South Pole Saloon review for Brixton Blog

Here in Brixton we have a fun game we like to play when we’re walking around our neighbourhood. Many of you will be familiar with it, even if you live elsewhere in London – it’s called ‘Try To Spot An Open Space That Somehow Hasn’t Been Turned Into Either Luxury Flats Or A Street Food Market’. Keen players of the game will have been kicking themselves recently, for having failed to spot that the rooftop of the long running shop Home ‘n’ Fashion on Pope’s Road was – far from merely a structure for ensuring the retailer’s stock didn’t get wet – also the perfect location for a winter themed pop-up night food market. Before 2017 has finished we fully expect to also witness a high-spec two bedroom apartment in each of the disused public toilets in Windrush Square, and a stall selling pork steamed buns on top of the Blenheim Gardens bus stop shelter.

South Pole Saloon (for that is its name) isn’t here to just tick off one hot trend, though. It’s here to tick off as many as possible! So sure, it’s a pop up, and it’s selling street food at night, but it’s also got immersive theatre! Warm cocktails! Staff with beards! Readers of ES Magazine will be flooding in!

Let’s look at the food first, because what’s on offer is probably why you’ll want to visit South Pole Saloon. And there’s good reasons to do so – nobody could deny it’s good news to have food vendors like Dip & Flip Burger on board, not least because it means you don’t have to go to the company’s permanent locations in the middle of nowhere (ie: Battersea or Wimbledon) to try their solid 8/10 burger & gravy concept.

Drinks wise, well, that could be argued to be more an area of concern. Pints of beer – exclusively supplied by Brooklyn Brewery – start at £5.40. Just to add some context, that’s 90p more expensive than the cheapest pint when watching The Who, Taylor Swift and Blur play British Summer Time in Hyde Park this year. South Pole Saloon doesn’t shy away from promoting its own entertainment offering of course – more on that shortly – but even the most optimistic bar manager is going to have a struggle on their hands to match the level of entertainment provided by Tay Tay and Roger bloody Daltrey.

Amongst the lengthy licensing documents that South Pole Saloon submitted to Lambeth Council back in September, the company said that they anticipated their customers will be from “all parts of London and of mixed backgrounds”. A harsh critic might suggest that at £5:40 a drink their customer base won’t so much be from ‘all parts of London’ as ‘pretty much exclusively from Clapham’, a theory we’re certainly not ready to dismiss based on their opening night. Still, at one point we do spot two women getting around this thorny pricing issue by making use of their own hipflask. For your £5:40 you could afford this fetching little hard liquor container and then just make your own alcohol arrangements. So you know, do that instead.

Still, the whole place looks okay, in a grown-up Winter Wonderland kind of way. There’s enough heaters to stop you getting cold. It seems like a passable place to come if you want an evening of dancing, and it doesn’t lay the whole Christmas thing on too thick. There’s other places you can go for Christmas schmaltz. South Pole Saloon wants to where Santa’s slightly naughtier elves hang out.

Which brings us to the Saloon’s theatrical offerings. Pretty excitingly, the website promises the venue will have “every corner designed to cater for the whims of the most fantastical, playful and debaucherous guests”, which would make for a somewhat ambitious way of describing the opening night. We can confirm that there are some young adults on stage dancing vaguely sexily. As for these promised ‘immersive performance’ elements, well, we briefly spot a woman in a costume walking on the bar, and a guy in a costume sit down next to some girls and sing them a song with his guitar. It would all probably hold up as a decent evening’s entertainment in Derby or somewhere. I think what we’re basically trying to say here is: we don’t think you should go to South Pole Saloon on the basis of their much-promoted theatrical offering.

Should you inexplicably find yourself in the mood for socialising outside this December, the Berlin-style surroundings of Brixton Bloc is both cooler and cheaper, whilst Pop Brixton is both a stronger food destination and a better thought out space. And both of them are one hell of a lot more community focused than this place.

Blues Kitchen review for Brixton Blog

Heard of the Columbo Group? They’re the new Antic in town. Heard of neither Antic or The Columbo Group? Oh, sorry. Well, maybe you’d be forgiven for having not. Antic are that big company that own all those young cool bars in our area that many people seem to mistake for being independents: Dogstar, Effra Social, Gremio De Brixton and Eckovision.

The Columbo Group, meanwhile? They’re the new boy in our neighbourhood. We’re intrigued by their arrival. We’d been re-thinking our long running romance with Antic for a while now, and now this young, flashy new boy has arrived in town. We somehow got chatting to them on the N109 home last month, and we must admit they did catch our eye a little bit…

Long story short, we somehow gave The Columbo Group our phone number as we got off the bus that night, and before long they were eagerly chirpsing us, with the successful launch of Phonox nightclub last month. Now, with Blues Kitchen, we’re at the ‘exchanging graphic Snapchats’ stage of our relationship. The first two branches of The Blues Kitchen are in Camden and Shoreditch. A suspicious eye might spot a pattern with these previous partners: this is clearly an organisation interested in our area for our ‘coolness capital’. You sense that if we blurted something wildly unhipster out on the third date – something like how we wished Ritzy cinema would hurry up and fully convert to a Cineworld – then The Columbo Group would be off running down the road and hopping into bed with Tooting before we’d even had a chance to suggest going shopping for matching knitwear.

