The Latitude festival, now in its second year, took place on the weekend of July 12th - 15th in Henham Park, Suffolk. Its a four day event, from Thursday night to Sunday, and this year completely sold out. I went last year and found it pleasant, a little quiet, with a amateurish atmosphere which was quite refreshing. Its a wonderful setting too, by a river on a hill, with a forest on the other side. To get in and out you even need to cross a bridge over said river. It was also notable for having little to no sponsorship. How would things be this year?

As I was in London at the Daniel Johnston concert on the Thursday we didn’t get there til Friday afternoon. There wasn’t much time to take things in then as it was a mad dash to catch the superb Maps on the Uncut (here comes the sponsors) stage. After that however we were able to take the site in. Some changes from last year, mainly the Main Stage was outside instead of under a big tent. Although this was due to this years tent being destroyed, it was the best thing to happen to the festival. Having a main stage indoors seems to get rid of half the point of a festival to me. Here I enjoyed the legendary Wilco (here not completely at their best), Andrew Bird (great performer but ultimately not best suited to such a large arena), the eager and beautiful but over synthed Au Revoir Simone, and the well suited and fun bands Cake and The Hold Steady.

Au Revoir Simone - Fallen Snow

The Hold Steady - Chips Ahoy at lattitude

Headliners were The Good The Bad and The Queen, who sounded great backed by a string quartet, looked great with seemingly hand drawn backdrop of Victorian London and gothic top hats for all, but ultimately failed to pull the crowd together and alleviate the tired feeling. They were best for me when sat on the other side of the site watching multicoloured sheep (don’t ask!) headbutt and nuzzle each other, whilst the music wafted across. A sit down with a picnic sort of band. I was not in attendance for much of Damien Rice’s set, instead watching Patrick Wolf experiment with brass, but when we arrived he appeared to be totally drunk lurching around the stage with a glass of wine. Probably part of the act, everyone seemed to be loving it anyway. Outstanding however, were the Arcade Fire who closed the Main Stage on Sunday night with an amazing performance of Wake Up alongside fireworks! (see below for video) The band were full of life and gave it their all, playing songs from both albums and really pleasing the crowd. They brought everyone together a gave a the festival plenty of great ‘moments’.

Patrick Wolf live at Latitude

Arcade Fire close the festival with fireworks - Wake Up

Another change of note this year was the moving of the ‘Sunrise Arena’ to the woods across the river. Although it was great to see bands in this surreal setting, the stage was built in a very odd fashion with two tents attached, one for the bands, on for the audience. The audience’s tent is on a slope down which means its hard to see anything. This rendered The New Young Pony Club invisible to us, although it was absolutely packed - a huge crowd for them. Other bands here included The Silent League, who followed an outstanding debut with an album of cod 70’s nonsense, and sadly performed a disappointing second album heavy set.

Howling Bells and Simple Kid both turned in great crowd pleasing sets, but the highlights here, and indeed of the entire festival, was I’m from Barcelona’s Saturday set. We met Johan from the huge Swedish collective before the set, who sold me some underpants handmade by the band and stuck us on the guest list for their Monday gig in Brighton. If you haven’t heard of this band yet, you must check them out, all 30 of them recorded the record which is Polyphonic Spree style happiness with childlike lyrics and a party atmosphere. 15 of them were here today, with plenty of balloons and ticker tape. Kids and adults alike were dancing with gay abandon, it was one massive party.

I’m From Barcelona - Live at Latitude

Jarvis - Eye of the tiger, at Latitude

From Scotland and Wales this weekend we had Camera Obscura, who the crowd went wild for and I spotted watching Jarvis later on and Gruff Rhys of The Super Furry Animals who played in typically bizzare fashion on a high platform alongside an air hostess(??!) with a giant candy lion backdrop in the style of the 70’s TV test card. Seasick Steve played deep and dirty blues, dressed like a redneck he cried ‘You may be lovin me now but if you saw comin towards ya in the street, you’d be crossin over the other side’. Indeed, he does look mighty scary, but provided another highlight.

Seasick Steve live

Gruff Rhys in the woods - Latitude secret gig

Once the music ended at 11 on the main stages, the Music and Film arena took over, with late night sets til 3 AM. Saturday saw Mark Lamarr DJ and welcome on stage at 1am the Alabama 3. We queued for over 30 mins to get in and arrived just as ‘Woke up this morning’, The Soprano’s theme tune kicked in. There’s nothing like a live rave performed by a bunch of people from London pretending to country stars for ending the evening on a high…superb. The last band we saw were local Brighton rock band the Guillotines, these guys are lunatics and at one point threw a table into the crowd, not to mention dragging people on stage, getting girls to slap the lead singer and doing pressups midair.

As well as all the music, there was films, theatre, book readings - I saw James Franco from Spiderman 2 reading something or other, cabaret such as The Puppini Sisters and loads more…all in all a great festival. My only critiscisms would be that they didn’t seem ready for the increase in people on last year. The comedy tent was always rammed, the poetry and literature tents were too small and queues for food and non-alcoholic drink were horrendous. Well at least the queues at the bar weren’t so bad. Either way, I’m sure I’ll be back one day to see how they are getting along.

Highlights of the festival (Parts 1 and 2)

At the end of the second video the girls get a free pair of sunglasses from Revival, I met them at the festival and bought some myself - head over and pick up some retro sunglasses.

Buy the headliners albums

Recommended albums from

Andrew Bird, Wilco, Cake, The Hold Steady

Patrick Wolf, Simple Kid, The Silent League, Howling Bells

Camera Obscura, Gruff Rhys, Seasick Steve

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.