Øya Festival

Summer excursions. It’s tricky to book the right trip isn’t it? While you need to feel replenished from your time off work, you’re probably a little too young to spend a week sizzling on a sun lounger in the Costa Del Sol with a crap crime novel in one hand and a B&H gold in the other. The slog of UK camping festivals, on the other hand, can be so hard on the mind and the body that you come back feeling like… well, like you need a holiday.

A happy medium is to head out to Norway’s Øya festival, a place where you’ll find yourself gun-fingering under the instruction of a rap megastar before disposing of your cigarette end in a courteous manner a minute later. This was Crack’s second time at Øya, and the first time the festival has taken place at the city-central Tøyenpark site. Here’s what went down.

On first entering the site, we’re allured by the distant rumble of Brody Dalle’s set on the Hagen stage, and we catch her play some of The Distillers‘ better songs (Die On A Rope, Dismantle Me) plus a cover of The Misfits’ Hybrid Moments. Sound like fun? It is. But Brody seems like she’s struggling a little in the unforgiving heat. As some kind of disclaimer, she announces that her pedals are broken and – due to the airline losing her luggage – she’s still in the clothes she wore on the plane. “Do you guys like circle pits? I do”, she croaks, in attempt to rouse the crowd before finishing with solo track Underworld. It’s 4:30pm, there’s ‘No Crowdsurfing’ signs around and everyone’s absolutely roasting. It’s not happening.

By the time her husband arrives on the main stage to front Queens of the Stone Age, however, we get the impression that the pair’s dilemmas haven’t stood in the way of a good time. “We came a long way to get shit-faced with y’all”, Homme slurs, swishing a spirit and mixer in his hand while squinting into the crowd. But Homme doesn’t play a note out of place, and Queens sound perfect. Maybe a little too perfect, in fact. The band have been touring with a slickly rehearsed Greatest Hits package this year, and while we can’t complain with the opening trio of Feel Good Hit of the Summer, The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret and Avon, we crave the unpredictable jamming of their glory days.

As we’re politely ushered out of the Tøyenpark site at around 11pm, it’s time to find out what the ‘Øya Nights’ programme has to offer by the way of DJs (earlier in the day, we’d hung around in the Sirkus tent for Crack favourite Prins Thomas’ set, but we felt disinclined to dance on the shaded, coarse gravel when the sun was still beaming on the grass outside). We opt for Floating Points in the Jaeger club, where we party among the Scandinavians to a set of warm disco tracks until 3am. It’s an experience only slightly marred by the suspicion that we’re the least attractive people in the building.

After dragging ourselves out of bed for Thursday morning’s breakfast buffet, we embark on a stomach-taunting boat trip (they eat caviar and smoked trout in the morning here) to a nearby fjord to enjoy a swim, a barbecue and a few beers. Back at the festival site that afternoon, it takes us a while to get going, with Bill Callahan performing an impeccable-sounding but motionless set. Bill’s tender croak sounds gorgeous of course, but our mind begins to wander. “How come his face still looks really young?”, we speculate. Maybe he doesn’t smoke.

After watching gloomy Danish post-punk band Lower churn through every bloody song as if they’re on the verge of some kind of breakdown, we lift our spirits with Janelle Monae’s flamboyant neo-soul pantomime before securing a front-of-crowd position for one of our most anticipated performances of the weekend: New Atlanta star Future.

One thing we’ll learn over the course of the weekend is that, while Norwegians are reluctant to mosh, they go crazy for rap. And with a set that neglects the gloopy love jams in favour of high-octane trap bangers, the kids down the front howl every word – which is lucky, because Future’s voice is barely audible. Maybe it’s not his fault – DJ Esco’s mic seems to be set at double the volume, and ear-punishing bass levels completely eclipse the poignant melody of Honest. Future’s best bet, he eventually realises, is to run from one side of the stage to another while punching both arms in the air as Esco drops hits like Bugatti and Move That Dope. Job done.

