All Photography by Daniel Sims, do not use without permission.
For anyone who doesn’t know, The Big Chill Festival is located at Eastnor Castle Deer Park in Herefordshire, surrounded by beautiful peaks and greenery. Being near the Welsh border means the weather can be a tad erratic. However, aside from the odd brief (but powerful) downpour the weather was pleasant and sunny by Sunday (which I’m sure came as a relief to the nude participants of Spencer Tunick’s art piece on Sunday morning.)
A first glance at the festival map gave the impression that The Big Chill would be anything but! I realised that unless I made a mental list of what I’d like to see, I’d end up in the Cinema tent all weekend (City of God, Ponyo, Moon, Eagle vs Shark, the list was huge and impressive!)
Out of fear I chose a location at random and began my Big Chill experience at 10.00am with the press event for Bompas and Parr’s Ziggurat of Flavour. My press pack told me that Bompas and Parr are ‘Food Architects’, and the Ziggurat turned out to be what was essentially a large pyramid with an inside maze and an exit via a rather steep slide. Entrants who went through the maze would inhale atomised Fairtrade fruit juice, freshly squeezed on site (I saw one man unsuccessfully trying to pay the juicers for a cup of orange juice). Inhalation, apparently, would give you at least one of your five a day. Now whether this is scientifically proven or not I don’t know, but a slide is a slide and it is always going to be a crowd pleaser. If, by some miracle, you manage to ingest an orange via your lungs then that’s an added bonus. The Ziggurat proved immensely popular for the entire weekend and it was good to see Fairtrade’s presence on site.
My first musical highlight was seeing Mike Patton of Faith No More fame singing Italian Pop Songs from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s with his new and unusual vehicle: Mike Patton’s Mondo Cane & The Heritage Orchestra. Going through all my bootleg copies of live Mr Bungle performances I notice there is one track that doesn’t feature on the studio albums but becomes increasingly popular as part of the live setlist. It is a very lively cover of Adriano Celentano’s ‘24,000 Baci’ sung in Italian by singer Mike Patton. This cover may be evidence that Patton had this project in mind from as early as the mid 90’s. Having missed Mike Patton with Faith No More last year I was eager to see this unusual performance. I’ve been a fan of a lot of Patton’s recent outfits, however, the more avant-garde his music has become, the less coherent his singing has become. This is a shame considering the vocal range at his disposal, so to hear him within the constraints of Italian classics, backed by a 40 piece orchestra, choir and electronic sounds, was a real high-point.
Chrome Hoof by Sophie Parker
But sometimes its the acts you don’t know that blow you away and on Saturday that’s just what happened. When Chrome Hoof arrived on The Deer Park Stage at 2:45pm, I was immediately swept away by the singers consistently electrifying performance. Actually, scratch that, the entire bands consistently electrifying performance. They sounded like a bizarre breed of electro-funk and dressed with a retro sci-fi Parliament aesthetic. As the first act on The Deer Park Stage on Saturday I couldn’t understand why they weren’t higher up the billing. It certainly gave all the proceeding acts a lot to live up to (and made Lily Allen’s Sunday night performance all the more lackluster by contrast).
Abigail Brown birds by Sophie Parker
The workshops were something I had been really looking forward to, particularly Selvedge Magazine’s collaboration with Abigail Brown to produce the Make a Bird workshop. This was Selvedge’s first foray into festivals and I was interested to see if the magazine could extend its visual approach into the workshop format. Their endeavor certainly paid off and the tent was packed from open till close each day. The material for the birds was a colourful mish-mash of fabric and snippets supplied by well known fabric designers such as Cath Kidston and Sanderson. As an added bonus, the staff of Selvedge and the lovely Abigail Brown were lending a hand for the duration. The result was a beautiful flock of hand-made birds strung from ribbons on a nearby tree which flitted and spun in the breeze (how tempted I was to take one!). Selvedge proved they are a dab hand at creating events that are festival compatible and I look forward to seeing more of their engaging ideas soon.
Patrick Wolf by Sophie Parker
Another great visual performance came from Patrick Wolf. The first time I saw him was at Latitude ‘07 from the very back of The Word arena. I knew I wanted to hear more and several albums later I saw him again in Shepherds Bush giving a farewell concert (do musicians in their 20’s really need to say farewell?) before locking himself up in Hackney to compose new material. A couple of years later and he’s back and high up the billing. His performance was just how I remembered it and both new and old material sounded tight. Something I have always enjoyed about Wolf’s performance is his energy and theatrical body language on stage and he didn’t disappoint. First song in and he was already sitting on the edge of the stage driving the nearby crowd wild. All that seemed missing was a good light show to enhance the mood, however as is the way with the open air stages, the light shows are pretty much reserved to the headliners.
I had made a conscious decision to avoid the film tents because I knew that if I sat to watch one then I’d sit and watch them all. However, when a matador approached me and gave me a flyer for Bunny and the Bull at the Dereliction Drive-In (21:30, open-air, sitting either on the floor or on old car seats) I felt I might as well check it out. I had already recently seen it once and it hadn’t really grabbed me. Not that it was a bad film, the sets were inventive, the actors were spot on, but it just didn’t work for me. However, when I heard that the band who recorded the soundtrack would be performing the entire score live, I felt it would be at least worth watching the first 10 minutes. On arrival it turned out to be a lot more than a live soundtrack, the entire film was interspersed with fun games based on sections of the film, including a crab (stick) eating contest with one of the lead actors: Simon Farnaby (that conker-headed bloke from the Charlie episode of The Mighty Boosh). I ended up staying for the majority, it was an amazing reworking of the film that, combined with cider, made all the film’s jokes ten times as funny.
Sunday was an early start for me. The arena was closed to all but press and off I headed at 8.30am for the set up of Spencer Tunick’s new photograph comprised entirely of nude festival goers painted luminous shades of yellow, blue, black, and red. The press were kept at a respectful distance (not that it made any difference thanks to telephoto lenses) and Tunick was positioned on a cherry-picker above his nude minions giving orders via a megaphone. The general feeling was weirdly positive, aided by Tunick’s friendly directions that kept his models in good spirits (considering he hadn’t had to pay anyone a modelling fee he was probably ecstatic!) Once the shots had been taken and the models disbanded it was surprising just how many did not put their clothes back on immediately, even coming up close to us in the press pit for a quick snap. Funnier still was the amount of people who didn’t wash off their body paint for the remainder of the festival, leading to some groups looking like background characters from The Simpsons. The rest of Sunday was pretty relaxed with good performances from both Magic Numbers and Newton Faulkner, who filled the stage with his charming personality and humour.
There are countless other little distractions that made up my festival experience and that’s the great thing about The Big Chill- each area is its own little world with its own brand of unique magic. Needless to say I had an amazing time and, providing the maximum occupancy doesn’t swell to epic proportions, I’d be happy to go again and again.
Tags:
2010, Abigail Brown, art, Bunny and the Bull, Cath Kidston, Eastnor Castle Deer Park, festival, Festival Republic, film, gig, Hereford, Latitude Festival, live, Mike Patton, music, Newton Faulkner, Patrick Wolf, review, Sanderson, Selvedge Magazine, Simon Farnaby, Spencer Tunick, The Big Chill, The Magic Numbers, The Mighty Boosh
awesome review! Dan I met you on the epic trip round the site to get to purple gate, and that rather blue lady in the photo happens to be me! Was lovely meeting you, I hope you had a super festival. Luckily the journey home didnt involve a cross country walk, I hope yours was pleasant.
Take care
Em