Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival 2010: Rated!

Italian Gardens, Inverness-shire - 6-7 August

United Kingdom | 11 August 2010

Overall - 9.5/10

Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival is a miniature Glastonbury unmarred by braying trustafarians and city traders, set in beautiful Highland scenery. Lovingly handcrafted with its own increasingly confident, quirky style, Belladrum's a well-established, well-run festival whose plus points include an eclectic choice of music, a different fancy dress theme each year, a great selection of good quality food and drink, reasonably priced, and lots of family-friendly entertainment. Capacity is capped at 13,000, but the sensible arrangement of the site stops it feeling cramped. Always popular, Belladrum's started to sell out earlier and earlier, so don't leave it till the last minute to buy your ticket.

Getting there and back - 7/10

Citylink bus (£35 return from Edinburgh/Glasgow), train or fly to Inverness; from there, special Citylink service bus (£12 return), drive or hitch. Thursday arrivals usually find roads clogged with nearby Black Isle Show traffic. Be prepared to queue at busy times - there's only one road in and out of the site. Chill - you can appreciate the views and fresh air while you wait.

The site - 9/10

Bella's perennial ace in the festival hole; a main stage set in an open air theatre, facing terraces and backed by mature trees and beyond, distant heather-clad hills. Added last year: a purpose-built optimistically outdoor dance DJ area overlooked by two watchtower DJ/VJ booths and partly enclosed by artfully ruined stone walls; Mother's Ruin rocks the post-apocalyptic vibe.

Stages are set just far enough apart to avoid sound leakage and not too far for tired legs. There are lots of stalls selling locally sourced, good quality food and drink at fair prices, and a Co-op shop open till midnight for happy but hungry campers mean not too many massive queues, except for drink tokens. The litter problem is pretty well cracked by plenty of bins and litterpickers, and 20p deposit per plastic glass – an unpaid army of kids avidly scavenge discards. There are plenty of toilets, plenty of space to park and camp, grassy banks and rough hewn tree trunks to sit on with benches near the food stalls. Tipis, bell-tents and yurts are available for luxury camping.

It loses marks for the demanding adults accompanying children in and out of campsites. The result: harassed parents/carers and/or kids badgering strangers to get them past the stewards.

Atmosphere - 9/10

Staffing the site with the same stewards every year and keeping the police presence low-key and helpful both make a big difference - the result's a great, relaxed, friendly atmosphere.

The music - 8/10

Though both the main headliners - Feeder on Friday, the nicely maturing Amy McDonald on Saturday - deliver polished, crowd-pleasing, and in the case of Feeder, eardrum-piercingly loud, sets, neither shine quite as brightly as Friday's surprise guest KT Tunstall. Oxford's Stornoway's melodic folk/rock and The Levellers crusty agit/folk both fill the Hothouse tent while the Seedlings tent threatens to burst at the seams for up and coming Highland outfit Woodenbox With A Fistful of Fivers. Mother's Ruin, the purpose built optimistically outdoor dance DJ area, does good business all day long but it's strut your stuff room only once darkness falls. In the Potting Shed, a long list of American or Americana-inspired musos get into impressive funk grooves. Everywhere young musicians impress - the unbeatable Caledonian Ceilidh Trail, Feis Rois, the Young Trad Tour, Copperdrift, Sorren Maclean, Rachel Sermanni, the National Youth Brass Band of Scotland, Julia and the Doogans, The Highland Youth Street Band Collective, Dingwall's awesome rock outfit The Side (fresh from supporting Bon Jovi at the O2 Arena), and of course Kitty The Lion (see Uppers). The future of music is safe in their hands.

Uppers

KT Tunstall – 10/10
The mystery guest and Grassroots headliner, bounds on stage like a greyhound out of the trap, launches eagerly into set featuring songs from new CD ("hope you enjoy them!"), wows the crowd, keeps up high octane performance right through to the end - a singalong romp through ‘Suddenly I See’. A Good tight backing band sets off a classy lassie.