If this all feels a little more corporate than your ideal vision of Brixton, then you may have to force a smile for some time yet: alongside the Blues Kitchen and Phonox, we also had the opening of the Brazilian chain Cabana last month, and next weekend it’s the opening of Caribbean chain Turtle Bay (with a whopping £800,000 investment in the branch). Seemingly, we’ve hit a new era of corporate investment in Brixton. Is it because rents are now too high for independents? Is the most a local business can hope for now a six month stint in Pop Brixton?

Best to put all that out of our minds right now, as we’ve got a romantic dinner date with The Columbo Group to get to. And we have to admit, Blues Kitchen know how to treat a neighbourhood like us to a good date. For starters, they make a great first impression. They’ve put money and thought into doing up the former (independent venue) Electric Social.

Meat cuts, barbecuing and marinating across the board are excellent. You can gnaw away at, say, the pork spare ribs for what feels like an eternity. If the beef brisket isn’t quite as good as the astonishing 10/10 effort from street food favourite Smokestak, it does just about manage to be better than the locally available brisket from Miss P’s BBQ at Pop Brixton.

Hard shakes will instantly win over anybody with a sweet enough tooth to stomach them. Anybody ruling out meat will find their options unsurprisingly thin on the ground. An underthought out vegetarian platter would be entirely lacking in imagination if it wasn’t for the solitary – yet excellent – parmesan and artichoke dip at its centre. The creole bean burger is huge and has clearly had far more care directed towards its inception. And here’s a strong bonus: as standard they’ll offer to pack up your leftovers for you to takeaway.

Visiting during the soft launch period, it was unclear how the live music prospect would fare in comparison. Blues Kitchen Camden has been responsible for some great live music in the past, even on weeknights, but every time we attempted to listen to the live music on our visit it proved itself too immediately ignorable to maintain any attention.

There are arguably bigger problems: the bill includes the standard 12.5% service charge. Taking our money, we told them we’d like to pay £27 each. Against this specific request, they kept all of our change. Due to a last minute round of cocktails we weren’t given a final receipt – being told that the till had already been shut down for the night – and that we’d have to email requesting one. A week later, there’s no sign yet of it showing up.

All of which we hope are teething problems, because based on the food here, and the clubbing at Phonox, we’ve kind of got the hots for The Colombo Group right now. We’re forgiving it some of its flaws for the moment, because of how dependably it pulls off the stuff we’re really looking for in a partner. We’re happy to keep seeing where this one goes…

Eckovision review for Brixton Blog

 

 

There’s a trendy new bar in Brixton’s arches. You may not exactly need reminding that it’s a sensitive time for the businesses in the area. The #savebrixtonarches campaign is in full swing with Network Rail looking to redevelop the area, then triple the rents it charges retailers. Even Wahaca have been canny enough to put the campaign poster up in their restaurant window. For the last decade or so Network Rail has (if you think about the major ones you use regularly) been on a mission to develop its stations into money-spinning shopping centres with a few train platforms attached.

All of which is fine, if you’re adding a Bella Pasta and a second Marks & Spencer Simply Food to Euston station. It’s arguably somewhat insensitive, however, if it will contribute to the social cleansing of Brixton. Network Rail has defended its plans, pledging to ensure that any new businesses that replace ousted ones will be independently owned. But as has been pointed out, it doesn’t matter how independent they are, as the process still forces out businesses that were there to affordably serve the established Brixton community, and so further erodes people’s ability to maintain their deep-rooted connections with the neighbourhood.

Only too happy to play the bull in the Brixton Arches’ china shop, then, is Eckovision – a new bar that’s opened opposite Argos on Atlantic Road, where Atlantis bar used to be. Eckovision arrives via Antic, the bar company that has the good wisdom to fool you into thinking you’re not drinking in a chain bar, by adopting a different name for each new venue they open. Those not familiar with the umbrella company will surely be familiar with the portfolio : Dogstar, Effra Social and Gremio Brixton are all already local, or you’ll perhaps know them from across the rest of London, from Tooting Tram and Social to Farr’s School of Dancing in Dalston, to Sylvan Post in Forest Hill.

There’s a system, then, to opening an Antic bar: take a property; restore it; keep the same name. Indeed, it’s a system that’s proved impressively unyielding in the past: in 2014 the company opened in a former Job Centre on the historically dilapidated Deptford High Street, and then refused to change the décor or name it had chosen – The Job Centre – in response to fierce public criticism from campaigners who suggested that it was turning the locally widespread experience of being unemployed “into a style feature for the amusement of those with disposable cash.”

Visiting on a Thursday night – the bar’s opening night – we order beer. At £4.50 it seems lightly at the expensive end of the spectrum, until we realise that they’re serving in 2/3rds of a pint measures, which tips the pricing from ‘lightly expensive’ into ‘hastily downloading the Wonga app’. We pop back into the bar 48 hours later on Saturday night to take photos and we bump into the manager – the smaller measures are explained with, “we don’t want to be the kind of place where people get drunk”. Which could be the reason. Or the reason could just be profit maximisation, of course. It can be hard to tell in these situations, but the fact that just 30 seconds after this conversation a customer walked past us carrying a tray of seven Jägerbombs suggests that they shouldn’t give up on the job of refining their customer base just yet.

On a similar note, if anyone is seeking nominations in the ‘worst bit of retail signage’ category for fictional Brixton awards, we’ll happily direct you towards the bar’s huge, hideously self-contradictory “Kitchen coming soon… but until then eating’s cheating (but drink responsibly, yeah?)” sign. For anybody who has spent the last decade considering the phrase ‘eating is cheating’ to be an infallible idiot-detector, it doesn’t bode particularly well.

