Ahhhhhhh festivals. To all those of you who are too squeamish to live beneath canvas, fester in your own filth and squat over a pit of ordure as your daily toilet for three days you really do not know what you are missing. No matter how bad things get, you will reach your festival peak, a moment when the sun shines, all around you sussurate in mellowed satisfaction and sweet music pours over you like maple syrup over hot pancakes; bliss out city. It will, more often than not, have less to do with who you are listening to at the time than it will to do with the general ambience of the whole experience.
So, to depart from the tried, tested and tired format of ‘this band that band, good band crap band’, I am going to approach the festival holistically and attempt to get down to the nitty gritty of Latitude’s three days of privation and ecstacy. In a less pompous fashion than I approached this intro.
Latitude takes place in the beautiful setting of Henham Park in East Anglia, close to the sea and far enough away from anywhere to make it feel like a proper discovery. This of course means that getting to there is not easy – probably not as problematic as Glastonbury, but most of the roads to it are titchy-tiny, touristy or indirect. You can avoid the queues if you time it properly though – thursday at ten o’clock was ideal. The location does have other disadvantages/advantages though, both of these covered by the weather. It can go from downpour to sunburn in a second and often did, with special mention going to the huge thunder storm that soaked me and Isaac (my three year old) shortly after we’d put up the tent.
Yes, we took a child; two in fact. One thing that Latitude does very well is accomodating the presence of families and junior festival goers. A seperate family site is provided, reasonably far from the maddening crowd, that has fairly decent toilets and a few hot showers (though the communal solar showers were missing this year – what, did some men find the idea of bathing together unsavoury? Never hurt the Romans…) – so few that queues were in evidence at 6 am. What they did get right was the laying on of children’s entertainments. In the campsite itself was a play area (with bats, balls, hula hoops, tug of war ropes etc.) provided by Leeds Met Playgroups, which was very handy for keeping certain people entertained until the official children’s area opened (at about 9.30). A meandering downhill path (yes, a bugger for getting pushchairs up at the end of the day)through the woods leads down to an area festooned with beach hut wendy houses, inflatables and tents providing all sorts of entertainment from junk modelling through wildlife spotting to pirate treasure hunts. Almost all are gratis (including the fruit, juice and hot drinks provided by the local church youth group in the under fives area) and run by cheerful, dedicated folk who are a) happy to be there and b) there to be happy. I cannot praise this area enough and more should be made of it, as I feel that more families would attend festivals if they knew that the children’s facilities were this good. But enough of my high horsing, you probably want to know about the rest of the festival and its location.
First impression is that it is remarkable clean. Door security is tight, so discarded bottles and cans are a rarity; teams of litter pickers work constantly, flitting around the festival like a team of pilot fish cleaning a whale; waste bins are divided into landfill, recycle and compost. It’s an effective way to deal with festival grub. The soil is also very sandy, so mud is almost nonexistant (though I did see a group of lads that found a solitary puddle of mud and proceeded to have a mudfight) and regardless of the weather the ground is never sodden. All good considering the capricious nature of the weather. Roads are also well kept if rudimentary, making this that rarest of things: a festival that doesn’t need wellies.
So now you are inside, have chuckled at the multicoloured sheep, cooed over the cleanliness – time to get a spot of food and drink. Meals can cost anywhere between four and ten pounds, which is a bit steep for a three day festival but isn’t bad considering the size of the portions (apart from the Posh Burger Company, who charge like manic street bulls for a simple cheese burger) and the variety on offer. Blimey, some of it is even vaguely fresh.
Variety is also present in regards to the bill of fare entertainment wise – ah yes, the bit you’re actually interested in. As well as the obligatory music, you’ve got theatre, poetry, comedy, film, literature, cabaret and bizarre one off artistic projects (The Tree of Lost Things was my favourite this year), all of which go towards making the festival feel nice and rounded, small town cosmoplitan if you will, but the emphasis is still very much on the music stages and the bands on offer there.
First off, don’t expect the major names this year round; Latitude has gone indie with a capital ‘I’ save for the headliners and a couple of support slots – even those are a bit quirky. The headliners (Pet Shop Boys, Grace Jones, Nick Cave) do have that ‘catering for the middle aged’ feel, but if bands like Of Montreal and Patrick Wolf can make the main stage, you know that the thinking is well and truly outside the box. And the quality of the music production is plain outstanding – there are venues that would kill for the clarity of the sound in the Uncut tent. I don’t think I have ever heard Spiritualized sound so good and as for iLiKETRAiNS… phenomenal.
It’s not perfect – the information staff seem fairly bemused, the catering a bit monopolistic and the whole thing a bit too nice to be a threat to Glastonbury but hey, it’s a friendly festival, a smart festival. Let’s face it, it’s a festival full of Guardian readers – smart, informed but very middle class. Guilty!
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