If so, I want to go!

I found this (with Google Book Search) while looking for something else. Fair or not, it's a vivid piece of writing:

... I was travelling down from Orkney to Edinburgh, and I stopped off on the way at Keith, in Moray, for the annual Traditional Music Festival. The main street of the small distillery town was jammed from end to end with crowds of locals, visitors, folk music fanatics, pipers, fiddlers, folklorists, travellers, bodhran-players, bothy-balladeers, hamburger salesmen, and – above all, encompassing most of the above – serious drinkers. The road was sticky in places with great puddles of spilt beer, littered thickly all over with discarded plastic pint-glasses. The sound of hundreds of people tramping up and down over splintering, crackling plastic glasses was like a ton of brittle bones being masticated in some giant beast's maw. Couples copulated up close. Fights broke out here and there, ending as soon and suddenly as they'd begun when one or other of the protagonists slipped drunkenly on a shard of plastic glass and fell to the ground. Music poured from every pub door, from open house windows, from buskers, from wandering pennywhistlers and squeezeboxers on their way to the next session, and from the cassette players of archivists and BBC producers playing back the recordings they'd just made.

The thing that struck me – standing there in the middle of 'The Mason's Apron', 'The Mucking of Geordie's Byre', 'The Nuptial Knot', 'MacPherson's Rant', 'The Bonnie Ship the Diamond', 'Deil among the Tailors', and a hundred others – the thing that struck me was the strange but certain feeling that nobody was really listening to the music.

For one thing, they were all too drunk. Ninety per cent of them had started chucking down the heavy and whisky ten hours before, when the pubs opened and the sessions started, and kept at it all day. (For my money, that's why the best music had come about one-thirty in the afternoon: the level of alcohol in the musicians' bloodstream was perfectly balanced at that point: it had loosened the fingers but not completely disconnected them.)

Mainly, though, folk weren't listening to the music because they didn't want to, they didn't need to. What really mattered was the idea of being at Keith Traditional Music Festival. They liked the idea of a weekend of carousing and music: they could look forward to it for months before; they could recollect it in sobriety for months after. While they were there, of course they would enjoy it. The folkies of the North-East of Scotland had whipped themselves into such a frenzy, were possessed of such a firm determination to enjoy themselves – wholeheartedly, ferociously, suicidally – that no other outcome was ever possible. The actual music could've been dull, clumsy-fingered, tuneless (it was often all three) but that didn't matter: it was the idea of the music that was more important than the actuality. As long as there was a vaguely melodic racket going on in the background, then everybody could keep on knocking back the whiskey, swaying in time to nothing at all, yelling at each other what a great time they were having.

--from Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, by Duncan McLean (a Scot), p. 208f.

I suppose it's only fair to explain that he wrote this passage by way of comparing it to a similar situation in Austin, Texas.