September 2010: a festival year in review
The final part of our summer retrospective
Lis Ferla - 10 November 2010
September is a funny month, with the rest of the world already starting to think more festive than festival. But there
were still a few final morsels of musical merriment for our writers to get their teeth into before packing the tent and wellies
away for another winter.
Ben Parkinson cheated and spent
a bass-heavy weekend at Croatia’s Outlook Festival. Even the furtive presence of the country’s
military police couldn’t prove much of a distraction from the jaw-dropping cliff-top site, blue oceans and daily beach
parties. Outlook, said Ben, was “a total celebration of bass culture” with particularly noteworthy sets
from Gaslamp Killer, Gentleman’s Dub
Club and Roots Manuva.
Back home Bestival,
End of the Road and Ozzfest were probably the biggest of this month’s final festival
names. Set in the idyllic Larmer Tree Gardens in deepest, darkest Dorset, the appropriately-named End
of the Road is starting to make a name for itself as the last stopping place on the summer calendar. Matt
Miles praised
some pitch-perfect sets from Iron and Wine, Stagecoach,
Wolf People and Gomez’s Ben Ottewell, but didn’t care much for a more middle-class crowd.
The ever-eclectic Bestival drew similarly rave
reviews. Although poor John Bownas didn’t have the best of luck with the queues (both for morning
ablutions and getting a camera past some over-enthusiastic security), but the party atmosphere and “musical wonderland”
line-up - from names as established as Roxy Music and the
Flaming Lips to up-and-comers like one-man-band blues
extravaganza Lewis Floyd Henry - pushed all the right buttons.
Ozzy wouldn’t like
to hear me call it the safest option, but the only way to guarantee protection from the elements as the nights get longer
is to stay indoors. Anna Hyams was
at this year’s Ozzfest as the legendary rocker and friends including Korn, Steel Panther and Murderdolls turned London’s O2 into their own little indoor
Village of the Damned for the day.
Suffolk’s Waveform provided Charlie McConville
with a weekend’s
escapism in surroundings both hedonistic and environmentally friendly - the trance/electronica festival won a Greener
Festival Award last year. Highlights included Headflux, Pook
and the chap who spent Sunday in a full-on gimp suit.
And as the sun set on another eventful festival summer, our
writers turned their thoughts to a cold winter of financial discontent ahead with a couple of features on how best to get
around January’s VAT rise. Neil Outram suggested
bagging a cheap Ryanair flight and heading for a European festival, while Daniel Fahey and Lydia
White looked
at buying early to take advantage of cheaper prices and ticket schemes among other money-saving tips for cautious future
festival-goers.
Not that we’re looking to end a bumper year on a bum note or anything. One particularly lovely
story to emerge from September was the tale of the first-ever Headstock Festival, a truly DIY effort
which hoped to bring some sunshine back to the depressed Nottinghamshire ex-colliery village of Newstead. Ash,
Frightened Rabbit and Field Music headlined the venture, put together by local residents
with help from BBC and Lottery cash. All of which goes to show that, VAT rise or not, Virtual Festival fans will still find
plenty of ways to have a good time in 2011.
Click here for our retrospective of August.
Click here for our retrospective of July.
Click here for our retrospective of June.
Click here for our retrospective of May.
Click here for our retrospective of March and April.
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