If you were organising a festival for 10,000 people, what would be your first wish for an ideal, solid preparation? A brilliant headliner? Varied catering perhaps? Selling all the tickets months in advance? These are all pretty desirable, and would help the discerning festival-organiser get some restful kip in the lead up to the event of their making.

         
However, I’m pretty willing to bet that above all of this the number one most valued, nay, most essential component of a music festival is the location, the ground on which those attending will walk, jump and stumble across for 3 days. Try to imagine Glasto without Worthy Farm, Big Chill without Eastnor, Reading and Leeds without, er, Reading and Leeds.  Doesn’t really work does it?


Well, in St Agnes Beach in Cornwall the organisers of Beach Break Live thought they had their perfect location.  They’d hosted it there previously, expanding the amount of students (it's a student only festival) visiting from 1000 in 2007, 5000 in 2008 and, finally, 10000 this year.  They were awaiting confirmation of planning permission, expecting it to be a doddle until a few crusty St Agnes councillors took umbrage with the bevy of rabble-rousers that were about to descend on the sleepy coastal town, and denied them planning permission 7 days before the festival was due to start.



Fuck.



Now, one could say that the easy option here would have been to refund the ticket money but, frankly, that would have meant total financial disaster for festival organisers Ian Forshew and Celia Norowzian. And more than anything it would have meant giving in, being taken down by the all conquering, soul-sucking Man.  So Ian and Celia said non, flicked the councillors two sturdy fingers and went to Plan B, moving the venue of the festival halfway across the country, to Kent and the Port Lympne Nature Reserve. If you want some context, according to Streetmap that will take you five hours and eleven minutes in a car. So six, then.

    
Now, the logistics of such a move are beyond thesmall,inconsequential brain powers of a simple music reporter such as I.  Suffice to say, I can only imagine it was a complete fucking nightmare and I don’t think anyone would have moaned too much if the festival ran off badly, or was an organisational nightmare with absent headliners, buckets for
toilets and local ASBO-holders as Security.


But as is the case in all the best feel-good stories, quite the opposite was to occur.  This 3 day soiree in the Kent countryside went off, as far as these eyes could see, without the merest hint of a hitch.  In fact the move and the hassles it presented leant an exclusive air to proceedings and seemed to bring out that charmingly get-a-cuppa-we’re-English strain of stubbornness and determination that is so vital to this green and pleasant land.  This giggling gaggle of students weren’t going to let any amount of bureaucratic wankery get in the way of their intentions to dance, drink and flirt their way to a good time.

So, overlong and over-sentimentalised introductions over with, day 1 started for us with Delphic as, due to our going to the wrong gate and subsequent traversal of half the site to find the elusive Production Entrance, we got in later than planned and unfortunately missed indie tricksters Flashguns and, more gallingly, Official Secrets Act. Unfortunately Delphic weren’t the best act to start with as they are intrinsically mediocre;  a mish mash of the more boring moments of Bloc Party and the thousand other middling beat-peddlers currently giving each other wedgies on East London’s backstreets.  Always on the edge of a tune but never quite getting there they had one good number, ‘Counterpoint’, but other than that were pretty ordinary, both visually and sonically, and did little to rouse an ambivalent, mainly prostrate crowd.

Fortunately VV Brown was on next, and proved to be an explosive, immaculately legged bundle of sassy 50’s pop-a-doo-dah (my own phrase).  Opening with ‘Crying Blood’ was a masterstroke and immediately got the previously seated hoards doing the side to
side shakey dance as she lurched and careered across the stage with an abandon that the politically incorrect among you may dub gay. Anyone not standing after that certainly was for her cover of Kings Of Leon’s ‘Use Somebody’ which achieved a mass sing-a-long that was to be unmatched until Friendly Fires later. Other highlights were ‘Quickfix’ and new single ‘Shark In The Water’ throughout which me and my companion Mike sniggered mischievously  at a quite clearly homosexual young chap singing and shimmying along to every word as though the elastic of his tight little pants depended on it. Judge us if you wish, but it was funny.