But despite Future’s sloppy show, Atlanta’s flamboyant legacy is gloriously maintained by Outkast. The purring organs of opener BOB create an intense sense of nervous excitement, the chorus of ATLiens throws hands in the air as requested, sleazy uncle figure Sleepy Brown is brought out for a slick rendition of The Way You Move and – in the midst of the collective euphoria – we’re actually excited about hearing Hey Ya! again. With a playful chemistry between Big Boi and Andre 3000 that was crucially missing from the Coachella comeback, the set is so electric that it pretty much trumps any festival headline show we’ve seen in recent years, and it proves that anyone still cynical about hip-hop acts playing higher on the bill should hide in a bunker built with issues of MOJO and vinyl copies of the new Courtneers record.

With nothing much taking our fancy until late afternoon on Friday, we decide to wander to the Edvard Munch museum, which is right beside Tøyenpark site and hosts a masterpiece in pretty much every room. One minor criticism: they’ve positioned The Scream in a glass box next a lizard fossil to make some kind of point about infinity and nature. We’re not fucking with it.

After getting lightly sunburnt to Neutral Milk Hotel later that day, we watch the eternally-underrated Kelela perform an emotionally intense set to a sparse crowd and then enjoy Joey Bada$$ compensate for his listenable-but-uninspiring retro boom-bap with admirable stagemanship. This involves a mass ‘fuck police’ chant, which is cute, because the Øya programme proudly declares that no one has ever been arrested at the festival.

Next up are Norwegian black metal titans Mayhem, whose performance is unforgettable. Candles light the stage, pigs’ heads are impaled on stakes, and frontman Void Ov Voices performs theatrically with a skull and a noose in his hands. The music is agile and thrillingly intense: riffs and drumming are executed at such a high speed that at times it all blurs into a drone-like smudge. Despite the band’s deeply grim past, the show is also great fun. They’re celebrating their 30th anniversary (it’s showing, if Void’s receding hair line gets any worse he’ll be applying corpse paint to his arse), they pull out Joey Ramone lookalike Bjørn Muller as a special guest and their roadies’ ongoing struggle to set the pigs’ heads on fire is pure Spinal Tap. We eventually go to bed that night with ringing ears, an immense sense of satisfaction and the strange desire to sacrifice a goat.

A large crowd surrounds the Hagen stage the following day for King of Dudes Mac DeMarco’s set. Mac gives the crowd exactly what they want: he rockets cans of beer, he wears boxer shorts on his head and he ignores the crowd surfing ban. The raucousness contrasts starkly with the sleepy, vague songs from this year’s Salad Days, which – let’s be honest – isn’t exactly an album of wall-to-wall classics. Still, what a guy, right?

We’ve already seen Darkside kill it earlier this year, but for some reason we’re struggling to endure Dave Harrington’s extended guitar noodlings on this occasion. Put it down to last night fatigue? Well, that doesn’t feel like an issue during Øya 2014’s incredible finale: Todd Terje’s live show on the Amfiet main stage.

It’s been one hell of a year for Todd. It’s Album Time has seen him graduate from respected producer, DJ and master of the edit to a major crossover act, successfully encouraging us to all ditch ‘cool’ in favour of ‘fun’ in the process. But can he really headline a festival? Tonight’s epic homecoming show proves so. Terje’s live electronics (he performs those proggy synth solos himself) are enhanced with a live drummer, a percussionist, a guitarist/bassist and – brilliantly – thee Bryan Ferry. When Inspector Norse finally drops, dozens of dancers with LED-lit costumes rush the stage perform a goofy, synchronized dance routine. Our one complaint is that it’s all over too soon.

For some, an incentive to attend a festival is to push it to the point where you struggle to recall your own name, never mind the location of your tent. If this is what you’re after, then Øya maybe isn’t the one for you. The clubs seem to close before 4am, it costs around £9 for a half litre of lager and you’re unlikely to even smell a joint all week. But by forfeiting the mud-splattered debauchery, you get a slick, meticulously-programmed festival at a spotless inner city site that’s populated by a welcoming and good-natured crowd. You know they’re going to pull together a massive line-up again next year, and we’re recommending that you give Øya some serious consideration.

Photography: Erik Moholdt, Markus Thorsen, Steffen Rikenberg, Tor Orset, Inhe Perdersen + Johannes Gronseth