Having celebrated its 10th anniversary last year and now embarking on its second decade of existence, Latitude Festival continues to go from strength to strength, reinforcing its status as the ‘biggest small festival’ in Britain. Unlike all of the country’s major festivals (Glasto, Reading & Leeds, T In The Park) the vibe at Suffolk’s Henham Park is very much more chilled, family-friendly… middle class, in short. Wine-tasting, poetry and experimental theatre comfortably exists alongside bands, stage-diving and the more traditional festival pursuits. Facilities are cleaner, queues for everything are shorter and more organised, stewards actually know the answers to questions you ask, and there’s even a “charity concierge” system in place, where you can pay £5 to somebody in a purple uniform to queue for drinks on your behalf.
Then again, with 25,000 people in attendance max, Latitude is a small enough scale on which such organisation can actually work effectively. The pleasures of which were underscored by some glorious weather and a total absence of mud (yay!). The merest hint of rain on Friday evening soon gave way to the breaking heat wave that Britain had basked in and sweated through this last week. Granted, this transformed our tent into a blast furnace by 8am and made sleeping off hangovers all but impossible, but the energy saved by not having to trudge through glue-like mud for hours off-set that.
In terms of the bands it attracts, Latitude has long been able to punch well above its weight, memorably landing the iconic German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk three years ago. But it’s really on the smaller stages that Latitude succeeds, targeting the kinds of bands from North America and Europe that don’t often play in the UK and who normally get column inches in the likes of Pitchfork and other left-field publications.
Continue reading: Latitude Festival 2016 - Live Review
Mumford & Sons are curating the Saturday at Latitude 2017
