Your new favourite festival, accompanied by your new favourite band.
Set in the heart of Lisbon, uniquely surrounded by a thriving city and a picturesque beach, is Bela Vista Park. It’s only right that the cultural epicentre of Portugal should hold a celebration concluding an excellent summer of European festivals.
Cue MEO Kalorama – a festival committed to music, art, and sustainability. But, never fear, this wasn’t another greenwashed festival to sip priced-up canned water whilst gazing at overfamiliar bands on industrial grandstands. MEO Kalorama made it their mission to produce a comforting, seamless experience. Augmenting the natural setting with art installations across the park, providing a plethora of access and enjoyment for those with disabilities, and even offering accessible ticket prices, MEO Kalorama seemed to have thought of absolutely everything. The huge double-decker bus serving food and drink even made us Brits feel at home, despite the affordable pints feeling a far cry from the daylight robbery at UK festivals.
MEO Kalorama wears its heart on its responsibly-sourced sleeves, yet boasts a line-up to make other festival bookers green with envy. The inaugural event’s bill hosted a variety of international sensations, including Arctic Monkeys, Kraftwerk, and Bomba Estéreo. Clash spoke to the latter electro-tropical band’s founder, Simón Mejía, on how MEO Kalorama is paving the way for sustainability and creativity to coexist.
The Columbian artist explained being well-suited to the festival’s ethos: “we have the Amazon jungle that’s very rich but at the same time, very threatened… we decided that we had to use music not only as an entertainment and as a dancing instrument, but also as an awareness instrument towards the environment.” Named after the Jamaican sound systems that inform Columbia’s sound (as well as its fraught political situation), Bomba Estéreo are as rich in identity as their country’s ecosystem. Playing an early evening set on the festival’s Stage Colina, the genre-fusing group pulled a sizeable crowd with their dynamic sound, aided by the vibrancy of lead singer, Li Saumet.”Our music is not only about dancing and entertaining,” Mejía prompts, “but also about connecting with yourself and thinking about more profound things.”
Bomba Estéreo, then, are suited to sharing a line-up with electronic altruist James Blake. Promising to play “a bit o’ everything”, Blake perched unpretentiously behind a piano in a pair of dungarees, crooning classics to approving murmurs. Latecomers barrelled down the hill to ‘Say What You Will’ caked in flurries of dust, courtesy of Portugal’s dry summer.
Day one found people sprinting not only toward The Chemical Brothers, but also away, as people rushed to relieve themselves against a nearby wall before surging back into the crowd. No one wanted to miss the spectacular glitching and tripping visuals that often bordered on performance art. 100-foot aliens fought superheroes, bodies were turned inside out, and onlookers of all ages gyrated to many a recognisable techno track.
But Mejía agrees that it isn’t just world-renowned musicians that make festivals great, as the three-day weekender proffered a deluge of new discoveries: “The best experiences I have in festivals is going to the small stages, and seeing people that I that I probably won’t see anywhere else.”
Case in point: D’Alva. Helping kick off the festival’s first day, swathes of punters were drawn to the Portuguese trio’s ferocious energy emanating from beneath a rose quartz sky. Although playing the smallest of the festival’s three stages, D’Alva could fill an arena with their “meta-identity”. Also gracing the Futura Stage on day two was rising star Alice Phoebe Lou, attracting a crowd of queer romantics comforted by the singer-songwriter’s soulful vocals.
Straight after Alice Phoebe Lou’s set, a gathering of silk shirts and floppy hair coyly ambled onto the Stage Meo – the festival’s main stage. It was none other than indie staple, Blossoms. The quintet played their greatest hits to an appreciative crowd, many of whom had spent all day shifting from foot to foot, queuing for MEO Kalorama’s pièce de résistance: Arctic Monkeys. Predictably, when the Sheffield swagger of superstardom was unleashed, Armageddon ensued. Throngs of fans jeered to get closer to a mercifully robust barrier, and pints sloshed in reverie as the Monkeys’ teased their new album. Yet, the festival’s meticulous design meant that a pretty sweet view was guaranteed even from the very back of the impenetrable wall of spectators. Organisation proved a highlight of MEO Kalorama, with three sizeable stages all navigable within the 85,000m2 location, due to impeccable scheduling.
The final day was chock full of more experimental performances, not including Nick Cave – a particular favourite of Mejía’s: ‘The music that he does is beyond music… his personal stories are really tough. But they’re pieces of art for sure.’ The beginning of Nick Cave’s set was garnished with the denouement of the whirlwind that is Peaches. Absolutely unhinged in the best way, Peaches’ queer feminist farce floored the crowd. A highlight included Peaches and her ensemble stripping down to nude underwear, before trotting off stage for a quick change into a bodysuit declaring, “Thank God for Abortion”. Peaches’ compassion (and flexibility) was awe-inspiring, shared by a delighted audience despite inhabiting a Catholic country. These tidbits of diversity left us hankering for more from the white male majority line-up. But being a part of such an organism as an impassioned festival crowd was incredibly uplifting, explicable by a particularly wise line by Mejía: “the pandemic forced us to slow down and to re-map humanity.”
The three-day weekender was drawn to a close by the euphoria of Disclosure dropping banger after banger. The duo humbly thanked an exhilarated crowd not wanting the festival to be over. This hankering for celebration, explains Mejía, is universal: “there’s this general feeling all around the world that after the pandemic, people want to party,” as the planet attempts to restore some semblance of normality.
MEO Kalorama delivered on its promise of a return to the real meaning of music. Despite being the first of its kind, Portugal’s MEO Kalorama festival was a smash hit for everyone involved, and hopefully won’t be the last. “It’s beautiful that at the same time that the world is so fucked up, people can have a good time at in music festivals… It’s a unique relief – historic in some kind of way.”
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Words: Gem Stokes