And so you could argue, the Claphamification of Brixton continues. Eckovision is unquestionably a well-designed space to drink in. There can be no doubt that the gin, elderflower, apple and mint cocktail we sample has been thoughtfully executed. But one wonders what other fresh, independent businesses Network Rail has in mind to replace the remainder of our retailers. For now, we’ve got a grim early preview of future Brixton.

Taylor Swift/Foo Fighters/Florence + The Machine/Muse: Radio 1's Big Weekend review for Drowned in Sound

There’s a lot of 'I can’t quite believe this is happening here', and 'this is so exciting for our city' sentiments in Norwich. It’s much like how I imagine Radio 1 would be as a lover: they swing by your town suddenly and give you the best day of your formative years. You spend the whole day together. You both upload emotional vlogs saying how wonderful it’s been. But then Radio 1 don’t stick around afterwards to meet your parents. Radio 1 are leaving out your window. They’re off in search of a new lover in Carlisle or somewhere, and you never hear from them again.

Try to live in the moment, Norwich. Take it from someone who saw Dave Pearce’s Dance Anthems as a teenager in Nottingham. Don’t ruminate over it. Don’t wonder why they’re reading but not replying to your WhatsApp messages.

Radio 1’s Big Weekend is a fairly unusual prospect: people grab free tickets to a day out, before the line-up has been announced. It tends to be as mainstream as crowds get: they don’t so much only know your hits, as only know two lines from the chorus of your hits. Throughout the weekend, many an act will turn the microphone on the audience and beckon them to sing lines of their hits, and will get nothing back. That’s not to say people aren’t here to have fun. People are definitely here to have fun. People are really quite desperate to be here. But the audience are going to make them work hard for their affections.

And the festival can dwarf even Glastonbury in terms of the names it can attract. Last year's Glasto headliners Kasabian were reduced to headlining the second stage at Big Weekend that year. Calvin Harris is a regular headliner at the likes of T in the Park/V Festival/Coachella; last year he had to make do with being second to last on the main stage here.

This year, everybody got tickets thinking Taylor Swift was headlining. This was already a great day out in the making. Then Tay Tay seemed to be, erm, swiftly bumped for Foo Fighters; you can only imagine the 'we can’t turn down Foo Fighters, can we?' conversations that were presumably happening at Radio 1. For one, Foo Fighters are also headlining that other really major event BBC Music stream each year. And having both Muse and Foo Fighters headline is something of a dominance of guitars, and we’re regularly told that the kids don’t listen to guitar music anymore. Big Weekend had also quietly established a format for these headline slots: the Saturday night would always be ‘somebody Zane Lowe would’ve interviewed’ - Coldplay, Biffy Clyro, Jay-Z – whilst the Sunday would be ‘teen pop icon’ night – Katy Perry, Bruno Mars and Rhianna being the three most recent examples.

So is this set to be the toughest gig Dave ‘but he’s such a nice guy!’ Grohl has faced in years? Trying to win over a crowd that are, hand on heart, a little disappointed Taylor Swift isn’t headlining?

More on that later. Big Weekend is also a good opportunity to suss out which artists are most doggedly keen for mainstream success right now. Take Snoop Dogg, for example. Following on from the unquestionable critical and commercial success of his conscious reggae ‘Snoop Lion’ phase, he has now alighted on a new strategy in search of a pay cheque: get Pharrell to produce his new album, and tour it around events like this.

At Glastonbury 2010 I saw Bonobo instead of Snoop, which provided a sharp lesson in festival clash management. Who ever reminisces five years later about a Bonobo set being one of the all-time great festival performances? We turn up on site on Saturday afternoon just after 2pm, having deduced that the worst that could happen is we miss half of Ben Howard’s set. Nope - Snoop’s already halfway through, and plenty of people have got there before us, so there’s no getting anywhere near the tent, let alone inside it. Oh well. You can watch him below this paragraph instead if you like. I haven’t watched it yet, but I did hear from people he was good. #musicjournalism

The Vaccines seem to be having fun with the occasion. Justin Young is throwing himself about all over the stage. It’s pushing the right buttons for everybody in the field. All these hijinks don’t make for best vocal performance of the weekend, mind – you wonder if anybody watching at home is enjoying themselves, and you’re certain it will be sounding terrible on the radio. Should acts treat these sets like extended Live Lounge sessions and not play for the crowd’s affections? Discuss.
David Guetta at 6pm is an interesting prospect for a genre of music that’s usually fairly reliant on darkness and big fancy light shows. Certainly his set includes some relatively challenging beats for this time on a pop festival’s mainstage. It’s all washed down alongside Guetta’s pop hits though, that riff from 'Seven Nation Army', and a (to use the technical term) shit ton of pyrotechnics, so it’s probably safe to say he knows how to get the whole field on board.

If The Vaccines concentrated on played to the crowd rather than worrying about sounding good on the radio, Florence + The Machine’s set definitely has a sense of Let’s Turn In A Flawless Vocal Performance about it. It does perhaps help that as she’s broken her metatarsal and spends the whole gig perched on a stool, which does famously limit one’s abilities for on stage tomfoolery. It all feels a bit Jools Holland. The fact that the crowd remain firmly behind her is quite the feat.

