Outside Shoreditch: FARR Festival

Across the UK this summer we’ve already seen, and continue to see, a spate of large festivals with huge acts (many years past their best form) providing folk with hefty ticket prices to watch dinosaurs rock out their previous glories.

FARR Festival, then, in Newnham, Hertfordshire, provides a refreshing and far more intriguing platform upon which one can camp and dance the night away than the BBC-covered mega festivals such as Glastonbury and Reading/Leeds do. Its niche is electronic/dance music, particularly that which may be lesser-known than, say, the type appearing at Global Gathering or Creamfields, but it was to my welcome surprise that I also found an all-day reggae party on both the Friday and Saturday in ‘The Shack’ (one of a few smaller stage tents located up in the woods behind the main stage) as well as an eclectic array of bands and artists playing on the main stage.

FARR markets itself as a boutique festival. As such it is unfathomably cool, with an expansive setting as its backdrop, with gorgeous, rolling fields intersected by the campsite and main festival area. The crowd is a good mixture of young hipsters gagging to rave and hippies looking for something less commercialised than the aforementioned large festivals, every so often penetrated with a random thrill-seeker whose spirit defies their years. It has a pulse, a feeling that you are indeed part of something new and exciting, rather than catching the fat, greedy machine in its fame days.

It is a festival which doesn’t scream to be heard, but merely goes about what it’s doing, knowing that those with enough savvy to see it and know it will join and embrace and those whose intentions are merely to get pictures of themselves doing what they feel they should be for their personal social networking pages will never know of it.

Its organisation is its key. The campsite is based a short, slightly uphill walk from the main festival/performance area and the security are well-equipped yet easy-going and so never intrude on your fun. Each tent is the perfect distance from the next and, by the time sundown is upon you, you’re hoisted emotionally into a consciousness-altering state, leaving you feeling as if you’re somewhere between Hunter S. Thompson and George Harrison in their respective late 1960s pomps.

As soon as the dark hits the true fun starts. The music feels louder, more visceral, and the scene is swept across your eyes in a flurry. A mixture of ravers dressed in psychedelic clothing and hipsters in ‘80s Nikes pass you, as though you’ve been transported to a time which has no era, but is merely an amalgamation of all that is past, present and future. A wash comes over you and before you know it it’s gone and it’s morning and you’ve awoken, sweating in a tent looking at empty beer cans.

FARR is an experience. It has a mind of its own. A mind that’s altered and wayward, laced with an infectious charisma. It’s certainly more enticing than watching Keith Richards fumble his guitar parts on ‘Street Fighting Man’ and ‘Honky Tonk Blues’ or Mumford & Sons in general (though, I do concede, so are lampposts). At its end you don’t want to leave. You’ve suddenly gone from City dweller to manure smeller and find it perversely beautiful. If the 2014 vintage (its 5th anniversary) is nearly as pulsating I shall be happy, because I shall, for sure, be there. As will you if you’ve any sense.

Watch the FARR 2013 video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=felC-aDJQJY

Visit FARR’s website here http://farrfestival.co.uk/about-farrfest/