This is the final part of my account of the 2022 Le Guess Who festival. See part one here, part two here, and part three here
On Sunday morning we did in fact partake of our hotel's breakfast cava, but overall we adopted a more restrained approach to breakfast because we had signed up for Le Feast. This is a Le Guess Who thing that had been abeyance for Covid last year. It basically involves sees those who sign up for it going to some random Utrechter for brunch. We did it the first time we went to LGW and we were looking forward to doing Le Feast again, albeit with that mild trepidation that faces the socially anxious when they have to interact with new people.
This year our brunch host lived just south of the moat canal that envelopes Utrecht. The other guests were two Dutch women, one younger than us and one older. Our host's son also helped his mother serve us and made for entertaining company, as did her friendly cat (her other cat hid upstairs). The food was appealingly homely. Interestingly, none of the other brunchers had full LGW tickets (the event was sold out by the time they thought of buying ones), so they were just dipping their toes into the free daytime events (which we largely ignored because they were on in out of the way places or, let's face it, because they didn't appear in the LGW scheduling app and so were off our radar).
Anyway, Le Feast is great and I recommend it to all Le Guess Who attendees. You can't beat second breakfast.
The first musical act we saw was Marina Herlop, a Catalan artist described in the programme as being inspired by Carnatic music from India. My first reaction when she came onstage was "Jesus Christ what is she wearing", showing how conservative I am with matters of attire. And I must admit I struggled with this set, mainly because I was by now incredibly tired (last day of a festival, etc.), spending most of it hovering between sleep and wakefulness. Herlop's set saw her doing electronic stuff and vocals accompanied by two backing singers and a drummer. I did not hear an obvious Indian influence, but then what would I know about Carnatic music? Overall though I was struck by how the set was simultaneously very avant-garde (in terms of its rejection of normal song structures etc.) but also clearly very composed and focussed. Whether I actually liked it was not something I could determine, at least partially thanks to my fatigue, but my beloved thought it was great.
We could at this stage have caught sets by Supersilent or Abdullah Ibrahim but then we realised that i) we had had no chips from Frietwinkel over the weekend and ii) friend Eamonn had NEVER been to Frietwinkel on any of his trips to Utrecht. So chips it was. Nom nom nom.
We did go to see Panda Bear & Sonic Boom playing electronic stuff with vocals in the Ronda. I liked the visuals but, unfortunately, the music was not really doing it for me, so we slipped off to the Pandora to see Gnod. Gnod, as you know, are a bunch of freak out types from Greater Manchester. Every time you see them they are different and have different people in the band. This time they had lost the singer and the quietly competent non-bloke member of the band but now have two drummers and a keyboardist as well as two guitarists and a bass player. They rocked hard in an interesting but impossible to photograph manner and were one of the highlights of the festival.
And that was almost it. But not quite. After some post Gnod refreshments we popped in to see Mr The Bug who was playing in the Ronda. At least, we think he was playing there: the stage was so wreathed in dry ice that it might well be that someone had just plugged a Spotify playlist of Bug classics into the PA. There seemed to be MCs lurking behind the dry ice too and they kept importuning us to "Give it up for The Bug!" which had me thinking what it must be like to keep encouraging people to give it up for someone else. The music meanwhile was of the crunchy bassy variety. I even danced a bit, though truth be told I was kind of hoping it would finish so I could go to bed.
But it did eventually finish. Some tried to keep the party going but I opted for sleep.
The next day we flew home (don't tell Greta) on stinky Ryanair, where the passenger in front of me in the boarding queue had a distinct odour of having been to several Gnod concerts without an intervening shower. Soon after arriving home we booked tickets for next year (too late for the early bird) and booked ourselves into the same hotel.
In previous years, I found it difficult to move from one gig to the next at Le Guess Who, with it generally being necessary to head to a venue a half hour early to be sure of getting in. This year though it seems much easier to move from venue to venue, with the result that I saw more performances than I had expected to. That said, I was a bit lazy about going beyond the Tivoli venues. Apart from Noori And His Dorpa Band and Sote and Tarik Barri in the Staadsschouwburg, I saw nothing outside the environs of the Tivoli. And I completely ignored the daytime U programme, which typically features smaller scale local acts, though in my defence I cite the festival's not including U acts in the timetable app.