They can seem more appropriate for Radio 2 though, don’t you agree? That’s why it’s faintly surprising to see them on this bill, but people seem delighted about the fact that they are. And I’ve certainly heard very good things about their new album. Certainly the set lays the new songs on thick, so the fact that it’s such a popular show with the crowd is a fairly remarkable achievement. When everybody is invited to pogo during 'Dog Days Are Over', the whole field obliges like they’re at a bloody Chase & Status gig or something. It seems they’re a band that can do no wrong. Anyway, as ever with Florence + The Machine, the final word goes to this tweet.

Speaking of acts that should really be packed off to the Radio 2 playlist by now, it was fun, back in 2012, to see the headlines ‘Nick Grimshaw bans Robbie Williams from Radio 1 playlist’ and speculate who’d possibly be next to lose the lucrative support of the station just as they’re releasing their latest album. Were one so inclined, it’s not a huge leap to imagine Muse - and last year’s headliners Coldplay - reading those articles and offering to play Big Weekend out of an almost desperate need to remain in the station’s affections. 'We know 18 year olds aren’t listening to us like they used to. Please keep playing us, we’ll give you such great access if you do'.
Now, do the buzz levels for this new Muse album seem a bit low to you, too? As possibly the only Muse fan that loves it when they go R&B (Madness/Undisclosed Desires), disco (Supermassive Black Hole and classical (Exogenesis Symphony), it’s difficult to get excited about this album cycle they’re embarking upon. It all feels a bit Muse-by-numbers so far. The first half of their Big Weekend set is very heavy on the new material, and for Muse, the audience seem to be having none of it. ‘Hysteria' is still the sound of a band bringing about the end of the world though, and obviously they’re fairly tight musically by this point in their career. The hits flow freely in the 2nd half. Floating voters don’t get converted though. You wouldn’t call the set a failure. But leaving the festival, nobody seems that pumped up about what they’ve just witnessed.

Sunday

Sunday begins with singer-songwriter Raury from Atlanta, Georgia in the In New Music We Trust tent. He’s broadly the upbeat type, and asks the Norwich audience 'did you come here to get inspired?', to which the woman next to us yells back 'no, I came here to get pissed!'. A moment of silence in support of the #BlackLivesMatter campaign is unusual to say the least at a Radio 1 Roadshow-style event, but it works in a varied set that makes every effort to put on a bit of a show. Raury encourages everybody to hug the person to their right, and I’d like to send my personal regards to the stranger to my right whom I immediately hugged, therefore also spilling his pint all over him. Afterwards there’s time to catch Cash + David’s playful atmospherics in the BBC Introducing tent, and - owing perhaps slightly to rain - plenty more are only too happy to join us. They’ve already got enough catchy tunes to see them playing bigger stages than this.

There’s no room in the tent for Lethal Bizzle, so it’s over to the main stage to see Rita Ora borrow heavily from hip hop culture for her production instead. She’s been kind enough to bring along quite a stage show: by this point in the day everybody’s in the mood for some well-choreographed dance routines and snazzy staging. It’s an impressively slick offer, which successfully does the job of disguising that 'I Will Never Let You Down' is the only moment of real pop genius on display here.

Everybody’s had a few gins by the time Sigma come on. One enthusiastic raver comes bounding over and tells me 'you know what: your kind of drum and bass makes people so happy'. Now, I’ve never so much as been in a DJ booth in my life, but he continues, explaining that he knows he recognises me but he can’t quite place who I am. I helpfully decide to announce that I’m (the 49 year old black drum and bass DJ) Fabio, which I (as a 31-year-old white-Irish male) thought might be something of a challenging sell, but he’s just overwhelmed with excitement at getting to meet me. That doesn’t stop him putting his finger on my lips when I talk during one of his favourite breakdowns, however. His reviews of Sigma’s set are perfectly serviceable actually, so logically extending his request that I stay silent, let’s record his thoughts instead: ‘Changing’ gets an enthusiastic declaration of 'that’s what I call art', but Ella Henderson’s guest spot on ‘Glitterball’ is less well received, with the feedback 'this is bollocks pop shit'. Meanwhile Sigma’s 'Bound 2' remix is – justifiably I’m sure we can all agree – credited as having 'clever lyrics'.

In between acts we get Radio 1 presenters DJing to the crowd (highlight: the new Chemical Brothers single), and Live Lounge videos. In the long history of attempts to whip a crowd up into a baying frenzy before shows, you have to wonder just how successful a James Bay Live Lounge video could realistically have been in building the excitement right before Taylor Swift comes on stage.

In stark contrast to Rita Ora, Swift doesn’t bring anything in the way of dancers or staging or choreography. Swift’s got the numerous incredible moments of pop genius on her side. Which should be enough. Taylor Swift’s songs dominate pop music to such an extent that it can be difficult seeing the point of all other teen pop icons. Every gig should be an easy win for Swifty. But there are problems: she only sticks around for seven songs, or 35-40 minutes, falling way short of her hour long time slot. There’s also a bit of an over-reliance on her backing tracks. But if she’s just about getting away with it, she’s getting away with it because she has those songs.

Big Weekend felt like an opportunity to see Taylor Swift without having to spend £55 on seeing her at Hyde Park, but Swift, like several acts over the weekend, hold back on large swathes of their hits in favour of their new material, and so sometimes Big Weekend sets can feel more like a teaser to get you back for a full gig later in the summer – you feel you’re being marketed at more than your typical gig.

