I love Music Festivals. I've been to at least one every year since I was old enough to get into them, which is about 12 years now.

Summer 2008 I made my first visit to V festival, unfortunately this will also be my last. I went to the festival in Hyland Park however I'm sure that a lot of my major gripes with the festival will apply to the other festival as well.

First of all, let me say I had a good time at V festival, its hard to not have a good time at a music festival, however I just felt a bit let down by the event as a whole and thought there were a lot of things that could have been done better.

Before I begin to mention the festival itself, the cost is a bit of an issue. My ticket was £150 which at first glance doesn't seem to bad, however this is only 2 days of music festival so that's £75 a day. If you buy a ticket to Glastonbury the cost is about the same, and you get 3 solid days of the main acts, far more choice, and there's also plenty to do on Thursday and even Wednesday before. So that's 5 days of entertainment versus 2.

Secondly there are colour coordinated campsites, red and yellow. If you have a bunch of friends going and they get a different colour campsite then you either cannot camp with them, or have to endure the hassle of trying to find someone who is wanting to make the opposite swap with tickets. I am not exactly sure of the thinking behind this, I presume its an effort to try and ease the congestion into the festival, which was as bad as any other festival so I don't really see that the objective was achieved. I'm sure there is a decent enough reason behind the red/yellow camping thing, but that fact aside, its just a pain to your average festival goer.

I found the services and general amenities once in the festival were ok. As you'd expect from most festivals everything is ridiculously marked up and you're going to have to pay a premium but that's pretty standard nowadays. There was a cash machine and the toilets were the usual nightmare, although I'm thankful to say there was quite a lot of men's urinals meaning the men didn't have to wait so long and could leave the porto-loo's free for the ladies. Although the queue for the ladies did look pretty painful about 80% of the time. There was a decent amount of water pumps around the campsites and the queues in the morning actually weren't too bad.

However, my major gripe with this festival was the lack of anything to do once the main stage acts were over. Once you've just watched a huge band perform live your energy levels and pretty high, and you want to maybe carry on the party a little bit. At V Festival that is not happening. Almost immediately everything shut (other than food stalls) and everybody was ushered out the arena. Around the camping area there was nothing going on and so everyone simply returned to sit round at their campsites which for me, completely killed the atmosphere of the festival.

I appreciate that not everyone wants to be up all hours partying, most festivals will now make a camping area specifically for people to do this. However most will give you the option of some kind of late night entertainment. V festival 2008 had nothing.

The line up with V festival is a bit more "pop" than your usual festival, and because of that I think you get more people who might not usually go to a festival. If you are one of these people and you're going to head to your first music festival, then do yourself a favour and try another one. This one really isn't worth the money.