All in all the festival was a lot of fun and a great way to catch up with buds and see weirdo music that I wouldn't otherwise have come across. See you next year.
My account of the amazing 2022 Le Guess Who festival enters its third day. See part one here and part two here.
It was this morning that we registered that our hotel was offering unlimited quantities of cava with breakfast (in particular we noticed the Swedish rockers at a nearby table who were consuming unlimited quantities of cava with or instead of breakfast). However we decided to set a good example to the world and chose for now to abstain. What we did do after our post breakfast nap was head back to the Centraal Museum to catch a screening of Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992. This is a documentary by artist Jeremy Deller, possibly best known for his re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave from the 1984 Miners' Strike and We're Here Because We're Here, a commemoration of the 19,240 British soldiers killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Everybody in the Place is a film about acid house and early rave culture in Britain, situated in the context of the social changes taking place in the country at the time. It features plenty of archival footage but its real stroke of genius is its framing device, which sees Deller delivering a lecture about acid house to a bunch of students in a London secondary school. Now, I understood from the introduction to the film by the museum's artistic director Bart Rutten that the school scenes were a reconstruction of an actual lecture to school kids that Deller had previously delivered: i.e. that what we were watching was essentially scripted even if it was in some sense based on real events. However, no one else I talked to appears to have taken that inference from the director, so maybe we were watching footage of a live event and the unscripted response of bemused kids to a cultural phenomenon long predating their birth.
Some of the film follows the usual trajectory followed by discussions of house music's history, with the music's origins in Detroit and Chicago receiving some interesting attention. One insight I hadn't heard before was that in the 1980s the local radio stations in Detroit were used to test audience reaction to a wider range of material than was generally the case in the USA, with the result that the locals had been exposed to a lot more weirdo European music than was the case elsewhere; he felt this factored into the mindsets of the people there who went on to make hard electronic music. It's also good on the influence Kraftwerk had on black American musicians, on the face of it one of the more bizarre features of historical cross-pollination.
When the narrative moves to the UK Deller positions acid house as a reaction to the Thatcherite crushing of working class power, as epitomised by the defeat of the miners' strike. There is also some interesting footage relating to new age travellers, where he deliberately confounds expectations by playing news footage of pensioners, who instead of saying "lock up the crusties!" are complaining about how Britain is becoming too authoritarian. Deller sees it as significant that they are of the generation that went through the Second World War, which ties into something I remember reading about the 2019 Brexit referendum: although pensioners generally voted for Brexit, the oldest pensioners (i.e. the ones who would have actually remembered the horrors of the mid 20th century) voted strongly against it.
When it came to acid house and rave itself, I was struck by how Deller underplayed the London-centric narrative that normally dominates here. Shoom and Spectrum were only mentioned in passing and he talked a good bit about how warehouse parties in the north of England had paved the way for mass acceptance of a new mode of musical enjoyment. But it does hop back to the south east when he gets into talking about the orbital raves. He is generally not hostile to the entrepreneurial types who took acid house from tiny clubs to huge rave sites, though he does pretty much state that Paul Staines (later the founder of the Guido Fawkes website) is a cunt from central casting. Sadly there was no mention of my own favourite of the rave-entrepreneurs, Tony Colston-Hayter, who went from professional gambler to rave promoter, to more recently serving stints in jail for a electronic fraud offences.
What I was struck by was how coy the film was about drugs. I'm not sure Ecstasy was even mentioned by name, even when we were being shown footage of obviously mashed ravers gurning away. I can see why Deller might have wanted to focus on the community aspects of rave culture, but it did seem like an odd lacuna to ignore the role played by MDMA in binding that community. In fact I think he only really mentioned drugs late in the day as fundamentally a bad thing, on the basis that they brought the attention of criminals and the cops onto the rave scene.
Anyway, at time of writing the film is available in full on YouTube. I recommend checking it out. If you want to get a taste, here is a trailer:
After a return visit to Double Act (see previous post) I think we may have sourced sustenance of some kind (perhaps a pizza) and then it was time for more music, in particular Colombian electronic music sensation Lucrecia Dalt, who was playing in the Ronda as a surprise late addition to the bill. Last year her set had been relatively austere but this time round we were treated to something a bit more all-singing and dancing, probably based on her recent album, on which she draws from the Colombian song-based music of her youth. As well as treating us to her singing she also had a bemulleted live drummer who really gave it socks. All pretty enjoyable but perhaps foolishly I left early to head to the Grote Zaal for another act.