So you can imagine how refreshing it is when Dave 'but he’s such a nice guy!' Grohl comes on stage and announces “right we’ve got one hour to play as many songs as we can” and Foo Fighters proceed to be more than generous with playing what people might want to hear. They’re skilled at bringing the whole crowd along with them for the ride. If you get the feeling that many artists see a Big Weekend show as a necessity rather than a joy, Dave 'but he’s such a nice guy!' Grohl is arguably the man who shows it least. Maybe Foo Fighters easily claiming victory in their Hardest Gig Ever is in part a testament to the magpie-like modern day music consumer that is all too happy to have an amazing time at both Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift gigs. But this felt like a full Foo Fighters gig compacted into a well-meaning 60 minutes. For that, Big Weekend belonged to them.

Burning Man 2013: The Drowned in Sound review

I've been feeling pretty ready for my big trip to Burning Man. We're driving thorough the Nevada desert (perfect soundtrack discovered: the Chromatics album), and I'm wowing my recently introduced campmates with some piece of Burning Man knowledge I've previously picked up. 'I'll be honest with you guys, I've already been doing a lot of reading up about this music festival', I say, allowing a smug smile to briefly dart across my face.

'Well, don't call it a music festival, for a start', snaps back the reply.

As is often quoted, 'Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind', but allow me to attempt the basics: Burning Man is a truly vast arts and community festival, a seven day experiment in radical self-reliance held on a swelteringly hot ancient lake bed in the Nevada desert.

Burning Man, or 'home', as regulars warmly refer to it, sits far apart from the rest of the US's festival scene, so amongst many attendees there's a reluctance to even call the event a festival. Europeans, however, are much more likely to find familiarity is the diverse range of art, entertainment, talks and quirky side attractions that make up Burning Man, so let's call the event what it is: a festival.

There is much to separate it from its major festival stablemates, however. Firstly, I'm not an attendee at this festival, I'm a participant. Our 13-strong group has put together the theme camp Barechested Baristas, and every afternoon we are barechested - men and women, alas - serving our delicious iced coffees to the Burning Man masses.

Significantly, all this delightful caffeine is offered free of charge. No money is permitted at Burning Man, the festival instead employing what it calls a gifting economy. It takes me a while to not get this confused with an exchange economy. In an exchange economy, I give you a delicious iced coffee (you gain something), but you give me an item or money in exchange (you lose something). It's a win-lose scenario. In a gift economy, I give you iced coffee (you gain something), and I feel a really warm glow in my heart for doing so (I gain something). It's a win-win scenario. Replicating this across seven days, and 70,000 people means you've got an awful lot of winning going on, and across the festival site people tend to exist within a permanent bubble of happiness. Certainly, long time 'Burners' I talk to throughout the week say they started enjoying the festival exponentially more once they became participants. An incomprehensible thing about Burning Man is the people who will spend all year, and significant portions of their income, on, say, the art car they're bringing to Burning Man. Or the people that design and build one of the 250+ officially recognised artworks dotted across the site. Or simply the people that will just drop a shit ton of money on running a free bar all week.

Not that a week in the desert is all love and hugs, mind. Setting up our camp (kitchen, dome lounge, giant shade structure to house all our tents) and ensuring it can withstand the harshest of desert sandstorms takes a full day of hard graft, during which I massively endear myself to my new campmates by crashing out asleep three hours before everything is finished. Throughout the day, the amount of people screaming with excitement because they've spotted friends from previous years is astounding.

The following day, I cycle out (protip: bring a bike. Light it and lock it. Two of our seven bikes get stolen over the course of the week) to the entrance gates for some further participation: I am volunteering for a four hour greeter shift in the midday heat, welcoming everybody 'home', initiating first time attendees in a way that I won't detail here (but suffice to say that we were pleasingly encouraged to make it up as we went along), and generally being the kind of cheerful irritant that would wind people up so much in London.

Ahh yes, that place. We socialise people hard in London. No talking to strangers, looking at people on public transport, being friendly in shops, or acting in any way cheerful or upbeat about the day ahead. Stepping from this into Burning Man's focus on radical inclusion and immediacy, where you welcome all strangers with a hug and your immediate trust, is a jarring gear change, and one that that I do not successfully make in just one day. It's the image people that haven't been to Glastonbury imagine for that event. Out here, it's real.

The bewildering number of side attractions across the site only adds to the overwhelming feel of the event. Amongst all the art installations, theme camps, talks, sound camps, workshops, and various unannounced oddities ('Armpit Smelling Booth', anyone?) waiting to be discovered, there's a lot of spiritual workshops, yoga classes, and quirky installations to choose from. Plenty of sex, too. BDSM in particular seems to be having a popular year, and we are camped next to the 200-person 'Poly Paradise' camp. They run the 'Human Carcass Wash', where you cup your soapy hand, and wash a load of naked bodies, before in turn getting to be the person to have a load of cupped hands wash your naked body.

I presume the 'Skyping With Grandma' event will be just as fun as any of that. Run by a "human powered internet cafe", I get condescending advice, bunion complaints, and technological incompetence from a real life grandma (20-something male in a wig, holding a cardboard cut-out of a screen). The folk running 'Write Your Future Self A Letter', meanwhile, allow you to do just that, and they promise to mail it to you 1, 2, 5 or 10 years later

Always fancying myself as the next Example, I also give Haiku Rap Battles a go. As the only person going to the effort to write down their haikus before taking to the stage, I'm confident the crowd with respond with hearty cheers and lols. What I get instead is silence, with the odd pocket of confused laughter.

