Never Enough Notes e-zine // reviews + interviews + music

Personality does a lot for a festival. V Festival, although it has the money to hire some of the top bands in the world, utterly fails as a festival for me because the V might as well stand for Vibeless; a bland, corporate event with about as much magic as a staff training day at Barclays. On the flipside, when I went to Big Green Gathering in 2007, I only managed to catch about two bands but I had one of the best weekends of my entire life, because BGG is pretty much constructed entirely from pure magic.

Nozstock, a small, independent festival nestled in the Herefordshire hills near Bromyard, has personality to spare. It started off as a tiny party for friends and family and in the past few years has managed to grow exponentially, building an excellent reputation and gaining access to some extremely impressive acts while sacrificing none of the quirk and inventiveness that make it a treat for the few lucky enough to know about it. It’s especially nice for me because it’s one where I tend to bump into and catch up with people I’ve not seen for months, sometimes years, and it’s pretty close to home, so one isn’t faced with a daunting four-hour journey when the festival finishes and you’re desperately dragging your ruined body around, trying to gather up your lost braincells.

2011′s festival was granted clemency by the notoriously un-co-operative British weather, with blue skies, sun and a negligible amount of mud. The festival organisers had gone all out, as usual, with tangled webs of bright lights, inventive décor and lovingly-crafted stages spread over the appealingly wonky site. Nozstock is a festival made by festivalgoers for festivalgoers, forsaking mass corporate sponsorship in favour of ingenuity, care and a madcap sense of fun, and this year they’d surpassed themselves with some particularly high-quality, eclectic music. Fans of whomping dubstep and drum and bass were well catered-for, with heavyweight sets from Reso, Icicle, Alix Perez and the don of the double-drop himself, Andy C, as well as Dr Meaker, a fearsomely funky and soulful yet satisfyingly heavy live drum and bass band, who welcomed in the golden Saturday evening in style. Nozstockers were also entertained by pantomime swing hop duo The Correspondents and Mancunian hooligans Sonic Boom Six, who combined heavy metal riffs with bouncy ska, jungle rhythms and dubstep wobble, had the front four rows moshing themselves into a collective coma and, in my opinion, pissed all over Pendulum from a great height. We were also treated to a performance from punk rock veterans The Jim Jones Revue, who closed the main stage on Friday night with a head-banging set of deleriously anti-social rock and roll.

One of my favourite areas of the festival has always been the Coppice, a secluded, wooden area at the bottom of a hill, curated by Bristol’s kings and queens of psytrance, Tribe of Frog. With luminous butterflies hanging from the trees and some of the most intricate, groovy psychedelic dance music pumping from a huge rig, this trippy little grotto positively dripped with magic, and managed to draw the smiliest, saucer-eyed festivalgoers into its multicoloured clutches. It was pretty delicious during the day, and an acid-warped raver’s tingly fever dream at night. That’s a good thing, by the way.

Variety, ingenuity and fun are qualities that Nozstock value highly, and there was something for everyone at this year’s festival. Enquiring minds who fancied a break from relentless stomping could sit back on a sofa in the small hours of Sunday morning (or late Saturday night, depending on your perception of time) and watch Prymedia present Tri Hita Karana, Thomas Buttery’s fascinating documentary about Balinese culture, with live music by Mark Thompson and Ben Garman. Elsewhere there were craft workshops, fire shows, massages, campfire singalongs, reasonably-priced local booze and plenty of tasty food, and a general atmosphere of joyful, up-for-it, ever-so-slightly barmy friendliness. Everything, in fact, that you could want from a festival.

Nice one Nozstock! See you in 2012!