Who was I going to see? Why none other than Cate Le Bon. When it comes to the popular Welsh singer I feel like I am suffering badly from the sunk cost fallacy, gripped by the idea that because she did one great album years ago I should keep listening to her in the hope that she will return to that kind of music. I've largely given up on her on record as she has moved away from what I liked about her, but I keep being drawn to her concerts in the hope that the old magic will return (sometimes it does). Anyway, with this concert I was struck by how full the Grote Zaal was: it's a big venue and I thought maybe her appeal was a bit selective so there would be just me and some rolling tumble-weed there, but no, there were loads of people. Moving away from the key Ian demographic has obviously paid dividends.And the set started well, with "Miami", the opener from 2019's Reward. After that though it all got a bit ploddy, with the unimaginative and overly high in the mix drumming causing me particular annoyance. Cate Le Bon's big strength is her voice but since Me Oh My she has continued to not give it free rein.
Now, the big thing I wanted to see this evening was Goat, but there was a bit of time before they came on so to kill it we went up the mysterious Pandora venue to see Cheikha Rabia & Esraa Warda. These are two Algerian women, Rabia a veteran singer of the 200 cigarettes a day variety and Warda a younger dancer. Warda also was the one with enough English to talk to the crowd (no one ever addresses LGW audiences in Dutch), and they were joined by two musicians (an older guy on some kind of small drum and a young lad on keyboards). The show saw Rabia sing while Warda shook her stuff, all very impressive, but sadly we had to leave early for Goat.
Now you know the way at festivals when there is one act you really really want to see properly, you resolve to make sure to get in early enough to where they are playing so that you get a good spot? Well Goat were like this for me. They were basically the LGW act I most wanted to see over the weekend. And we did leave Cheikha Rabia & Esraa Warda in reasonably good time. But then we fell in with some of our buds, which necessitated some quick toilet breaks and then suddenly it seemed like a good idea to queue for drinks which then of course took ages to arrive, and with the hares and the hounds by the time we made our way into the Ronda it was only a few minutes before Goat were due to come on, plus the venue was completely rammed. A clever ruse saw us leap towards the front but way over on one side, and it was still unpleasantly crowded, but we had to make the best of our bad lot.
But who you may ask are Goat? Well, that is a good question. They appear to be from Sweden, though doubts have been raised on this front. What we can say for definite is that they play live wearing robes and masks. Their music is of a broadly psychedelic nature, with some suggesting that it incorporates "tribal" elements (with further people wondering if this makes them problematic). They have two singers, both of them apparently women, with these two also working as dancers and crowd molesters. As spectacle they are unbeatable. The music is pretty hot too.
I was struck by how the two singer-dancers were relatively uncoordinated with each other — while they were both wearing masks and crowns, they were not wearing matching masks and crowns, while the rest of their clothes shared an aesthetic without being in any way identical. They did not seem to have jointly coordinated dance moves either. Yet their dancing was not completely random. I noticed that a couple of times they exchanged places on the stage, swapping which microphone they were basing themselves at when resuming their vocals; and they managed to do this without bumping into each other or getting into scuffles over who was going to be using a mic. Fascinating.
So yeah, Goat deliver. They are GOAT.
And thence to the Grote Zaal, where África Negra were doing their thing. They are from Sao Tome and Príncipe, one of those countries Europeans dread coming up in Worldle. They played good time uptempo music drawing on various influences, and their frontman is known as The General and dresses accordingly (his precise military status has not been confirmed). I had originally planned to relax through their set, being a bit worn out by Goat, but even I ended up dancing away to them.
We then thought of sticking our heads into the Ronda then to see what Kokoko!, an electronic fellow from Kinshasa was up to, but everyone else had the same idea, so we decided that enough was enough. And so to bed.
The next post will conclude my account of the 2022 Le Guess Who festival.
images:
Typical ravers (Mixmag: "Jeremy Deller explores '80s UK rave culture in new documentary")
My account of the amazing 2022 Le Guess Who festival continues. See part one here.