All the cycling and finely spread entertainment means you never get the swirling, immovable crowds that your average Glastonbury goer regularly does battle with. It's not the only difference. Glastonbury for a few years now has tried, with little success, to impart a 'Leave No Trace' message. Here, the message gets through, and to a startling extent. Nothing - not so much as a flick of cigarette ash - is dropped on the playa floor.

Music wise, Burning Man shows signs of beginning an upward trajectory, and things have apparently improved after a couple of years of what is described to me as 'Skrillex every five minutes'. The overwhelming music trend seems to be bass music, mind, and it occasionally takes a fair effort to find a music camp that deviates from this norm.

Over the course of the week, the one DJ I make an effort to find out the name of is Stylust Beats, who plays Camp Question Mark on Friday night. Rather than a teeth grinding 60 minute set of pure trap music on offer across so much of Black Rock City, he successfully weaves the more inventive material the genre has to offer around the kind of party playlist that would set any clubnight alight. It's one of the best atmospheres all week.

I spy an afternoon talk called 'Sex, Drugs and Electronic Music', which sounds like a combination that could catch on doesn't it. Arriving late, the speaker is asking the audience 'How many people here believe we are birthing a new world?' Oh. Okay. Half the audience raise their hands. Right. Faintly hope I'm at the wrong talk? There's plenty of discussion about consent (which I am all for, incidentally. Just putting that out there), a little about sensible use of drugs, and nothing whatsoever about electronic music.

The speaker begins an exercise: we are to stand, wander around, and when she says stop, we are to immediately connect with the person nearest us. I 'connect' with another man, also as it happens, visiting from South London. We are instructed to share with each other our hope for the world. 'Creativity' he enthusiatically offers up. 'The basic goodness of the human heart', I manage to come up with, whilst successfully keeping a straight face. He seems satisfied and engaged by this answer. We are then told to share our medicine for the world with each other. 'Kindness' he quite reasonably suggests. 'Errr, the basic goodness of the human heart...?' I return with. This is deemed a satisfactory answer, although there's some acknowledgement that we're both essentially saying the same thing. He hugs me, and we're allowed to return to our places. There's some further talk about how 'we need to reclaim the solidarity of our connections', and 'let our emotions flow freely down through our bodies and into the earth', before we are finally free to go.


Not that it's all hippies at Burning Man. There's ravers, California's high fashion set, your nerdy music fan, a few jock types, loads of over 40s, and many of the greats of Silicon Valley are in attendance. You still occasionally come across the type of person you'd never want at a festival though. One member of our camp, Jessy, is walking her bike along the road one afternoon when a guy cycles past her and, with a confidence in his own hilarity sadly not matched by his material, shouts at her 'you're supposed to ride it'. Jessy somewhat understandably dislikes this. He cycles on in front of her, before suddenly losing his balance, falling off his bike, and collapsing in a heap. Jessy calmly walks her bike past him, turns around, and calls back 'you're supposed to ride it'.

Also not fitting the Burning Man stereotype are the brilliant, vicious rockers that put on the Mad Max inspired Thunderdome. Inside, they suspend two contestants in harnesses, pull them back, then fire them at each other armed with pugil sticks, whilst the baying crowd erupts. The weaponry is virtually inconsequential - the rules seem to be anything goes. On one occasion two young female festival-goers are fighting and the bout ends with one manically rallying the crowd whilst treating her opponent as a human surfboard. On several occasions battles end with blood splatted on the sand below. Throughout, the audience watch not just around the Thunderdome, but climb up the structure from all sides, in order to gain the chance of seeing each battle commence.

It's one of the things that is most remarkable about Burning Man: a pleasing disregard for health and safety legislation. Several times throughout the week you may find your group dancing late at night atop some shimmering art work, and you will think 'one wrong move here, and I am a seriously injured festival-goer'. Your safety is your own responsibility, a point somewhat hammered home by the fact that the back of your festival ticket states that ticket holders voluntarily assume all liability in the case of their own death whilst at the event.

Which, in such a harsh environment, means that every attendee must practice what the festival calls radical self-reliance. You take entire responsibility for your own well being. Everybody is more than welcome to climb that 30 foot ladder, then carefully climb up on top of the roof to be able to lie back and stare over Black Rock City, but if you put a foot wrong and fall to the ground, you've only got yourself to blame. Radical self-reliance also means that everybody must bring every single thing they may need to survive for a week in the desert environment along to the festival with them, including for example, 1.5 gallons of water per person, per day.

Feeling all too settled by midweek, I drink far too much on Wednesday night, and fail to take responsibility for my own safety. Whilst at a nearby camp to our own, I am unable to work out where I am, unable to make it home, and oddly unwilling to seek help for the matter. I wake up hours later in a separate camp, without memory of how I got there, or my bag. I have failed to practice radical self-reliance. The bag's contents include my UK passport, and five days of notes for this article. I spend 90 minutes searching nearby camps without luck. Each day I queue at Lost & Found to ask if it's been handed in. It never is.

