All Tomorrow’s Parties
All Tomorrow’s Parties: the festival that’s so good they made a film out of it…
Flicking through breakfast TV the other day, hovering over an episode of Frasier and moving on (having seen it countless times already), we inevitably ended up skipping between BBC Breakfast and whatever the Sky variant is called. The BBC is still talking economic downturn so, scared, we switch to the British Sky Broadcasting monolith.
Already disappointed with ourselves, we’re further aghast to see and hear that Jabba the Hut of the news desk that is Eamonn Holmes prattling on about Glastonbury Festival. Or ‘Glasto’ as it is now almost universally known. Reason being, the Rolling Stones had just confirmed to play 2013’s festival, and along with Mumford & Sons and Arctic Monkeys, are this year’s Pyramid Stage (the main stage) headliners.
Great, we think to ourselves, there remains absolutely no need to consider a return to the Eavis’s Worthy Farm. Four Glastonbury Festivals have been more than enough to convince us that a place attracting hipster parents carting round kids with biblical names, and goons called Jez and Tristram, there for the ‘magical experience’, is not where we wish to spend any time at all. That the line up of bands no longer entices either is a godsend frankly.
But, you’re probably asking by now, where are we going with this quasi-rant? The point is, we think, something has probably been irrevocably lost from any festival’s ‘magic’ (or whatever you wanna call it) when that sorry, sadly irrelevant bunch, are your marquee acts, and sourcing and targeting of ever more affluent demographics is not only the means by which the thing is sustained but is almost the reason it exists – call us idealists, but there’s something the wrong way round there.
Thank the music gods then that it mustn’t always be this way; believe it or not, there are other options out there that include few blockbuster names yet exponentially better line-ups. How can this be? Step forward All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP for short). Founded by Barry Hogan in 1999 for many of the reasons above, ATP moved away from models with an emphasis on the corporate, and toward something of a more intimate, frequently cozy, affair.
Over the past decade or so, we’ve seen the likes of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Pavement, Battles, Four Tet, The Breeders and Boredoms (to name a few) at various ATP’s, and never walked away disappointed. Nor did we end up sharing floor space with cow pats or getting rained on for three days straight, hosted as it is by Camber Sands Pontins (previously Mine Head Butlins). Plus, there’s always the chance you could bump into the guys you just saw on stage (we have a friend who, years on, is still mortified after drunkenly chatting up the Fiery Furnaces singer Eleanor Friedberger).
You don’t have to take our word for it though, as next week FACT screen the movie which marked the festival’s 10th anniversary: described as “a semi-found multimedia bricolage shot by over two hundred filmmakers, fans and musicians over the festival’s recent history”, it serves not just as great introduction, but also as a piece of nostalgia (accentuated by its use in part of Super 8 footage) and cultural artefact all rolled into one. Think of it as a mash-up of what’s on offer at a typical ATP, which manages to evoke a fuzzy mixture of music and family beach holidays.
One thing’s for sure, if you want to swerve the big daddies of the festival circuit this year, the All Tomorrow’s Parties film is a decent place to start your research. That the whole shebang is named after the Velvet Underground track is a wonderful extra.