Things now go a little hazy as me and Mike came down with a serious case of Firstnightoverexcitedeness, and proceeded to get on that most typical of festival beverages, the Jaeger Bomb.  To the uninitiated this is a shot of Jaegermeister dropped into a can of Red Bull , the effect of which couldonly possibly be compared to a line of the good stuff.  Suddenly tongues became loosened and we found ourselves lounging on these raised wooden boxed disguised as beds (see below), talking to some girls who openly admitted to being in ‘a bit of a state’.  We weren’t about to argue, yet neither were we about to pursue amorous advances as, to be honest, they didn’t quite cut the mustard. 


The Whips' dirty synth stylings took us away from the boxes/beds, and hit the spot rather nicely as a warm-up to the hideously overworked (check out this gig schedule) Friendly Fires. Despite being a bit fond of a scowling disposition, they embarked on a mission to rock da joint, chucking in singles ‘Jump In The Pool’ and ‘Skeleton Boy’ early in the set to get the gathered hoards slathering and jumping under the still light sky. Twitchy frontman Ed Macfarlane didn’t interact much with the crowd, but then Fires are a band to get people moving though their bleeps, bloops and big chorus's.  And move they did as they patiently waited for ‘Paris’ to come, the dropping of which provoked a largely tuneless but utterly impassioned wail-a-long.  Beach Break 2009 had just had its first pivotal moment.


More were to follow with Mystery Jets, by which time I had descended into the shouting, lunging fool of yore; fortunately, the Jets were perfect for this mood with their mix up of eminently danceable tunes that demand vocal support.  ‘Flakes’ was a real highlight, and lived up to its reputation of the sleeper tune from the brilliant Twenty One. ‘Hideaway’, a personal favourite, was also blinding with the red lcd lights lending a suitably sleazy air to this tune about a girl who just can’t get enough (just can’t get enough).  I’d thought as a band they might suffer from not being too visually engaging, due to lead singer Blaine’s necessity to sit on a stool  in the centre of the stage, but I needn’t have worried and, frankly, Blaine’s still- adolescent voice hit the notes with such ease and emotion that you’d have to a darned fool to think him anything other than a brilliant frontman.


As expected, penultimate song ‘Two Doors Down’ sparked mass carnage amongst the rowd as people clambered all over each other to get the best shouting spot, though more should have stayed for the last tune (the name of which escapes me), which is apparently from the new album and real weeper.


High on sugar, singing and dancing we then went off into the festival which, like all the good ‘uns, really comes alive at night when everyone’s had maximum sozzling time.  There’s plenty to do, not least at the main dance stage named Forest Of Kernow ,where the resident gurners were out in force ‘avin it.  The atmosphere, as is normally the way with these arena’s, was excellent and jam packed, everyone smiling and sweating in your general direction.  But there was far more to sample; Club Tropicana had a wealth of jingly jangly guitar led bands that kept the hoards dancing and pogo’ing around.


Unfortunately we were of a restless disposition, eager to enjoy as much
as possible from the still young night, so squirreled out from there into the Residential Care Home, a smallish tent decked out like an Old People’s Home which was playing some obscure beats that didn’t quite tickle my indie pleasure bone.  Still, people in there were again
disconcertingly friendly and seemed very willing to consume the drinks we insisted on buying for them.


From there it was onto festival staple Chai Wallah’s, the Moustache Bar and back to Tropicana’s.  Next thing I knew I was standing outside a
ride called the Mystic Swing, messily snogging someone far too young for me, before trying to convince her and her friend to come back to my tent for what would almost certainly have been the least gratifying sexual experience of their lives.  Fortunately for them they had the sense to reply in the negative to my romantic offer and, though they did let me come back to their tent for a while, it became clear after about 5 minutes that this was not, as I hoped, a precursor to an all-night triumvirate but more a     if-we-don’t-talk-to-him-while-he’s-here-then-he’ll-go-away offensive.  And work it did, and I soon had the presence of mind to crawl back to the tent where Mike was kept awake by excitable retellings of my (mis)adventures at the Mystic Swing.  Day
one, seized.

Posted In Festivals, Mar 30 2011. Words - David