I consider myself to be reasonably knowledgeable about dance music, but scanning the lineup before the festival, there appears to be just three DJs I have heard of: Paul Oakenfold, Seth Troxler, and Elite Force, and I'm not really sure how I've heard of Elite Force. This is perhaps unsurprising - it's down to the non-profit sound camps to try and book big names, and a couple of the major camps don't show up this year. Any veteran will tell you this is not the point of Burning Man, however. And for the kind of music fan that usually spends the whole of, say, Glastonbury darting all over the site like a headless chicken, the opportunity to spend an aimless week in the desert is an appreciated one.

There are unannounced sets, mind, and Diplo shows up as both a solo DJ ('superb', reportedly) and in his Major Lazer guise ('awful', reportedly). Paul Oakenfold is the only appointment we keep all week, though. 45 minutes into the set however, and it's all seeming a little pedestrian. It's at this point that a rumour spreads around our group that he cancelled at the last minute. We have no idea if we're dancing to a perfectly serviceable unknown trance DJ, or a somewhat unimaginative Oakenfold set. Either way, we leave. In the early hours of the morning, friends who stayed announce Oakenfold later showed up, and played a blinding set. I'm fairly gutted. They are in a jubilant mood. Later on that afternoon, I'm told that no, Oakenfold never did show up. Then I'm just confused. I still have no idea what happened.

'The only thing worse than attending a Doctor Who party at Burning Man, is publicly admitting it', a friend tells me. So I opt to only go for an hour. The tasty, strong sonic screwdriver cocktails are freeflowing. Three girls come dressed as sexy TARDISes. A guy asks one 'are you bigger on the inside?' 'Yes, and available for public use!', she cheerfully retorts. We also grab a drink at the Dead Celebrity's Champagne Disco, where you are encouraged to dress as your favourite dead celebrity, and enjoy all the drinks they can't any more. The 'Critical Tits' bikeride, meanwhile, sees a couple of thousand women take a topless cycle on mass around the playa. I think I can say with confidence that it's the most amount of topless women I've ever seen within a five minute period.

I spot a session called 'Speed Counselling', which sounds like good fun. In a speed dating format, you'll have five minutes to co-council with someone before DING!, the bell rings and you're on to the next person. What a nice afternoon activity that will be! What a fun format! I arrive, and settle in. The event is certainly busy. We are encouraged to really go for it and make the most of the opportunity, and to seek a moment of immediate resolution. I council five people, and then are counselled by five. And obviously, it is the exact fucking opposite of fun. I have to talk about emotions! For a full 25 minutes! I'm male and live in England, the most I've ever spoken about emotions is for three seconds in hospital in 2006 when a doctor asked me if my arm was still hurting. Even then three seconds seemed a little indulgent. Here though, everybody is sharing very deeply felt problems and emotions. There's one hell of a lot of people in tears (all except one guy, who spends his five minutes telling me about the psychology book he's about to have published, and is agonising over whether to put a photo of himself on the front cover or not). It's traumatic, but it's also a brilliant hour. I leave a nervous wreck.

All through the week there's a sense of escalation. The festival always feels like it's building to a climax. On Tuesday, paragliders can be seen descending on the festival, before landing amongst passers by on the wide open playa. I witness one land, and the nearest person to him immediately runs up, puts a beer in his hand, and promptly walks off again. On Wednesday and Thursday the same paragliders have grown long colourful ribbon tails as they cascade down from the sky. By Friday night their tails have become fireworks leaving a trail behind in the sky.

All this escalation is building to one thing. With no main stage to speak of, Burning Man feels like it doesn't have a focal point to concentrate your mind - or media attention - on. Instead, the festival offers a thousand different stories happening simultaneously across the site. A thousand moments of awe, pain, laughs being shared, or perhaps lives being changed. The exception to this rule is the final night. The whole festival gathers around the iconic Man that sits at the centre of the site, to watch as he is finally, spectacularly burnt. Much of what overwhelms about this experience is perhaps because, after everybody here has had such an intense, yet disparate week from each other, the whole festival is finally together as one. It certainly provides a more exciting climax to a festival then, say, Mumford & Sons headlining your final night.

Burning Man is one hell of an ordeal. There were certainly lows, but there was also countless highs. Its beauty, its weirdness, its vibrancy, and its constant, unfaltering welcome. It's truly a unique way to spend a week. Name me a better festival.

This article originally appeared on drownedinsound.com here.

India goes indie at the NH7 Weekender - Guardian article

This article was originally published on guardian.co.uk here.


  

The big Weekender … The Raghu Dixit Project perform onstage at NH7 in India. Photograph: Stephen Budd

It can be difficult when travelling by train in India to ensure you disembark at the correct city. Especially when it's 5am, and everybody around you is busy giggling at your pronunciation. We're in Pune (pronounced Poo-nay, apparently) for the second year of the NH7 Weekender. India has a smattering of music festivals, but these are mostly traditional events or trance affairs aimed at tourists unable to wait for their Ibiza kicks. NH7 is an attempt to create a Glastonbury, or perhaps more precisely, Lovebox-style event in India.

India's middle class is now estimated at more than 300 million people – that's a lot of folk with disposable income, internet access, and perhaps an interest in exploring non-traditional culture.

"There aren't any Indian festivals that concentrate on non-Bollywood music," NH7 co-organiser Stephen Budd explains. "The view was Indian audiences would never want to go." A few years ago Budd's business partner, Vijay Nair, was struggling to fill a five-band bill in Mumbai, now they're both filling festival schedules. Understandably perhaps, Budd says they faced skepticism. "The industry view was there's not enough interest in things that aren't Bollywood led. [Myself and Vijay] lamented that the only British acts visiting India then were the Stings and Simply Reds of the world, when kids wanted to see Mumford and Sons and Basement Jaxx, but no one was bringing them over."

