I do feel that a festival wouldn’t be a festival without these three things; A truly great live act, some nominal nudity and someone gravely (and most of the time deservedly) injuring themselves due to a moment of awe inspiring stupidity . We shall return to this nugget of festival wisdom in a bit.
Beach Break Live festival is nestled in a mass expanse of Welsh sand dune and pinewood forest, where thousands of students and idiotically fashionable, sexually charged young things pitch tents on the rolling hills, sleep the day through and get up underneath the stars to go crazy to reasonably priced booze and all night tuneage.
For those bothered enough to get up during the day, the beach was heaving with water sports and the fields busy with games, early chilled live acts and burlesque / pole dancing lessons. I was there for the music, however as a journalist I deemed it my duty to casually but insistently peek in the burlesque tent.
I’d been looking forward to seeing We Are Scientists for a couple of years and wasn’t disappointed to watch them blow away a strong afternoon crowd with hit after hit, with young Andy Burrows mullering the skins behind two of the stongest song writing teams around.
I hadn’t heard of Beardyman before, and naturally pictured an old man slithering to the stage in a cardie and massive beard, shitting us tales of woe. He was actually awesome. A sort of live producer and sampler, he beat boxes to synths, drum machines and other electronic paraphanalia, but not only this, he can sing; and well, morphing us in and out of his own tightly packed anthems and reworked covers such as MGMT‘s ‘Kids‘ and ATB‘s ‘Til I Come‘ (Even cooler than the XX‘s live version.)
The two musical highlights for me were from very different corners of the festival. The first was an eight piece folk band named Robbie Boyd Band, a truly charming and enthralling live act playing three times over the course of the five days in different forms. Front man Robbie Boyd is as talented as he is self-deprecating, hollering timeless The Birds and Everly Brothers-like tunes and pulling even the early hung over audience to their feet to participate his irresistible chorus’s.
Of course, the truly great live act I was banging on about at the start was a band I hadn’t even sniffed before this weekend. White Lies blew me and the already riled up crowd of mentals away. The punishing bass lines were as harsh as the beautifully haunting melodies. I’ll admit, I was probably slightly dazed at the time as some berk elbowed me in the back of the head and probably sent me into a slight state of euphoria but never the less this is one of the strongest headliners one could ask for even a slight concussion.
So I guess the injury sustained was my own, but the truly great live act was of course White Lies and I won’t bore you with the details, but the burlesque tent really was fantastic.
Cougar Microbes attended Beach Break Live 2011 as part of Lucozade‘s Play Festivals campaign. Make sure to check back as we join Lucozade in bringing you more events through the summer.
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Post by T.R. Wicks
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