LATE REVIEW: Boardmasters Festival 2017

Howdy ladies and gents, today I am going to talk to you about the Boardmasters Festival that went down in Newquay over the past weekend. I was actually meant to write about this on Monday, but because the weekend was so long and I had to work soon after I just put it off. But I had to at least do some kind of review for it on the blog so here I am. 🙂

So yeah after the longest 9-10 hour journey ever via coach to get down to Newquay I got into the festival on Saturday morning with my friend and it was a lovely area. Even before the various stages were housed by the different artists, there was a lot to see, do and buy. With several stands for buying food, merchandise, and loads of other stuff, and then there were the different sound stages just blaring out music, benched areas for sitting and of course numerous toilet areas too. I just appreciated how well everything was placed in just the right area and there was a nice variety in the food you could eat, the places to chill, the places to go to the loo and a good distance between stages with the various musicians so the sound did overlap/overshadow each other.

When it comes to the musical acts I’m not gonna I only knew about 3 or 4 acts, everyone else was new to me. And do a degree I feel bad because about 90% of them were really good to bloody incredible. But at the same time, I liked coming into this thing completely blank as I had no expectations so to be blown away and discover all this music I didn’t know I would love was a magical feeling.

Firstly there was Kioko which my friend and I found while randomly walking around and their sound caught our immediately with their song “Deadly Roots”, and from there the rest of their set was just a delightfully cool and addictive. Next major act of interest was Will Heard, I have never heard of this guy, but he had such a lovely voice and a nice sense of humour, he also had a wonderful band and backing vocalists, and together they delivered an incredible session which was great for chilling and jamming. Heard and his people really brought the main stage alive. There was a nice variety of Heard’s music and it got a lot of people dancing, me included and it was so much fun. The next musician to catch me by surprise was Laura Mvula, she had such a beautiful voice and an incredibly engaging presence through her music and charisma, her music really touched the soul and like my friend said, it sounds like her music belongs on film soundtrack like maybe the upcoming live action Lion King film that Disney is doing, she’s that good. 🙂

Next highlight of the day for me was Lethal Bizzle, now I knew Bizzle would do well, but I had no clue it would be nearly as fun as it turned out. Besides one other act, Bizzle had drawn in the most people to the main stage area and I was in the middle of that when it all kicked off. Bizzle stepped on stage and asked the crowd to start up some mosh pits and what followed was a chaotic mess of energy, excitement and a loss of items from the crowd. I had the best time ever, but trying to avoid, the moshing, getting hit in the face and being shoved around left, right and centre was crazy. Bizzle had a great selection of all of his most popular material and some new material too and everyone had a great time, whether it was “Dude”, “Rari WorkOut”, “The Drop” or “Pow 2011” it was damn good, but of course “Fester Skank” was the highlight, that was just incredible, oh and can I just say I’ve never seen people so willing to throw shoes, shirts and hoodies out up in the air until that concert haha. And after that was The Vaccines, a band I’ve heard but never really listened to and their material was pretty good and a lot of the crowd going for sure.

And finally to close off the day on the main stage Jamiroquai came and bloody killed it. I saw them once before in Guilford at the Magic Summer Live Festival 3 years ago, so I knew how good they’d be live, but considering the awesome material that the band have crafted with Automaton I knew they’d have some awesome new live material and they did not disappoint. They started out with the opening track from their latest album, Shake It On which was a lovely way to get everybody jamming, but when they went straight into “Little L” I lost my mind. 😛 We also had the gorgeous sounds of “Automaton”, “Dr Buzz”, “Cloud 9” and some of the classic jams like “Cosmic Girl”, “Canned Heat”, “Love Foolosophy” and sexy new arrangement of “Emergency on Planet Earth”, to some unexpected jams like “The Kids” and “Supersonic”, the latter of which is one of my absolute favourite songs to chill to, and the fact they used it to finish out the concert was the icing on the cake for me.

So to conclude the Saturday session I had at the Boardmasters Festival was hella fun and it was totally worth the trip with a great selection of artists, a great venue and a good sense of organisation too. I would totally recommend it if you’ve never been. 🙂