Reading and Leeds Festivals have banned pineapples this year, but why?
It's all thanks to Glass Animals
There are a lot of things you’re not supposed to take into festivals: drugs, fireworks, weapons, flower-crowns, cats, your mum, but pineapples? Not really ever on my list, actually.
“Oh no, we forgot our pineapples.”
“Sod it, let’s go home, weekend’s over, etc.”
But this year, Reading and Leeds festivals have added the spiky fruit to the list of banned items, alongside your usual offenders. “But why?” you screech into a hollowed out pineapple, “What am I supposed to screech into now?”
Well, it’s all to do with the band Glass Animals and their song ‘Pork Soda’, which contains the lyrics “pineapples in my head”. The band have adopted the scaly food as a fun mascot – people bring them to shows, dress up as them or eat them beforehand so their sperm tastes lovely and sweet.
As such, a spokesman for R&L has issued the following statement:
“Organisers were a little concerned about hundreds of pineapples turning up on site so decided to ask fans not to bring them along.”
But Glass Animals have thrown some stones in their glass cages (ill-advised, according to legend), and responded to the ban, telling the NME:
“It’s Fruitist. Watermelons are fine, but not pineapples?
“Challenge – anyone who wasn’t bringing a pineapple definitely is now.
“It’s irresponsible to stop young people at a festival having vital vitamin P.”
Good point, actually – telling people not to bring something means they’re going to bring it. Pick anything, like, I don’t know, Tabasco sauce, and tell people they can’t take it in – you know there’s going to be a hell of a lot of Tabasco sauce at that festival. And what a festival that would be.
Reading and Leeds may also have said:
“The tongue may be slightly in cheek on this one.”
But regardless of their joking about a serious subject, I’m still going to set up a trebuchet outside to fling some pineapples over the fence – and I’m not even going in. The man can’t tell me what to do. Fuck the system. Up with pineapples.
(Image: iStock)
