Fireworks and ting.
Summer isn’t covering itself in glory at the moment. In fact right now it feels like it has already been and gone like an unreliable lover, leaving nothing but a warm, sticky slug-trail of sweat and frizzy hair in its wake. Like an unreliable lover.
But snap out of it, because we’ve still got two months of it to go, hooray! And if you, like me, would like to squeeze one more festival into your sticky, puffy-faced existence then let me take this opportunity to recommend Boomtown Fair.
Boomtown is an unusual festival. For a start it’s probably the only one in the world that took the global financial crisis as its founding inspiration. Back in 2009, its organisers surveyed the unfolding doom of the Western economic order and thought, presumably, “good time to put on a new festival”. Taking those tedious real world events as a loose foundation, they conceived Boomtown, complete with its fictional backstory of a mining town fallen into Mad Max-style anarchy after the gold ran out.
There have been six chapters in the Boomtown story, with a new one written each year. The last Fair saw an election which culminated in the now ex-Mayor of Boomtown chasing his victorious opponent out of the city following some nifty time travel-related skullduggery courtesy of a 40-foot mechanical alien spider called Arcadia. Follow? Excellent. You can read the full story of all six previous festivals here.
Boomtown wasn’t the first festival to have a fictional narrative running through the proceedings of course (Shangri-La, Glastonbury’s after-hours mecca, got there just a few months before in June 09) but, boy, do they do it well. Each one of the eight ‘town districts’ has its own story and stages, and a dizzying array of characters, played by actors, obviously (I suppose), jolly things along.
If all this is in danger of sounding a bit twee, the festival itself certainly isn’t. 38,000 people attended last year. This year the capacity is 49,999. Those making the trip this August will unearth a rich seam (because it’s a mining town) of underground (ha!) talent and performers. Boomtown’s organisers prefer to book a lesser-known but judiciously-chosen roster of acts which cover the full gamut of what you might call the ‘non-commercial’ genres*. Hence you’ll find house and garage in Barrio Loco where DJ EZ is headlining, reggae and dancehall in Trenchtown with Stephen Marley (son of Bob), Ska and Punk in Chinatown and so on and so on. 500 artists are playing across 24 stages in all.
The arts, crafts, massages and whatnot of Whistler’s Green probably deserve a mention too, although with the humidity what it is as I write this the idea of being drizzled in oil and rubbed about by a stranger is just filling me with a clammy sense of foreboding.
Anyway, I urge you to get your beautiful selves to Boomtown. And maybe bring an ice box.
*if your tastes are more commercial then you’d probably be better off looking elsewhere. Maybe V-Fest. Yes, go to V-Fest…
BoomTown Fair takes place in Winchester on the 13-16th August. Tickets here.
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