On Friday we tried to go to a screening of a film about the Chelsea Hotel. Unfortunately so did everyone else, as this was one of very few festival events taking place during the day, and we were unable to squeeze into the small cinema auditorium. I hope the more organised people enjoyed themselves. So instead we trekked down to the Centraal Museum to catch a LGW-associated exhibition called Double Act, which combined video art stuff with paintings from the 17th century. Video art is a bit hit and miss and, truth be told even some of that 17th century stuff is not all that, so there was no guarantee that this was going to deliver the goods. It turned out however that there were some real corkers here. The video of the guy scooting around Puerto Rico on a moped with a trumpet attached to the exhaust pipe (there was parping) was amusing, even if I did not really buy it as a commentary on how imperialism is bad. I was also struck by how quite a few of the other video pieces just featured people walking purposefully.
The actual hit of the show for me though was Irish artist Richard Mosse's The Enclave, which presented footage shot in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo during one of their wars there. This was shot on some kind of infrared sensitive film that renders green colours as pink, giving the landscape a strangely alien look. And the way the images were projected was deliberately disorienting, with this exhibit using six screens, four arranged in a rectangle and two diagonally outside. Sometimes the same images were projected on screens facing each other, and sometimes not, with the viewer always having the sense that they are missing something. The images themselves showed soldiers moving around, people in a small town or refugee camp, and sometimes the aftermath of violence (dead soldiers triggering the mild curiosity of their former comrades and/or non-combatants). But there was no narration or explanatory text, indeed no soundtrack of any kind, leaving the actions of the people in the footage (and indeed the choices of the filmmakers) largely inscrutable.
A key sequence for me was the long section inside some kind of village hall, where initially it seems like a large group of civilians have gathered for entertainment, until you realise that the event seems to be mainly taking place for the bunch of guys in military fatigues sitting at the front. First we have music and dancing, then kids jumping through flaming hoops of burning petrol, and then a woman with the most amazing presence strides in from the back of the hall and marches up to the stage, only before we get any sense of what she is about the lead army guy gets up and leaves, with the camera following him out. This to me embodied the whole baffling incomprehensibility of the piece and, by extension, the confusion that must come with living in a conflict zone.
We also popped in to the Speelklok Museum, where they had some things available for LGW attendees. As you will recall, the Speelklok is a museum for mechanical musical instruments, and the big thing they had for us this year was the Klappermobile. This was like what you would get if John Carpenter's The Thing ate a load of bicycles and then turned them into a musical instrument. It required at least two people to operate: one person to wind a handle and keep the contraption going and then another to press keys that depressed baffles against spinning bicylce wheels designed to rotate at different speeds and so create noises of different pitches. My beloved was able to make it play something approximating to "Raglan Road".
The first musical performance I saw on the Friday was Noori and His Derpa Band, who were playing in Janskerk (which is a church). They had played previously in the Grote Zaal and I think that might have been a better place for them, as this was uptempo good time music (albeit with something of an edge, as Mr Noori is from Sudan's downtrodden Beja community).
Back in the Tivoli's very comfortable Hertz venue we then saw Alison Cotton, a spooky folky gothy lady. She played violin, did stuff with electronics, and used her voice to create a distinctly eerie atmosphere, to the extent that friend Brian was afraid that she might accidentally summon something from another plane of existence. I was struck by how she covered Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair", but it was the tunes where her vocals were almost completely non-verbal that sent shivers down my spine.
We were then faced by a dilemma. Dry Cleaning were playing in the Ronda, and while I am unfamiliar with their work I have heard of them and was interested in checking out this big name band. Also my friend Mr B—'s repeated comments about how the Dry Cleaning singer is great while the rest of the band's music is rather plodding had me curious as to how bad it could really be, especially when you consider the eccentric nature of Mr B—'s tastes. But they were playing at the same time as Širom, whose programme description as weirdo avant folkies from Slovenia made them sound like a hard to resist option. And we could not resist, climbing up to Cloud Nine (and successfully accessing it) to see most of their set.
And basically Širom, gave good weirdo avant folk, with an added side order of drone. They played a variety of strange acoustic instruments while also providing us with some vocals, though whether these were of the Slovenian or non-verbal variety remains an unsolved mystery. They also had a carpet on stage and I understand from other reports that they might have thrown lentils at people. It all sounded a bit like those Finnish Fonal people (who may or may not still be going). And they appear to be from the Karfeit and Carso areas (possibly called something else in Slovenian), sites of the famous 11 battles of the Isonzo in the First World War.
