Festival Preview: Boomtown Fair: Making The Abnormal Normal
Kirsty Black | 8th July 2015
Photo Credit: Facebook
Boomtown fair is nearly upon us. On August 13th the pop-up city opens its gates for a new wave of hippies and new agers to gather for a weekend of musical variation from reggae and roots, to electro-swing and techno. The amazing thing about this festival is the sheer spectacle of the event. So many people seem to speak about the endless experiences on offer and the festival’s ability to ‘make the abnormal normal’. The festival’s grounds, comprised of nine districts, allows its ‘citizens’ to live in and amongst the city for 3 days. I will be making my first steps into Boomtown Fair this August, and after doing my research, I feel as though they are just as excited to welcome me in as I am to make my weekend residency there.
What I love about this festival, is the way they follow each year on from the last one, each year is a ‘chapter’ rather than just another year with another set of acts. You can go in to this festival with a vast amount of knowledge on its fictional history and storylines, it’s a whole other world of ‘making the impossible possible’. The mode of transport around the city is a magic carpet, you can get married or even buried, you can experience every major life event in three days.
Boomtown is the perfect place to go to and broaden your musical horizons, with each district a completely different theme. As long as you want to dance, you can work your way around so many genres of music that some big name festivals just don’t seem to offer. Electro- swing, for example, is a slowly growing genre, bringing the very best of the 20s, 30s and 40s up to the new age of electronic music, combining the old and the new to create the perfect balance for feel-good music that makes it hard to stay still throughout. One member of the line-up to listen to is Don Johnston, after seeing him on the list of acts at Boomtown Fair; it only took me listening to a few of his tracks to get hooked. His music has such a classic vibe, yet feels so new, the world needs to open its eyes to this growing scene of electro-swing, and Boomtown does a grand job of doing so.
Boomtown offers such an eclectic mix of new music, there isn’t anyone that I wouldn’t advise to give it a go, and I am certainly excited to be dipping my toes in. My advice would be to get there before it becomes much more popular and tickets turn into to gold dust.