Lounge On The Farm Festival 2008

I can’t let the Summer pass without saying a few words about the Lounge On The Farm 2008 festival, held in Canterbury over the weekend of the 11-13 July. Billed as a “boutique” festival, with a maximum capacity of 10,000 people, it promised a locally sourced mix of music and food in a relaxed environment.
The reality more than matched the promise. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so chilled out at a large-scale music event like this. In fact, frankly, I was a bit too relaxed and spent much time lounging around, inspired by the festival’s title, without getting off my arse to actually see many bands. But then, even music festivals aren’t entirely about the music.
This was the first time I’ve enjoyed camping at a festival. Electric Gardens last year was a bit of a white knuckle ride, as far as the campsite was concerned. LOTF was so much better. I picked a quiet corner, which also happened to be right next to one of the security stations, so managed to get a good six hours sleep each night.
I heard someone moaning about how Lounge had “gone all corporate” since last year. It must have been pretty ramshackle last time then, because I thought it all seemed very well thought through. The campsite was only a couple of minutes walk from the car park. There were enough loos. Nice food. The stages were themed and mostly ran on time.
Ah yes, the music. Almost forgot about that. That’s pretty much how the festival itself passed by, to be honest. Oooh look, band X are on in a minute… Ah well, we’ll have another pint and maybe catch the end of their set… I had very friendly camping neighbours and we were in the bar by 1pm on the Friday. The music seemed almost incidental.
Friday afternoon was marked by a spate of truly terrible tribute acts in the Sheep Dip tent. By the evening things went decidedly indie, with a trendier-than-thou line-up on the main Cow Shed stage of Lightspeed Champion, Black Kids and Art Brut. I generally found myself irrationally irritated by them all.
Holy Fuck closed the Cow Shed on the Friday evening. They restored my good mood to a considerable degree. Having seen them in a pub environment towards the end of last year, I wondered how they’d scale to the main stage. Very well, as it turned out. The only disappointment was the lack of encore due to a curfew.
On the Saturday, I’d been looking forward to seeing Billy Childish in the evening, but unfortunately he’d had to pull out at the last minute. This didn’t particularly leave anyone in the line-up that I was dying to see. I knew that Lupen Crook was doing a lunchtime gig in Chatham, about half an hour away by train, so I headed off-site.
As it turned out, the lunchtime gig got postponed until the evening. I decided to hang around for it and so I didn’t get back to the festival until much later than expected, around 11pm. It was definitely worth it though, Mr Crook’s art centre performance was intimate and absorbing. And I got back to LOTF in time to see New York Dolls.
They’re one of those big name bands whose appeal has completely passed me by over the years. In fact, I only made the effort to go and see them because they were pretty much the only choice left at that time of night. They turned out to be utterly brilliant, a pure blast of concentrated rock ‘n’ roll. I loved every minute.
With Sunday came the prospect of meeting up with several people who I knew were going to be there. More conversation, more fun in the sun. We watched Ukulele Gangstas, whose unique blend of Beefheart meets ska-punk meets Hawkwind meets Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine was utterly brilliant. I’ve never heard a ukulele put through so many effects pedals.
I caught some of Pete Molinari’s set. His name has cropped up in a few conversations over the past few months and I’d been intrigued, but the reality sounded too much like Bob Dylan for my taste. I’d also wanted to see local band Eben, who I caught in Maidstone earlier this year, but despite being on the roster they didn’t appear to be there.
Medway post/thrash-rockers UpCDownC were much more my kind of thing: a mixture of gentle, almost pastoral instrumentals that frequently soared into a crescendo of complex, noisy, precision-engineered riffing and percussion. I want to hear much more of their stuff and will be seeing them play live again in September.
Lupen Crook & the Murderbirds closed the Sheep Dip stage. I’ve seen them so often over the past twelve months or so that I thought I knew what to expect, but they delivered a fierce, angry, almost brutal performance of a kind that I haven’t seen since way back into last year, with much more back catalogue material than their recent gigs.
I ended up in the field round the corner watching a band called Diagonal on the Furthur stage. I’d never heard of them, but their heady mixture of post-prog-psych-jazz rock and their trippy lightshow were the perfect end to the day and to the festival as a whole. I staggered back to my tent a very happy man and slept like a baby.