Crack

Now in its 5th year, Field Day just keeps growing and growing like Jack’s beanstalk. Let’s call it Crack’s beanstalk. Five stages, one fun fair, big names and new talent demanded the team attend Hackney’s Victoria Park to mingle, have a dance and obviously - get down the front. Well, with a line up like that it would have been rude not too.

Fresh off the plane from LA came Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, providing the perfect kick-start to the party proceedings with their blissed out nostalgia and flare for the ostentatious. Crack caught up with Ariel and his bassist Tim Koh after their show to discuss genre pigeon-holes. Both turn their noses up at the Pitchfork coined term “chillwave” – Ariel describes himself as “hipster garbage” before settling on “retrolicious” whilst Tim sites the term “dream-a-billy” which Crack concurs is ultimately most fitting. These guys would make great soundtracks for your dreams. Playing the singles Round Round and Bright Lit Blue Skies from their most recent album Before Today as well as classics from the Before-Animal-Collective-discovered-em era such as For Kate I Wait and Grey Sunset, Ariel Pink and his Haunted Graffiti leave us quaking in their wake and wanting more.

Twin Shadow was a touch more than fashionably late on stage and therefore played a shorter than expected set. The vaguely disgruntled punters seemed appeased in the heaving tent when his sumptuous southern drawl (for George Lewis Jr is from Miami yis sir) explained that the band had just literally arrived from Palermo. Bloody Easyjet. As the synth pounds in and his voice floats over us like a new wave wet dream, all tardiness is forgiven. The favourites are delivered despite the time restriction and the huge crowd witness Castles in the Snow, Slow and When We’re Dancing being performed with an impressive energy - which must be so hard to sustain when you have been touring your debut album solidly for six months and you surely have Groundhog Day-esque nightmares. Fair enough Twin Shadow, we salute you.

Crack also salutes the team behind the Bloggers Delight stage who smashed it again this year. From the 3pm mark their stage pulled us back like Thor’s hammer (which is highly magnetic okay?) with Oneohtrix Point Never seasoning our pallets with their amazing veteran glitch electro, Zola Jesus belting out beautiful operatic synth-pop, Jamie XX doing his thing and doing it so well, plus the stage’s headliner – man of the hour – SBTRKT – complete with full band, all masked. If you asked for more, you would be plain ungrateful.



Words: Lucie Grace Trotman

If Field Day were a dish it would be a massive home made lasagne created by one of your bezzie mates who is overly passionate about cooking. Think Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall more than Epic Meal Time. Think AGAs and aprons rather than peel back plastic and microwaves. Hours of preparation and only the finest ingredients; chopped, layered and oven cooked for at least four and a half to five hours.

People gather around the oven, queuing up in amazement as the Field Day lasagne comes out after a serious bake, bubble and bronzing like it has been basking in the summer sunshine - I am talking a perfect looking lasagne - ONLY to turn into a limp, soggy, dribbling mess when it gets dished up on the first porcelain plate at the top of the pile.

Field Day is hyped as the most happening one dayer of the summer in the city and that it is. Thousands of incredibly safe people stroll round a couple of corners and descend on Victoria Park, ripe for a good old knees up. It is the complete opposite to Lovebox (aside from the location) in the sense that there are literally no chavs or shit acts like Chase and Status – not one. The line-up is notoriously dope BUT there is something strange going on within the perimeter fencing that guarantees you will NEVER see, hear or watch anything even remotely musical. How can I best put it?

Field Day is basically a gathering of jellyfish randomly bumping into friends old and new until everyone is completely bemused as to why they went to Victoria Park in the first place. It is only when maximum confusion levels are reached that anyone is actually allowed to leave the premises. The organisers may as well of taken down the fences and let everyone's bezzie mates in (if they weren't there already) to get involved in the intense love in. Field Day is such a love in that it doesn't even begin to feel like a festival. No fights, no angriness, no tracksuit bottoms, no bong stands, no nothing. It feels more like a mad intense Tumble Tots session than a music festival.

Field Day and Lovebox should swap names.

Maybe it was just me, but I have a sneaking suspicion it wasn't. All I know is that I had a long list of radical artists that I dared not miss - I was so hype it was unreal. Clock Opera, Jamie Woon, The History of Apple Pie, SBTRKT, Mount Kimbie, Willy Mason, Zola Jesus, blah blah blah the list goes on and on, yet I managed to miss each and every single one of them. I saw the The Horrors from top to bottom (they were decent) and I also looked at the side of a tent for about eight minutes before giving up on Glasser, but in all honesty that was it. I did also hear the efforts of Wild Beasts pass me by like a gust of high pitched wind but at the time I was far too busy chatting to one of my bezzies from primary school about climbing frames and grazes to pay much attention.

There were some highlights, and not a solitary second of my Field Day experience ticked by that I did not enjoy completely, I had a whale of a time. From clocking Bat For Lashes just strolling about (she wasn't even on the bill), to watching some guy eating an undisclosed quantity of windswept cocaine off the floor and with it lumps of mud, shedloads of grass and almost certainly traces of dog piss just to get his money's worth. Watching my buddy run around with her trousers split at the crotch all day was another highlight (not in a pervy way) as was giving another buddy a better view of The Horrors on my shoulders in order prove that I had what it took in the strongman stakes. This is what Field Day is all about, and this is what I will remember it for; not much, but then again pretty much everything.

To finish where I started; it doesn't matter one single bit what shape your portion of lasagne is presented to you on your plate so long as the effort was put in by your bezzie chef. It could be a perfect rectangular tower of food architecture -or- it could be a chunky, steaming puke puddle. Both are equally as brilliant (and most importantly) just as tasty as each other.





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Words: Thomas Hawkins

Photos: Laura Palmer

http://www.fielddayfestivals.com/

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