But then we did go to the Ronda to see Clipping (who may actually call themselves "clipping." but it's not my fault if they don't understand punctuation and capitalisation). You have heard of this trio: two blokes on productiony stuff and one on rappy vocals. The music is pretty glitchy and the overall effect is a bit like if you had someone rapping over a record by Squarepusher. I think a lot of the appeal here comes from Daveed Diggs's rapping, with his quickfire vocals carrying the music along. Great as it was though, I did find myself wondering if this might be hip hop for white people (though as a white person myself maybe this is not a problem).
And thence to Hertz to see Nancy Mounir's Nozhet El Nofous. She is an Egyptian musician and like Nadah El Shazly her work involves a certain interrogation of the musical past of her country. As a performance, Nozhet El Nofous was an odd beast. Mounir herself played both violin and theremin, but she was joined by a gang of local classical musicians. And she had a man and a woman projecting photographs of Egyptian singers of yore (less famous ones than Um Kalthoum) and explanatory text. The musical also combined samples of the old singers with the music being played live, to create a sound that might be described as hauntological. It was all rather fascinating and strange, with the frequency with which the olde singers seem to have played against gender roles being an intriguing aspect of their biographies. I found myself thinking that this could do with being released as a nicely packaged CD set with an accompanying book containing all the details of the singers, as there was too much to otherwise remember.
As with the first night I was by now too tired to go on to BASIS so I made my way instead to BED.
You know the drill. Le Guess Who is that festival of Wire-reader music that takes place each November in the picturesque Dutch town of Utrecht, with most concerts taking place in the Tivoli Vredenburg complex but many also happening in various satellite locations. I previously attended in 2021 and 2018. This year for crazy person reasons my beloved and I decided that rather than fly over we would travel by a combination of boat and train, so you'll have to put up with some yap about our travel arrangements before reaching the music festival chat.
The ferry and train journey to London were uneventful, notwithstanding the intermittent industrial action that had been taking place on the trains. Rather than risking a missed connection. we broke our journey in London. The check-in queue for the Eurostar in the morning seemed a bit more chaotic than I remembered but moved quickly enough, and soon we were on our way. The Eurostar itself is a weird combination of VERY EXCITING ("OMG we are going under the ocean!") and pretty mundane (it is just a train). I was nevertheless struck by how big and full it was. I've very little sense of how much human traffic there is between England and the near continent, but being able to zip in to the centre of a continental city makes this a far more attractive means of travel than flying. I was irked though by the fact that the catering car seemed to shut for an age before and after a staff changeover at Brussels, which was basically prime time for when you would want to be sourcing wine to drink at your seat like some kind of debauched plutocrat. By the time the bar was open again we were so close to our destination that it didn't seem worth it.
We left the Eurostar in Rotterdam rather than Amsterdam, as we thought it might be interesting to have a quick snoop through that famous town. It did not quite conform to expectations. Firstly, there was no gabba blaring non-stop over the loudspeakers in the station, with no loud voices shouting "FUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUU" to be heard either. Also the city centre had far less of the completely rebuilt after being bombed to shit look than I was expecting (the city was heavily bombed by both sides in the Second World War but they seemed to have missed a surprisingly large number of old buildings). However it did feel a good bit less shi-shi or dinky than Amsterdam and Utrecht, and the walk down to the river (a mouth of the Rhine, I think) gave good nautical feels. The hour or two we spent there might be enough, but I'm sure if circumstances brought you back (say for their film or jazz festivals, or the < href="https://www.erasmuscon.nl">2024 Eurocon) you would find things to amuse yourself.
From Rotterdam it was a short journey on a double-decker train to Utrecht, where we checked into our hotel (conveniently located right beside the station with a view of the platforms, while also being five minutes away from the Tivoli), ate our dinner in a branch of the famous Dutch restaurant Wagamama (where I saw a couple that I then kept seeing again and again over the weekend) and repaired to bed.
