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| Illustration courtesy of Adam Menzies |
At 10am on Friday morning the Into The Woods tent is already filled to capacity, late-comers linger in the entrance and gaze around briefly, then seeing there’s no space they turn back towards the campsite.
‘Exhale and lift your knees away from the floor,’ — the yoga instructor pivots.
The popularity of yoga is indicative of the crowd Beacons Festival attracts: festival goers willing to use the weekend to try out a new hobby or enrich their cultural capital. Into The Woods is the centre of this, a tent where you come to be away from the elements, to immerse yourself in yoga, film, poetry and the arts.
Aside from a handful of seasoned yoga-pros everybody has come here with a single idea: that yoga might function as a hangover cure. Beacons officially begin on the Friday, but the Thursday night Welcome Party hosts DJ sets into the night. More than a few of those collecting their shoes look as if they’ve yet to sleep — everybody has settled into the vibe of the festival.
With shoes back on feet the crowd disperses and groups move towards the three smaller arts tents. Dawson’s Arthash House — a cafe that shows independent short films, where you can pick up a variety of zines and graphics mags. Beacon’s Boutique — a quaint cafe selling cakes and tea, with a corner for screen-printing. And the Impossible Lecture tent — a performance tent padded with sofas, where the performers let off spiel and give various performances at the whim of an idea-generating tombola. In effect a sort of bullshit bingo, interesting for 10 minute intervals when waiting for the rain to pass.
Usually it isn’t busy around the arts tent. Misguided planning means the music and art tents are each located at opposite sides of the campsite, placed as far a distance from one another as possible. When compared to larger festivals, the quarter of an hour walk between the two areas may seem short, but Beacons is different. At Beacons you quickly become accustomed to everything being close. At Beacons it is never more than a few minute walk to a toilet and no matter where you place yourself within the campsite it is more than five minutes from your tent to the music arena.
In the context of this closeness walking the 15 minutes from the music arena to the arts area rarely seems worth the time. This means that the arts tents serve primarily as a sideshow to the music; plodded through for an hour or so when there’s nothing else on, then quickly forsaken, erased from memory until it comes time to plod through again the following day.
Though the clouds are grey there’s a sense of excitement around the music arena. Groups scatter on the grass chatting. The prices in the beer tents are good: programmes are a couple of quid; pints a little more; and you can eat for around a fiver. There’s a friendliness, a sense nobody wants to rip you off and you need only worry about having a good time.
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When Thumpers begin playing the You Need To Hear This tent the crowd is still relatively quiet, but their music is loud and heartfelt and feel-good, attracting straddlers and passersby. You Need To Hear This primarily hosts alt.guitar bands, but their synth-pop feels at home as their set is brought to a close with swollen applause.
Away from You Need To Hear This, the Loud & Quiet stage looms at the farthest corner of the arena, in the walk between there are a variety of other stages and tents to visit. Urban Outfitters has a tent and there are more independents selling vintage clothes; elsewhere DJs play from an outdoor sound system, the mood and size of the crowd dependent largely on the weather.
The larger Resident Adviser tent also plays host to back-to-back DJs through the weekend, with the mood inside growing as it gets later. Alongside the quality of each musician’s set, the mood at Beacons bears a direct relation to the amount of chemicals the crowd are putting into their body. The effect of this is most noticeably around late afternoon. Numbers grow. The mood shifts. People dance.
By the time Eagulls play You Need To Hear the arena is busy. Playing to what feels like a home crowd, their brand of aggressive, head-mashing punk has listeners moshing and beer swigging from the first chord. ‘Council Flat Blues’ and ‘Moulting’ are the sets scream along highlights, the lasting image a man scrambling from the pit — ‘anyone seen a green boot?!’
It’s disappointing that there are sound problem at the Loud & Quiet stage for Ghostpoet’s performance, with apologies offered throughout the set. ‘Why isn’t louder?’ a disgruntled voice asks, but all in all the atmosphere around the tent remains good: most people in the crowd either don’t notice the problems or are too fucked to care. Nearer the stage the sound is clearer, the vocals are smooth and the disruption fades from memory with the music.
The sound for Bonobo is improved, but still has slight problems. Guest vocalist Andreya Triana is especially good over the beats, her ghostly vocals haunting a crowd in a synchronicity of raised arms. The set improves as it goes along, peaking in the final 10 minutes when the sound problems are finally corrected. Moving towards the Resident Adviser, where music is still playing, there’s a collective sense that it has been a good start, with expectations even greater for the days to follow.
