It may have been a joy for us campers but you wouldn’t want to have been a band at this year’s Lounge on the Farm. Kent’s finest boutique festival was sunny and hot and sweaty and really not the ideal environment for wearing elaborate stage gear.
Still, some hardy old stagers battled gamely on, notably Motown legends Martha and the Vandellas on Saturday’s main stage (called the Cowshed, because it’s a cowshed). Elsewhere there were oddball arty types – five girls in a cage pretending to be canaries – and a choice if slightly random smattering of indie outfits. The most sensibly-dressed was New Yorker Lissie Trullie, who went with a smart-but-superthin shirt (she too is smart and superthin).
The least sensible stage utterance of the weekend, meanwhile, was by the chap from the Wave Pictures, who dissed Sunday headliners Toots and the Maytals for their rider demands, and was met with a deathly silence. “Oh dear, I feel a pressure drop,” he countered, but even an impressive Toots-based pun couldn’t quite win them back. When you make a tune as good as ‘Pressure Drop’ you can ask for all the beers you can manage, sunshine.
Enough of the between-artists backbiting, though: generally speaking this year’s LOTF was a solar-powered delight. Then, on Monday, it pissed down.
Words by Si Hawkins
View an accompanying photo gallery from Lounge On The Farm 2010 HERE.
