SW on the road: Latitude Music Festival

image: M.McCabe for Style Wylde

Ed Note: Special contributor Mark is on the road again in Europe checking out the best the music festival season has to offer, and reporting back on all the sights, sounds and bands making waves across the continent. After his first stop in Barcelona his next stop: Latitude Festival in the U.K.

Summer in the U.K., apart from intermittently good weather, brings music festivals and lots of them. You can think of any kind of music and there’ll be a choice of outdoor festivals to go to, with one of the most well known and one of the biggest in the world being Glastonbury. Featuring hundreds of artists on more than 50 stages and up to 150,000 people watching anything from the biggest bands in the world to up-and-coming artists and everything in between. I like music festivals, I’ve written about them before but I’ve never wanted to go to Glastonbury and probably never will, it’s just too big.

Instead, I recently went to Latitude Festival, which is over on the East coast of Britain. Latitude has gained a reputation as a bit alternative, a bit different from the other festivals. You’ll never get big bands such as U2 or Coldplay at Latitude, and the people that go are generally thankful for that. What you will find is a friendlier atmosphere, a wide range of music and entertainment and a festival that cares about the quality of its facilities, food and the impact it has on the environment.

We arrived on the Friday afternoon and once we’d got to our tent and dropped off our things we headed straight in to the festival but, with three days and nights of music, we had some planning to do. None of the headliners really impressed but there were plenty of smaller bands I was keen to see. You can never see everything you want to at a festival so it’s a case of making the most of it and where possible seeing new things.

Friday afternoon brought us the brilliant Caribou who played inside one of the big top tents. I saw them at Sonar last year and they were just as impressive here. We also had a showing of the Beastie Boy’s ‘Fight For Your Right Revisited’ film which was a pastiche featuring some of the brightest young acting talents of the day. After that there was The Electric Hotel, an incredible set built to show the performance of a series of strangers within a hotel and listen in on the goings on. With stages in woods and on lakes there’s plenty to explore at Latitude so once The National had headlined the main stage I headed off to explore. At night the place transforms with DJs, such as Horse Meat Disco and bands playing through until 4.00 a.m. and the party really gets started.

After a bit of a late night we woke up to  the expectation of rain and so headed for the comedy tent to see a live performance of Never Mind The Buzzcocks a brilliant music quiz from the BBC which was on the road for the first time in its almost 14 year history. With the rain staying for a few hours we sought shelter and got to see some great performances by I Am Kloot, Seasick Steve and The Cribs. For me though, the highlights were seeing Foals play an incredible set which almost took the roof off one of the tents and Steve Mason, formerly of The Beta Band, who last year released his first solo album Boys Outside, play on a tiny stage in the middle of a wood. I finished off the evening with some poetry from the superb Kate Tempest and a trip to the Disco Shed, literally a garden shed that turns in to a DJ booth.

With the weather a bit brighter on Sunday we headed back in to see New Zealand band The Naked & Famous; aging New Wave band OMD who were loving playing live at the festival despite being over 50 years old; the incredible talent of Anna Calvi; and the brilliant Everything Everything who really got the big top going. My two favourite parts of the day though were L.A. band Foster The People with their sharp pop who couldn’t have had any more fun; and Kele, front man of Bloc Party, who played a set full of so much energy no-one cared that it was raining. The one big disappointment for me though was James Blake, a rising star of the UK music scene and a runner-up on the BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll and recent Mercury Music Prize nominee. There wasn’t much wrong with his performance, it was the crowd which was full of kids being kids and therefore annoying. Call me old, I don’t mind, but I can do without 16 year olds thinking they’re at a rave and screaming incessantly at each other.

Finally, Suede headlined on the Sunday night. I never liked them and after seeing fifteen minutes of them my feelings towards them were affirmed; they were awful. Luckily, I didn’t go to Latitude for the headliners so I wasn’t bothered, I’d seen plenty of great music and in a great setting.

One thing Latitude does do well is the food, there’s such a great selection and it’s all good quality and at a reasonable price. The beer is the same price as you’d pay in a pub in London and they have re-usable cups, which you take back to exchange for a clean one, to cut down on waste.

Despite the hormonal teenagers I’ll definitely head back to Latitude; it’s got the right number of people, a great variety of things to see and probably some of the best facilities around. Roll on next summer.