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Intermittent rainfall through Saturday morning leaves those who forgot to bring waterproofs consigned to their tents. Across this quiet it’s noticeable how many families are in attendance, an area of the campsite being devoted to family entertainment — as the day gets later there is a strange juxtaposition between families with young children and pissed-up revellers, all moving toward the music.
Near to the family area of the campsite is the ELFM tent, which hosts an array of smaller and local bands. Leeds-based Handmadehands play in front of a sizable crowd who greet their trumpeter (who arrives late) with good-natured ironic applause. They open with a few slower, post-breakup numbers: ‘I said/ she said/ what she said/ she said / I said’, but the set picks up as they play some up-tempo pop reminiscent of Jack Penate’s first album. Between songs they joke with the crowd, and the frontman’s use of a saw as an instrument provides an element of novelty.
Next up, on the Loud & Quiet stage, are Temples whose set is one of the festival’s highlights. Their psych-rock broods, and then glistens. Ominous verses are broken by jovial, melodic guitar solos; all of it against a backdrop of keys and a rhythm section with an incessant thump. It’s all great, but listening to set highlight ‘Prisms’ it’s clear that, though originally released as a B-side, it ought to be re-recorded for their debut album.
They are followed by the similarly impressive Melody Echo Chambers, equally psychedelic but more spacious than Temples. Dreamlike. The songs fall into one another; the vocals are ghostly. There’s a sense of a crowd at once day dreaming and taking in the sounds that rebound around them.
Returning to Loud & Quiet later, for Gold Panda, the crowd is larger, more gurned. The music is complemented by an impressive light show. Below the flashes everyone is having an incredible time. ‘You’ is the song everyone has been waiting for, when it eventually comes it’s evident that it has been worth the wait. ‘This is awesome man.’ ‘Yeah, so fucking good.’
Heading to the Resident Adviser tent afterwards, Ben UFO’s set is perfect for a crowd that just wants to dance. It might be raining still, but nobody cares.
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On paper the final day of Beacons has the best line-up of the festival’s three days. It makes sense, encouraging everybody to save a little of themselves for the final day. Not to go too hard.
In the Loud & Quiet tent for Sky Larkin, it’s evident that some have succeeded in this aim, while others (blank, pale, unhappy) have failed. Either way Sky Larkin’s fiddly guitar pop does its best to rouse everyone into consciousness. Their set is sharp and strong and considering their local connection it’s a little confusing why they weren’t offered a later slot.
Hookworms turn up the volume with a set that’s as aggressive as it is loud. The crowd grows as the performance goes on, with passersby being drawn by the fuzz. When they play new track ‘Away/Towards’ the noise shakes the tent. And the crowd. And anything else in the vicinity. It’s one of the best sets of the weekend; everyone in attendance is left with a ring in their ears and the sense that this is a band that will go on to big things.
Through the afternoon there’s a noticeable change in the attitude of security. Most likely the organisers are keen to avoid the usual final day dissention into Lord of the Flies, but the insistence of security on frisking everyone trying to enter or leave the music arena creates a counter-productive ‘us and them’ attitude between staff and festival goers. Until this point security have been friendly; with the fact most of the audience were sneaking booze into the arena being an open secret. Waiting at the gate is frustrating for everybody — ‘just let us through man.’ — but in all the crowd remains calm.
It’s Detroit’s Danny Brown who kicks off the row of final acts playing the Loud & Quiet stage. He’s one of the few hip-hop artists playing, but the size of the crowd shows a hunger that’ll surely have an effect on the line-up for next year. The energy of his performance is exactly what’s required. By the end of the set everyone’s moving, remembering why they came to the festival, enjoying themselves.
SBTRKT’s DJ set builds on the energy created by Danny Brown — the crowd knows that there isn’t much time left and they’re intent on enjoying themselves. There’s a MDMA-induced camaraderie: the few who have any cigarettes left give drags to those who’ve smoked up their last. And everybody dances. There’s the genuine sense of unity that you only feel at festivals, or football grounds, or the other grand events where everybody is synchronised to a single vibe: united by a common feeling. Happiness. It doesn’t matter whether it’s induced by chemicals or the music, in that moment the people in the crowd are one. Reminded that for all the shit in the world, we can be happy because there is and always will be love.
Django Django end it. Their indie rock is a complete contrast to what has come before, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares. It serves only to highlight that the diversity of the line-up is what has made Beacons great — the crowd sing along.
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A few hours later, on a hill inside the campsite a crowd has gathered, nobody wants the festival to end. They still want more. More comes in the form of a man holding up a boom-box, a hundred plus bodies moving, gathered around like moths to a torchlight. Not a single face says they won’t be making their way back in 2014.
(Written for No-Title Magazine)
