GOTTWOOD FESTIVAL
Anglesey, North Wales
20th – 23rd June, 2013
http://www.bidolito.co.uk/issues (page 26-27)
http://www.bidolito.co.uk/issues (page 26-27)
Larger festivals, despite their mammoth budgets and capacities of a
small country, have disassociated themselves with youth culture to the
extent where half the acts are older than your Dad and half the crowd have
brought their kids with them. Now it’s easy these days to bash the likes
of Glastonbury, and you might argue that there isn’t an issue when it continues
to sell out months in advanced. But there is a problem here, in that thousands
of young people want to go and get fucked up in a field and listen to their
favourite electronic music without having to take out a mortgage for it. I know
that sounds crude, but festivals that brand themselves as ‘smaller’ like
Festival No. 6, Green Man, End Of The Road, usually justify their size at the
expense of being a ‘family festival’, whilst Electronic Music festivals like
Creamfields and Waveform are either too full of dickheads who are going to kick
your head in once they’ve eaten a plate of two pound pills or are just, well, too
shit. Gottwood, with its two and half thousand capacity, on the
ball lineup and an astonishingly cheap £95 four-day ticket fills a cavernous
gap in the festival season, allowing a bunch of broke idiots like me to have a nice
little holiday.
Gottwood’s best attribute, and what they rightly lean on when it comes
to branding is their festival site. Situated in the aforementioned hills of
Anglesey North Wales, it certainly isn’t the easiest place to get to, but what
meets you upon arrival is certainly worth the journey. The campsite is basic,
with a burger van, toilets and a large ‘chill-out’ tent providing solace for
anyone who’s managed to stop gurning for five minutes. At the edge sits a rare
opening in thick woodland, doubling as the entrance to the festival arena.
Densely populated trees and a hastily hacked away bush land give the impression
that we’re going down the rabbit hole, where vintage clothes stalls, gazebos,
drinks huts and a giant swing awkwardly frame a footpath leading you towards
the stages. Venture through this area after the sun goes down though, and you
really start to understand how special this festival is, as fairy lights and
multi-coloured beacons sit stunningly among the top of the trees, reminding us
that despite the debauchery on show there is still some beauty left in these
woods. Somewhere.
Thursday night acts as a warm-up, with a thinly
spread lineup slowly easing us into proceedings. Manchester’s TCTS, from
Bondax’s JustUs label, provides an early highlight, with the piano house
grooves of 1997 and an excellent remix of Snakehips’ On & On keeping
things upbeat for those early revelers. Hessle Audio co-founder BEN UFO and
Belfast’s EJECA have been operating at the pinnacle of UK electronic music this
year and together spearhead Friday’s offerings, with the former seamlessly
blending house, techno and garage, as well as Dem 2’s Destiny (!!) to
provide the most focused set so far. Ejeca’s jersey-style deep house falls on grateful
melody starved ears, with his own The Way I Feel and Different Rules
providing that sort of fist-pumping euphoria that makes you want to dropkick
everyone around you. Tunes inevitably overlap as the weekend progresses, with
Saturday heavyweights WAZE & ODDYSEY’s Bump n Grind getting a
run-out from MARIBOU STATE, which alongside their recent remix of Fatboy Slim’s
Praise You provides one of the most joyous, tuneless sing-alongs this
side of Rolf Harris. The feet are still moving deep into Sunday, where BICEP generates
that sort of weird, analogue-leaning house that made their Stash EP a
2013 highlight. Musically, the weekend keeps up with electronic music’s
relentless momentum, ensuring that any of the crowd who has managed to salvage
at least a few brain cells will be leaving with a basket of new favourite
tunes. With one of the strongest and most consistent lineups of the summer
though, its as you would expect.
The hills, the lake, the seclusion, those fucking fairy lights; all
create the impression that we are in some sort of twilight zone completely
separated from the rest of the world. This isn’t real life, these aren’t real
people, and I know it probably sounds like I was high as fuck but I bet if you
asked the organisers, an escape from reality was exactly they had in mind. Post
Gottwood blues is a phrase synonymous with the two weeks that follow, as daily
lives resume and we all strain to remember a time where we were back in some
weird little woodland, dancing on hay-bails and screaming R Kelly songs.
Mike Townsend
@townsendyesmate
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