“We Need To Cultivate Longing” Boomtown Fair Is A Space For Dreamers

Imagine this. Sixty-thousand nutters getting on it in the sunshine. Murderous basslines thundering out of monumental sound systems. Warmth and wonder, daft smiles, dirty drops, dancing and love. 

Boomtown – spoiler, I adore it with all my heart – is a colossal work of art. No other event can touch it for sheer madcap ambition. The setting, the stages, the costumes, the world building. All masterful. Awe-inspiring. 

If you don’t know, it’s more than just a music festival. It’s a wild living adventure game. Hundreds of brilliant actors inhabit a topsy-turvy alternate reality where, if you’re so minded, you can spend pretty much the whole weekend not seeing a single band, or skanking to a solitary DJ. Honestly, a sizable cohort of festival-goers basically spend the entire time bimbling around doing quests, collecting trinkets, solving puzzles. It’s barmy.

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But not trivial. Au contraire. ‘Revolution Of Imagination’ is the theme this year, inspired by author and activist Rob Hopkins. Rob, a leading light in the ‘transition town’ movement, wrote ‘From What Is to What If’ – an influential tome entreating individuals and organisations to think big and channel the magic of imagination to fight climate change, and other intractable problems..  

Boomtown, appropriately enough, is imagination made manifest. The storyline is creative to a level that frankly defies belief. But it’s not prescriptive! The creativity and wit of you, the punter, is the storytelling substrate. Seriously, bring your own art to trade, improvise with the actors. Originality is the lifeblood of Boomtown. 

ANYWAY, it’s also a music festival. And I must confess that, try as I might to focus on the story – something about an election? – the irresistible siren song of fat beats and filthy bass yet again lures me astray. Next year, eh.

Dutty Moonshine Big Band, good grief they’re sick – bass and brass and rampant firepower, a pinch of cabaret, a dash of hip-hop. DJ Bou declaring sonic world war three on battalions of shirtless ravers at the Origin Stage – that’s the whacking great stone-looking monolith, aka ket-henge, ha-ha. 

Captain Flatcap is a bit of a hero of mine, virtuoso flute and merciless donk donk donk. The rudest embouchure in the biz. I’m tempted to say he deserves a bigger stage than Little Pharma. But somehow the dinky dispensary window format feels apt. Just what the doctor ordered, you might say.

Flatcap kicks off with a cover of The Beatles’ ‘Daytripper’, indicative of the sheer piss-taking joie de vivre that acts exemplify here. Chris Tofu does Old Macdonald Had A Farm, if you please, to a delirious 2am mob at Fool’s Leap. I wander into a dinky hole-in-the-wall playing DnB Christmas numbers, Mariah Carey et al. The Bad Apple Bar is rammo for an Abba singalong on Sunday afternoon. Dr Asparagus, also at Big Pharma, deploys lively, ludicrous loops and hardcore cabbage abuse. 

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It’s not just DJs though. Oh no siree. Soft Play at Grand Central is incendiary. It’s heartening, really, to see a bazillion gym-bodied heads go apeshit over a guitar band. Rock n’Roll? Alive and well, it turns out. 

Oodles of trad, too. Bewitching gothic country from Heathen Apostles. Muscular, pugilistic folk-punk from The Lagan and their phenomenal fiddle player, who’s named Stan, helpfully (because we stan).

I’m dying to meet Boomtown’s main creative team, led by Luke (/Lak) and entirely by accident I happen to stumble into them, in the white heat of the Flogging Molly moshpit. Honour of a lifetime, lovely people, artists without parallel. 

Too much good stuff to cover! The ‘Gabba Kebabber’, an earsplitting takeaway-themed venue blasting epic techno. The ‘Scotland Yard Soundsystem’ and its crew of fetish feds pole-dancing at the Boomtown Bobbies – so loud I felt my individual hairs vibrating. 

In a ballsy move, author and inspiration-merchant Rob Hopkins does a talk on the main stage – the conceit being he’s a time traveller, landed on-site to tell us the good news from 2030. What good news? That cities are safer, cleaner, car-free and diverse. Compellingly, Rob reckons the only way to inspire us toward this future is through the example of creativity. Of the kind Boomtown, naturally, is world class at.

“Art is an integral part of how we inspire a better world,” he says when I buttonhole him at the campsite earlier that day. “We need to cultivate longing. Before anybody went to the moon, artists imagined what the technology to get us there might look like. Festivals like this provide an opportunity to imagine a better world. To test drive alternative ways of seeing, and being. To create space for what might be possible, and allow us to fall in love with the future.”

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Beans On Toast at the Engine Shed makes a similar point. Albeit a little more colourfully. 

“I’ve been up and down the country this past fortnight,” he declares to, essentially, his hometown crowd. “I’ve seen way more people at festivals, a hundred times more, than you’ve seen burning up city centres in racist riots on the news.”

Warming to his theme, he continues: “Society is fine. The culture is fine. We just need to take care of a few pricks.”

How do we do that? Beans On Toast plays a tune commissioned by Boomtown a couple of years ago, entreating his dizzy followers to clear up after themselves, especially their tents, when they leave site (“take your shit home!”) 

Perhaps humour is the way – I spy a crochet sign in a fake brothel window bearing the legend “THIS ISN’T A WHORE HOUSE, IT’S A WHORE HOME”. Or the fake Apple Genius Bar logo in the architecturally jaw-dropping Botanica zone, that looks just like a goatse. Or (ahem, ready for this?) “Poppers Limbo”. 

Or the geezer dangling a bag of wine lashed to a flagpole in the middle of Ezra Collective’s giant crowd, cheap merlot being gleefully sucked off by hot ravers. Boomtown could well save the world, with art, booze, piss-taking and music. 

Imagine that.

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Words: Andy Hill // @andyhillwrites
Photography: Lucas Sinclair, Adam Tidman, Leora Bermeister, Scott M Salt

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