involved – and not in a good way.
A few miles round the north circular, London’s Alexandra Palace will host the world’s first drive-in opera in September, meeting a demand that had occurred to literally no one before lockdown. “I miss seeing my mates close up, and I miss seeing something live,” Stuart Murphy, chief executive of English National Opera told the Guardian. “Hopefully, we can offer that universal, collective experience in a safe environment.” Shortened versions of the Mozart’s Magic Flute and Puccini’s La Bohème have been programmed. Fingers crossed it will change stuffy opera etiquette: at a drive-in, if you want to sing along to Your Tiny Hand is Frozen as the pasty maiden on stage pegs out to consumption, who is going to stop you?
Happily, too, the Ally Pally drive-in opera will admit audience members on motorbikes and bicycles rather than, as some other drive-ins do, excluding them, in a sickening new form of cultural apartheid. Given that bicycle sales have soared during lockdown while demand for cars has plummeted, surely the two-wheel demographic could be much more lucratively exploited. A push-bike-only festival of Ida Lupino movies and German expressionist classics is what we need, ideally with customers allowed to be accompanied by one well-behaved dog in a wicker basket.
For the terrible truth behind Britain’s looming lockdown drive-in summer is that it will meet demand only by adding to traffic congestion and pollution levels that have been predicted to soar as lockdown restrictions are eased. Several cities, including Wuhan and Stockholm, have seen truck and car use rise above their pre-coronavirus levels. But let’s park, not just our cars, but our cynicism. Drive-ins, creatively reimagined, can be culturally nourishing. In Toronto, for instance, there is something called Gogh By Car. Visitors drive into the industrial space that once held the Toronto Star’s printing presses, turn off their engines and experience huge light projections of Van Gogh artworks, including Starry Night and Sunflowers.
I suspect this idea could be further developed. Put your car into first gear and move through a digitised projection of – I’m spitballing here – exhibits from the British Museum’s recent Troy exhibition with audio supplied by Stephen Fry. At the end of the drive-through you’d pull up at the counter that doubles as gift shop and fast-food counter, pick up your pre-ordered mocha latte along with a Sulking Achilles terracotta plate (£115) and drive home, tired but happy.
Clearly, there is scope for the drive-in experience to adapt further to our summer of strange. Bingo and silent discos are, for instance, being retrofitted even as I write by drive-in entrepreneurs such as @thedrivein as part of entertainment packages. It’s not clear yet whether this drive-in phenomenon is a cul de sac from which we will reverse later this year or a permanent change in the way we consume culture. But certainly the idea that Britain is belatedly becoming a drive-in nation is one of the more bizarre results of global pandemic.
Meanwhile, next week in Los Angeles Garth Brooks will take the stage before a live audience of zero. “I am so excited to get to play again,” the country crossover star says from under his trademark big hat. “Back to what we LOVE to do!! Did you know you can’t spell FUN without G? HA!!” he tweeted recently.
No, I don’t know what Garth’s on about either. His gig is to be relayed to 300 drive-ins across the US and Canada on 27 June. “This drive-in concert allows us all to get back to playing live music without the uncertainty of what would be the result to us as a community,” he says. “This is old school, new school, and perfect for the time we are in.”
No doubt, but the fact that the gig will be accessible only in North American theatres points up the disappointing truth about globalisation in 2020. You can catch Covid-19 anywhere in the world but not yet Garth Brooks.
