Dancing with the ghosts of Blackpool: The Black Lights Festival was an inspired collision of place and sound

There’s something about Blackpool that brings out the latent Jonathan Meades or Martin Parr in us all. The self-styled Vegas of the North has passed through eras of Victorian splendour, mass-market holidaymaking, seedy kitsch and terminal decline – a downward trajectory that has never quite extinguished its peculiar allure. Whether eulogised or celebrated, there quite simply is no place quite like it.

The Black Lights is a new festival from the team behind Manchester’s White Hotel, one that deliberately tunes into the town’s atmosphere: its shabby glamour, easy sleaziness, and camp-as-a-row-of-brick-shithouses appeal. In this way, it feels like a knowingly playful node in the network of international festivals that champion the avant-garde and experimental. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the appearance of the northwest’s own James Leyland Kirby, better known as The Caretaker. His degraded plunderphonics unfold in the baroque belly of the Blackpool Tower Ballroom, an inspired pairing given his samples of decaying light-orchestra 78s and the project’s lingering nods to The Shining in both sound and name. A pair of spotlit dancers move through the crowd while Kirby remains unseen until the very end, when he emerges to take a vintage microphone and pantomime a croon. By then, the festival’s spell – first conjured by the kitsch grandeur of the ballroom’s Mighty Wurlitzer organ – had been well and truly cast.

South London experimentalist Klein takes a different approach. Shredding on guitar and blasting a rave whistle into the microphone, she stages a kind of exorcism of excess: chandeliers flicker violently as waves of noise wash over a crowd getting to grips with the ballroom’s famous sprung dancefloor. The result is one of glorious discombobulation – a sonic alienation effect forcing you to perceive both the noise and the venue anew. But it’s not just the grand dames of Blackpool’s architecture that are utilised across the weekend, but the tiny clubs, the basement of mainstream nightspots, churches, Houndshill shopping centre, even the corporate, upholstered wastes of the Pleasure Beach casino. 

On Saturday, the Catholic Club is the day’s most improbable hotspot – a sticky daytime rave amidst pool tables and fruit machines. Manchester labels Bakk Heia and Red Laser respond to the clammy conditions with languid tech house, the energy spiked by the eye-openingly cheap pints and shots. At one point, the owner has to step in and remind everyone about the sanctity of the venue, which only reinforces the surrealism of the moment.

A short walk away, the basement club Bootleg Social offers some respite from the baking sun. Here, Londoner feeo conjures her oppressive atmospheres of dread and beauty, with only her hushed, soulful voice acting as the watchlight through the murk. It’s a roadblock by the time Jawnino takes to the small stage. His trademark blend of slice-of-life UK rap and tear-jerker rave sends the crowd into a frenzy – not even a rogue fire alarm can knock him off course. It’s Cold Out, with its dreamlike pads, lands with new urgency: “Broken Britain, but that’s how we like it.” 

On Saturday night, a rare performance by the collective Gescom is the clear standout. A few festivalgoers we spoke to had made the trip specifically for it, lending the moment a sense of anticipation. Following a characteristically intense, physical set from former Crack cover star Blackhaine in the vast Olympia Hall, the enigmatic collective (Autechre and a revolving cast of collaborators) appeared on the balcony, reorientating the space in the first of many perceptual shifts courtesy of their stippled, intergalactic acid techno. For a project instigated in 1994, the laser-bathed performance still felt like something from the future, with visceral drum patterns and gaseous pads somehow cutting through the venue’s iffy acoustics.

Sunday daytime belongs to the Albert Hotel, where a tombola and pub quiz unfurl at a sedate pace in the seafront hotel’s bar (when we enter, Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and the ‘Allo ‘Allo! theme tune are drifting out the speakers). The hotel itself has been appropriated into an exhibition by painter and sound recordist Ivan Seal, turning its corridors and rooms into uncanny spaces displaying his artworks, with hotel TVs tuned to hauntology FM: bingo callers, mumbled conversations about Gracie Fields and The Caretaker’s tea dances of yesteryear. It’s an unsettling, voyeuristic experience.

Undoubtedly the main event on Sunday’s schedule is the premiere of a newly commissioned, as yet untitled work by Mica Levi, performed by the BBC Philharmonic in the Winter Gardens Opera House and conducted by Ludovic Morlot. This is Levi in symphonic horror mode: slow-building strings, enticingly slippery and off-key, gathering into flourishes of jarring colour. There are also sotto voce murmurs from the choir, reminiscent of the ominous drones heard in The Zone of Interest. It sits, deliberately askew, within a programme that also includes John Adams’ Harmonielehre, Terry Riley’s In C, and closes with Jerusalem.

Suitably nourished – culturally, spiritually, and otherwise – only the closing ceremony remained. It was held at the Pleasure Beach on South Shore, where most souvenir shops were now shuttered, the day-trippers having long since gone home. How to ring down the curtain on a weekend so strange, surprising and off-beat? Well, you have options – and the three floors at the function space explored them all, until reality was hanging by a thread. On the top, lift-accessed floor, The Commission for New & Old Art Crooner Band entertained a seated and engaged crowd with jazz standards and light operetta. Downstairs, karaoke – when the technical hiccups allowed it and finally and most strangely of all: a performance by Leyland Kirby under his experimental V/VM moniker, entitled The Hitman and the Hair – a reference to a television dance show hosted by Pete Waterman (hardly playing to The Caretaker’s TikTok arrivistes, then). Living up to its bonkers promise of the name, it channelled old-school end-of-the-pier entertainment complete with naff dance troupe and a Christmas songs section. Sure!

This being the inaugural event, there were some kinks – bars are often understaffed and underprepared across many venues, and while the searing heat and incumbent delays couldn’t have been planned for, greater accessibility for locals could have. Many seemed somewhat baffled by the influx of sleep-deprived, overexcited ravers to their town. These are fairly minor issues, though, and easily resolved. The overriding feeling on the train ride back to reality was clear. The Black Lights – there quite simply is no place quite like it.