The festival started the next day, which was a Thursday. Following the crowd I found myself catching the very first performance of the festival, Sote and Tarik Barri performing together not in one of the Tivoli Vredenburg spaces but in the Stadsschouburg, a theatre space I had not previously made it to. Sote is an Iranian electronic musician while Barri is a Dutch visual artist. For this Barri was doing visuals live in response to Sote's plinky music, which made for a wonderfully immersive introduction to the festival.
After a quick beer and burger break we made our way to the Tivoli's Grote Zaal for a performance by the Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar (who split from the Master Musicians of Joujouka in the 1990s, for reasons). Hailing from Morocco, their music draws from Sufi traditions and would probably have originally been played at events where people were going into trances and getting close to the divine and stuff, as opposed to music festivals for whitey. Quite a few of their tunes began with long piercing blasts from their wind instruments, before the percussion instruments came in and a bit of to-and-fro ensued. I did find myself thinking that maybe the percussion instruments were a bit quieter than they should be, but that might be because the master musicians kept moving away from their microphones. My beloved meanwhile was amused by how the various master musicians were like a bunch of crotchety auld lads who seemed to spend their time grumbling about stuff.
In previous years it has been hard to move from gig to gig at Le Guess Who, with venues filling up to the extent that you needed to get to them half an hour or more before an act was scheduled to start in them. But I was nevertheless able to go straight from the Master Musicians to the Ronda (second largest Tivoli venue), where Divide and Dissolve were playing. They had played support to Low earlier this year but I arrived too late to see them on their Dublin date, so this was my first time catching them. They are a two-woman outfit, one on drums (Olivia, filling in for the usual drummer) and the other playing sax, guitars, and keyboards (Takiaya Reed). There were no vocals, though Reed did a lot of between song chat. Some of the chat was about the late Mimi Parker of Low, who Reed reported being very supportive of Divide and Dissolve's work. Colonialism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, etc. were also discussed (the band are broadly against all of these things). The music meanwhile was quite in-your-face and in some ways contrasted considerably with Reed's vocal style, which was quite soft spoken and almost like what you might get from someone fronting an indie band. I liked her and sympathised with her struggle, but after not too long I felt like I had got the idea with D&D and did not really need to hear too much more of their music.
Leaving the Ronda I decided to make my way up to Cloud Nine to see OKI. The venue was pretty crowded, but I made my way up to the balcony and had a pretty good view of proceedings from there. But who or what is OKI? It turns out that he is this guy called Oki Kano and he is a member of the Ainu community (an indigenous people hailing from the north of Japan). He was playing with his wife and son as well as some other guy on bass. Kano and his family wore what looked like some kind of traditional garb, while the drummer was less traditionally attired. The instruments meanwhile hovered between tradition and modernity: as well as the bassist, there was Kano's son on a standard Western drum-kit, while Mr & Mrs Kano played the tonkori, the five-stringed harp of the Ainu, which they played almost like a guitar.
From reading about Oki Kano, I gather he is all about preserving the embattled culture of the Ainu, yet he is also surprisingly un-precious about it. His band's performance was not like some kind of stuck in amber reconstruction of a true well of Ainu music of yore but instead pulled in influences from all over the place, with dub and western pop being obvious points of reference (I read that he has also collaborated with Ireland's Kila, but then hasn't everyone). All in all this was a big pile of fun and one of the most enjoyable sets of the festival.
I made arrangements to rendezvous with my beloved in the Grote Zaal where she was planning to catch Alabaster DePlume but I arrived early and the previous ensemble of Mr Sarathy Korwar was still playing, joined by special guest star… Mr Alabaster DePlume! Confused? Not as much as I was when they all went offstage and I thought that the Alabaster DePlume concert was over before it had started.
But it was not too long before Mr DePlume returned with his band. Basically he is a jazz saxophonist but when he isn't playing his sax he treated us to either his wise sayings about the world (generally of the upbeat positivity variety) or else his beat poetry. It's the kind of thing that should be terrible but it all somehow worked. I particularly liked his "I Was Gonna Fight Fascism" poem, which was all about how he was going to fight fascism but for a variety of reasons he was unable to do so (he was a bit tired, he had a lot on, he got a bit annoyed with the other people fighting fascism, etc.); and then it was too late. We've all been there.
And that was that for me. Some of my buds went on to BASIS, Le Guess Who's late night club venue, but you don't want to wreck yourself on the first night of a festival.