Fans desperate to see the few western acts playing India have lately encountered a second problem: this year has been disastrous for gig cancellations, including Bryan Adams, Akon and Metallica.

This organisational chaos is something NH7 wants to put right. Arriving on site, the event feels clean and well mapped out, in a country with a reputation for the opposite. We never wait more than 60 seconds for one of the (regularly cleaned) Portaloos. There's a buzz in the air – none of the acts are received poorly. "Has anybody heard of grime music?" London's Riz MC asks the crowd. Three people cheer. But no one is standing still once introductions have been made.

The festival programme advises "getting from one stage to another will require a fair amount of walking". But it took us less than four minutes to get from one end of the site to the other. Not exactly Glastonbury, then.

There's corporate branding. For most of ex-Radio 1 DJ Bobby Friction's set, a vodka logo is dragged around the screen like a four-year-old playing Etch A Sketch. India is a fan of brash marketing, and here it is overwhelming. As are the lineup changes, which seem to occur throughout the day. Thankfully, everybody on site is tweeting so it's easy to keep them updated. And aside from the music, there's plenty going on. There's a convention of 30 tattoo artists on site. Fans can pay for food, drinks and merchandise via an impressive system of RFID cards and micropayments. With the same cards they can also choose to log performances they watch and have the story of their weekend automatically updated on Facebook. Well, that was the idea – the system collapses minutes after the gates open and stays down all weekend.

Indian acts get the biggest reception. The audience for the secret set by Mumbai rockers Zero is easily the most frenzied of the weekend. The mass singalongs when the Raghu Dixit Project play Mysore Se Aayi and Indian Ocean play Bandeh rival the most euphoric Glastonbury moments.

An almighty party closes the festival on Sunday night, as artists from across the bill collaborate on covering western hits (Blur and Metallica ) and Indian folk classics. Finishing with a rave, Indian Ocean singer Rahul Ram freestyles in Hindi over Underworld's Born Slippy. It's a brilliant set to close the festival.

Afterwards, nobody is disappointed. The festival sells all 7,000 tickets for the Saturday and Sunday, and says it has made a profit in its second year, something "unheard of in the UK festival market", claims Budd. "Next year I expect we'll get some really high-end younger artists willing to take the leap. I'd love to see Chase and Status, Dry the River, even the Vaccines come and play with their Indian counterparts." NH7 has certainly proved there is an appetite for it.

Nottingham’s new tourism campaign in London is the finest advertising I have ever seen.

Dear fellow Londoners,

I imagine, like me, you’ve already spent much of 2013 gazing at the bare summer months in your calendar app, painfully aware of how most years this season passes unfilled, each of us lonely and imprisoned in our respective dwelling-houses. Perhaps also like me then, you sensed a great weight lift from your shoulders recently, as posters went up across our city’s transport network (two spotted so far!) showcasing events forthcoming not here, but up the country a little bit, in my home county of Nottinghamshire.

Please, at this juncture, take a moment to admire the above poster. The more astute observers amongst you will by now have realised that it appears to be advertising some manner of medium sized outdoor concert. And so let us linger in order to further admire the impeccable timing of this poster campaign. For as only the canniest of Nottingham’s marketing brains will have noticed, London has been cruelly starved of medium sized music events in recent years. Quality entertainers simply don’t gravitate to this city. The situation has become quite dire, with people being spotted wandering around various London parks, listening to Smooth Radio, and trying to imagine a way of seeing such hits performed by the people that wrote them.

But puzzle no longer, wandering citizens of England’s capital! A plucky city in the North has rushed to our aid. The less cool-headed Londoner might slap their head in embarrassment, that none of their own had hit upon such a winning event formula. Although I know it will take a degree of swallowing our pride to depart our city for Nottinghamshire, I hope my fellow Londoners will be as commendably mature as I am, and join me on that journey.

If that seems impossible, and you tire of gazing North with your thinly veiled jealousy, let us instead examine our advertisement in question with the appropriately mature admiration that it deserves. Alongside the totemic headliners the London music industry have been kicking and screaming in its attempts to book for years – Blondie and Paloma Faith – we see a number of other borderline arrogant claims. Aside from the brash assertion to hold 12 of some fantastical creation called ‘music venues’ (presumably 11 now), one also notes that apparently, (and please fellow Londoner, steady yourself before reading on) Nottingham has given birth to “one top album artist”.

Well, I can only assume you are also in stunned silence. The only course of action remaining appears to be damage limitation, and so I issue a critical warning to my fellow capital dwellers, not yet versed in the beauty of England’s green and pleasant county: book those train tickets early. Once summer finally rolls around St. Pancras will verge on riotous scenes for the hordes of culture starved capital-dwellers fighting for a place on a train to get to a city where a person has produced a successful album. Let alone a person as admirably refined as Jake Bugg.

In closing, I can only enter a plea to the Gatekeepers of Nottingham: act with greater delicacy in future! Be sensitive to our already blindly jealous eyes! Did NBC advertise their US presidential election coverage across Syria? London life is a daily struggle as it is. I just ask for our plight not to be rubbed in our faces. Many, many thanks, and obviously, see you in June.

This blogpost was originally posted here.