Beautiful Days Festival 2013 preview

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Beautiful Days Festival crowd

Beautiful Days Festival crowd

When I stumbled across the award-winning Devon-based festival, Beautiful Days, my curiosity was well and truly piqued.

A family-orientated festival, perhaps a far stretch from previous notables on my CV, Beautiful Days was started back in 2003, courtesy of Brighton’s very own, Levellers (of course famed by – yes, you guessed it – ‘Beautiful Day’).

If you’re into current chart music, great! Please stop reading now and go back to whatever electronic-music-for-robotic-people hole you crawled out of.

This festival seems very much designed to instill the nostalgia of old, bringing back the days where good music was filling the charts, from bands with character and presence. At least that’s what I’m hoping for, after looking into the festival and what it stands for.

Beautiful Days doesn’t obsess over attracting the mainstream crowd, evident in their strict ‘no corporate sponsorship, branding or advertising’ policy. For all genuine music lovers, this is the destination, tossing aside all showmanship bollocks and focusing on the music. Beautiful Days is the laid back option, or as they call it, ‘the antithesis to V Festival’.

The notches in their bedpost are not to be sniffed at either, with notable scalps including The Stranglers, Billy Bragg, Echo and the Bunnymen, Supergrass and Toots and the Maytals, to name a few, as well as The Levellers themselves.

This years line-up looks to be one of the most fruitful of the last eleven years, particularly for Britpop lovers, with Primal Scream, Dodgy and Ocean Colour Scene all featuring, along side Sinead O’Connor, a rare appearance from Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel and alternative American hip-hop group, Arrested Development.

A self-confessed sucker when it comes to Britpop, I think the most galvanizing ingredients for me – and what I’m certainly most excited about – is the prospect of catching such a fantastic trio of influential British bands all in the same place.

Primal Scream undoubtedly lead the way as the most iconic of the selection, with their shape-shifting, genre-hopping back catalogue sure to induce plenty of psychedelic, feel-good vibes from the crowd. I first caught them when they supported The Stone Roses at their comeback gig at Heaton Park last year, and the energy and presence of Bobby Gillespie was pulsating.

While Britpop’s dominance and once-mandatory presence in the charts may well be gone and dead – which some might say was confirmed most recently by a joint on-stage performance by former Britpop heavyweights Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn – the brilliance of Ocean Colour Scene and Dodgy is one that transcends any time period.

Ocean Colour Scene are the band I’m most looking forward to seeing at Beautiful Days (having never seen them before), and it’d be fair to say they’ll provide any real music lover with the much needed reminder that the aural taste buds of the masses were not always in the dire state that they are today.

Hearing the hits of summers past from Dodgy (‘Good Enough’, ‘Staying Out For the Summer’) will be a fantastic moment for anybody, and on that note, let’s have it right: there’s not a person in there that won’t be looking forward to hearing Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel bang out a rendition of ‘Make Me Smile’.

Watch Beautiful Days 2012 Highlights

That said, great festivals need more than just music. What makes a great festival is the hours in between, when you’re hungry or you’re waiting for your next favourite band to come on, when your legs have turned to Playdo and your mind has followed suit, leaving you desperate for that certain something to prevent your fragile mind from drifting off into ‘bat country’.

The selection of food stalls has got everything from pies to paella, burgers to butties and sausages to salad (not to mention their particularly varied selection for those of the vegetarian/vegan variety).

More importantly, however, Beautiful Days offers all festivalgoers a plethora of alternative entertainment across their six stages, with the most notable coming from their Theatre Tent (which debuted last year to great success).

Having looked over the line-up of acts, personal stand-outs are English stand-up comedian Robin Ince – presenter of BBC Radio’s The Infinite Monkey Cage (with Brian Cox) – along side award-winning clown troupe, Le Navet Bete and performer/juggler/skilled-hat-master, Dan the Hat. I’ve done the homework – catching a few performances on YouTube snippets – and I’m sure their collective array of comedic talents are sure to assist you through any lethargy that might creep in.

For the younger members of the audience, the huge children’s area in the centre of the festival should provide the perfect playground (pardon the pun) for all weary minds, and for the more cultured artistic connoisseurs, there are plenty of site art installations to satisfy your taste buds.

To illustrate their rate of evolution, Beautiful Days originally started out with two stages in 2003, and has developed tremendously over the last eleven years, growing arms, legs, a stellar reputation and an additional four stages in the process.

The Main Stage and The Big Top play host to most of the prime talent, with The Little Big Top offering a perfect stomping ground for up and coming artists, as well as the more seasoned – yet more laid back – entertainers (a one Mr. Howard Marks springs to mind).

Alongside the Theatre Tent, The Band Stand and solar powered mobile venue, The Bimble Inn (impressive, I know), offer up a surplus of off-beat, niche talent that will satiate the thirst of even the most hardened eclectic practitioner.

Most festivals gain success by catering to the masses, but Beautiful Days has managed to gain its reputation through the opposite: The Levellers have tailored this experience around a niche market of people who love a certain type of music, perhaps the anti-mainstream side of music, and turned it into an experience that caters for an audience ranging from young lads to old Dads, babies in prams to dear old Mams and anywhere in between.

The Beautiful Days festival takes place at Escot Park, Devon from the 16th to 18th August. Tickets for the festival have sold out.

For more information and tickets click here.