Desertification, where previously lush countryside withers and turns to desert, is a term that looms large in my imagination this year at . We’re on heatwave number five and it’s dusty. Dusty as hell.
A hundred thousand skanking feet hoof up ghostly plumes of parched earth, painting the sunset armageddon orange. A hacking cough is surely in the post.
Are we bothered? Are we fuck. It’s a glorious day, and the most beautiful festival crowd in England is having it large.
Kneecap are amazing, revelatory, dominating a rammed Lions Den amphitheatre. Their special sauce? take everything that’s cool about electronic music, make it a band, then make that band about something. Peerless, truly.
They’re on right after . I love Ren, on record. Not sure about the live show, a wee bit all over the place. His Bittersweet Symphony, an astute play for the nation’s affections, comes across a smidge NatWest advert here. His rapping would be more convincing if he looked up. Looking hench though, and Chalk Outlines is a tune. He’s still young, a boy really. Bet you anything he matures into a generational star, with his insane versatility, his Peaky Blinder good looks.
This year I resolve to get stuck into the storyline. You know, the plot. The byzantine rolling narrative, that goes back years. What’s extraordinary about Boomtown, as I can’t say enough, is the depth of worldbuilding. All these radically disparate zones – Copperwood Heights, a roaring twenties fever dream, Gatsby on acid, is having a water crisis. Botanica, mycelial den of earth mothers, is staging an election. At one point I engage in conversation with an actor in a cage, in a dog mask, telling me at length how gnomes have no right to exist. It’s storytelling, it’s satire, it’s LARPing on a staggering scale.
I was lucky enough to interview Luke, one of the founders, the other week. He told me that gaming is so big in the world now, why not create a space where folks can come and do it for real. Yep.
In Letsbe Avenue, I’m handed a yellow sash and encouraged to bimble about collecting badges, like a scout. Over the course of the weekend, it becomes clear this adorably goofy troop is unwittingly being trained up as a paramilitary sleeper cell. Genius.
I must shout-out Soapranos Launderette, a nutty little venue where you climb through a washing machine only to be confronted by an unexpectedly murderous soundsystem. And the Inconvenience Store, a flat-out hilarious collective whose sole reason to be here is to fuck with you, squirting your crotch with waterpistols, tying your shoelaces together, custard pieing some luckless cunt in a bucket hat.
The big story this year is those bad old billionaires are going to space, having determined Earth is a ‘single-use planet’. It’s witty in that way – tech-bro posters that co-opt the language of mindfulness by ’holding space’. They’ve built a massive fucking spaceship, in the dystopian wild west Area 404 – an aesthetic entirely in keeping with the eerily arid IRL hillside around us.
Still, I’m mostly here for music. As are most of the crowd, to be fair – every now and then one of the gym-bodded twentysomethings that make up the vast majority of punters stumbles into the middle of a skit, bewildered, oblivious. That’s actually a huge part of the charm, for me.
draw an enormous crowd – Suggs and co’s brand of twinkle-in-the-eye cockney songcraft still resonating with the Gen Z massive, many of them adorably wearing fez hats.
Something I’d not quite appreciated before was how deep not only the build, the costumes, and the vibe of the zones goes – in Botanica Garden Centre, a zany birdbox emblazoned with tit jokes, on Sunday afternoon a clown heist – but how well the music lineups reflect that.
So in the Full Moon ballroom at Copperwood Heights, the band – infectious latin rizz, the quintessential festival party band – energetically channel that gilded-age flapper aesthetic. crowdsources noise from his audience, weaving organic womp-womp beats at the mushroom inspired Nexus stage. Pedal to the metal techno by Fish56Octagan lights up Spectrum 360, a startlingly innovative DJ booth, staged in the round.
My favourite venue, for a host of reasons, is . It’s fucking huge, bruv, doling out lunatic electro heavy artillery, from a city-block sized behemoth, all blazing lasers, creepily massive Blade Runner screens, vast pitiless ducts. A masterpiece of stagecraft.
It’s inspiring too, powered entirely by hydrogen, so the only waste product is water. Not as some weedy sustainability sticking plaster – ’woke-washing’, as the ever-hilarious Daily Rag in-universe newspaper has it. It’s by far the biggest and brightest stage, visible from all over the site pretty much. were made for it. were right at home.
Why go to all that trouble? Because, I guess, Boomtown cares. It’s a party, first and foremost, a colossal mash-up rave. It certainly has a sense of humour – is an inspired booking, delivering crowdpleasers to 30,000 or so kids who could barely muster a teaspoon of serotonin between them on Saturday night.
But there’s also a point. A point that’s made in a few clever ways, through the story, through the acts – take the , a sprightly Bristol collective who set out to inspire vegetarianism with sick tunes and a pitch-perfect megachurch pisstake by Finn in a brassica bishop’s mitre.
Environmental campaigner and artist is given a plum spot right after to deliver his message from a fair and just future, quoting Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld with the unforgettable line “longing on a large scale is what changes history.” Let’s hope so, eh.
On the way into there’s a giant sculpture of a head, just one of countless elaborate props that the team lay on, art for art’s sake. I sit in its shade with my mate, skulling cider, thinking about the poem . Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair.
When the party’s over, tomorrow, after Faithless, will that message go home with the crowd? These gorgeous kids, the flower of English youth. The fine-boned sweethearts and the jacked lads, having a well-earned rager while all around them the lone and level sands stretch far away.
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