Boomtown
Matterley Estate, near Winchester
7th-11th August 2019
Boomtown is madness and mania. It’s unlike any other festival I’ve ever been to.
While Boomtown is smaller than Glastonbury in terms of attendance and footprint, the sheer range of delights for the ears and eyes gives Pilton’s finest a close run. With 14 separate ‘districts,’ each with at least one main stage and many smaller and hidden stages totalling more than 100 venues overall, you’re never likely to end up with a gap in your schedule.
The bulk of the musical programming revolves around drum’n’bass, EDM, techno and other electronic music, but there’s plenty of other sounds for those that want it: on my wanderings I came across top-level death metal, grime, punk, hip-hop, soul and jazz of all colours, as well as the largest reggae stage in Europe, set within a huge, naturally-occurring amphitheatre provided by the picturesque South Downs. And of course, there’s more than enough to set a Songlines reader up for the weekend too.
Much like the rest of the line-up, Boomtown’s world music offerings were many and varied, from the mosh-fest of premier Gypsy punks Gogol Bordello who provided an electrifying retrospective headliner set, to San Salvador, the voice, drums and nothing else Occitan sextet who came fresh from two storming sets at WOMAD to a just-as-impressive show at Boomtown. Scottish folk was particularly well-represented all throughout the festival this year, and Talisk and Elephant Sessions gave a wonderful double-bill in a flame-heated medieval town square with back-to-back sets of pumping, clubland-inflected instrumental folk that got the crowd rowdier than any of the electronic stages.
On the Sunday afternoon, it was Grace Petrie’s turn to blow the crowd away. With her mix of English folk and singer-songwriter roots with a punk attitude, her ultra-political songs in defence of butch lesbians, transfolk, the welfare state and the young and angry (and against the Tories and all their works) gave visions of a millennial’s Billy Bragg. With a stand-up’s wit and defiant but cautiously optimistic lyrics, her set prompted tears, fury and joy from this reviewer. Other highlight sets included Asian overground pioneers Asian Dub Foundation, dub-soaked jazzwoman Nubya Garcia and Soweto’s hottest BCUC – I also spent a particularly glorious 3am submerged in the festival’s psytrance forest curated by Bristol’s Tribe of Frog.
You can have an amazing five days of festival entirely absorbed in the brilliant and varied musical line-up that Boomtown has to offer. But if you do, you’ll barely be experiencing half of it. Because Boomtown isn’t just a festival, it’s an entire immersive universe.
The Boomtown storyline has been developing for 11 ‘chapters’ (years) now, with an evolving plot of political wrangling, internal tensions and, this year, the presence of an unsettlingly benevolent AI overlord. This story is not just a vague, hinted-at theme though, but a full-blown, interactive theatre piece spanning every district and the whole weekend.
Every district is fully built-up from amazingly detailed sets – there’s a Wild West town, a medieval/pirate area, an opulent rich-kids’ playground, a huge and gritty downtown with all manner of dystopian inner-city architectures and more. They’re not just soulless façades either; they’re packed with interesting nooks and crannies and intriguingly unmarked doors that can lead you to a raucous Irish pub, or maybe a sophisticated burlesque show or an extremely loud techno club made from an old caravan with a shoulder-to-shoulder capacity of ten. The whole thing is a masterclass of maze-making. Each area is populated by scores of actors acting out in-depth plots relevant to their district – I was particularly engrossed in the saga of the American Old West-style Copper County, which saw town drunk Willie elected by festival-goers to the rank of mayor, only to go mad with power and set up roving vigilante gangs to rough up his political opponents and former allies.
There are so many layers to it. Not only are there the surface stories happening around you, but if you talk to the right characters and ask the right questions, you will get directions and codewords and other interesting folks to meet, uncovering a vast, under-the-surface conspiracy that brings together every aspect of the festival’s lore in one. It’s dizzying in its scale. Just as you can spend the entire festival without touching the more fanciful elements at all, you could easily leave having seen no music but still had an intensely profound five-day experience.
I’ve been to many festivals in my life and seen so much amazing music at them, but my first visit to Boomtown this year will stay with me for a long time. The music was brilliant, undoubtedly, but when it’s experienced in conjunction with an entire reality-bending story, it becomes much more than a music festival, but a wonderful, self-contained world. It’s madness, but I can’t wait to go back.
Photo: Boomtown's epic reggae stage, The Lions Den, by Scott Salt.