King Creosote – 10/10
Another Fifer (is it something in the water?), another Grassroots headliner (Saturday), another wow. He sings (‘Saffy Nool’), "I was past 35 years of age before my face made that much sense," but hits all the right spots with the female audience. Girls queue to hug him afterwards, baggy old-man stylee cardie and all. His secret? Maybe it's because he's just so damn happy about what he's doing.

The Lush Rollers – 9/10
Local Inverness band who've been off the scene for a good few years made their comeback debut in the Grassroots tent (patience - other stages you'll get a look in later) with a glorious, spine-tingling set lapped up by connoisseurs of melodic country rock, close-knit vocal harmonies and true songwriting craft.

Orkestra del Sol – 9/10
On the Garden Stage for the first time, fans flock to dance to their inimitable Balkan/Latin rhythms, quickly warming to new addition the Rev. Emmanuel Jones who charms all with his hip-swivelling singalong Calypso Collapso and hilarious, foot-perfect Sand Dance. Faced with a relentless OdS happiness offensive, spirits rise, grins break out, and the incipient drizzle vanishes for the rest of the weekend. Result!

Kitty The Lion – 8/10
Fresh, exuberant pop/rock/folk band from Glasgow. Singer-songwriter Anna Meldrum joined up with four other young musicians including Mull's Sorren Maclean, himself no mean singer-songwriter, last year and the chemistry's really working well - you can almost touch the excitement in the crowd. Definitely ones to watch, and listen to.

Downers

Feeder – 5/10
Almost painfully loud, yes. Tightly together, yes. Alternative? Not really. There seems to be a lack of soul in Feederland, but the crowd don't care. It's a charting band, they must be good, seems to be the philosophy.

The Wailers – 5/10
The only person on stage who's got any kind of claim to the Wailers' name is bassist Aston 'Family Man' Barrett, who was indeed in the band which backed Bob Marley. Some of the others probably weren't even born when Marley died in 1981.The drummer has only a passing acquaintance with reggae beats. The rest of the band create note-perfect facsimiles but without any soul. As with Feeder, the crowd don't care - they know the name, they know the tunes, they're happy.

The Dangleberries – 5/10
What started off as a jolly jape - a bunch of bagpipes and samba drums playing 'pipe-rock' - has started to take itself seriously and added a vocalist. Fun as it evidently is for the crowd dancing along to covers of catchy hits like the Killers' ‘Human’ and Black-eyed Peas ‘Tonight’, it would be a lot better if said vocalist didn't sound just a bit of a tone flat most of the time.

The absence of acid croft. Vintage folkrock fusioneers Wolfstone attempt to fill the gap but though they give a great set - "It's been a real homecoming gig for us" says founder and local fiddle virtuoso Duncan Chisholm before launching into a stirring rendition of 'Highland Cathedral' - the mind-bending mayhem that would have been added by acid-croft pioneers Peatbogs or Shooglenifty, or even young turks the Treacherous Orchestra, is sadly missing.

Badly Drawn Boy – 2/10
Badly Behaved Boy gives a masterclass in how not to play an early evening slot in a family-friendly festival. The sound men are bleep awful, everything's bleep, Scotland's bleep, he wants to bleep back to England. He plays for barely half his allotted time before saying he's bleep had enough and leaving the stage. The audience are *not* amused.

Random events

Masked Daft Punk-alikes, the LED, launching into a carefully crafted set of ace remixes in Mother's Ruin late on Friday night. Photos of couples taken during the day are projected onto a heart dangling from the trees.

A costumed coven of life-size puppets including a red, horned one dangle, sinisterly, beyond the Ruin. Where's Mad Max?

Signs advertise "Haggis Dogs and Chutneep". A fusion too far...

Carrot-topped Johnny Depp-alike Mad Hatter, balloonhead Bonham-Carter lookalike Red Queen and their diminutive Dormouse child pose and chat winningly. If they don't get the first prize for fancy dress, it's a fix.

Saturday afternoon aerobatic team skywrite a heart above the Garden Stage - all together now, "Aaaaaaahhhhhh". It feels like a gift.

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