We Out Here Festival, Wimborne St Giles in Dorset, August 20-23
HEADING into the Love Dancin’ tent at We Out Here, Giles Peterson’s beautiful festival in the gentle folds of the Dorset countryside, there was a commotion going on.
On stage was vocalist Vanessa Freeman with Mancunian MC Equasi: they were adding lyrics over DJ Mr Scruff and DJ Spinna, who were laying down a selection of funk-soaked dance beats.
No wonder there was a freak out, dance off going on: Freeman – a singer from NW5 – has the soaring vocals of a soul angel, and her scatting over the Mr Scruff classic Get A Move On was utterly brilliant.
It felt like a seminal festival moment, and we had only been on site for about an hour.
We Out Here is clearly an event for discerning festival-goers. Events have become genre-orientated from our culture tribes – Reading for the post-GCSE crowd, Boomtown for Drum and Bass freaks, Houghton for the house heads… We Out Here feels like it’s for the adults, people who no longer aim to spend a weekend having their minds altered and coming home Monday prepared to feel terrible, but just want to experience pure musical joy.
Vanessa Freeman
In a way, it feels a little like The Womad Festival, which always offers you the chance to discover something you didn’t know you needed in your life but are so super-happy to come home after a weekend with a new band to stick on the stereo.
We Out Here manages to do a similar trick, but whereas Womad has always felt like a place where if you fancy raving to four-to-the-floor dance music, you’ll need to bring a speaker for your tent when the sound stages stop, We Out Here provides ample opportunity is to get down into the early hours.
It is hardly surprising: Giles Peterson is a DJ who has built a following on crate digging, finding those bits of audio gold that make the discerning listener sit up and take note. We Out Here is the embodiment of flicking through his record collection and bringing the acts to life.
Love Dancin’ was also host to a Trojan Sound System session, featuring Nightmares On Wax and Hopepa from Fat Freddy’s Drop: acts who are known for heavy sub bass, the music could be felt as well as heard.
Due to the number of sound stages across the event, some systems were played at a level where you could converse with your neighbour. As a stone deaf, hearing-aid wearer, I found myself creeping closer and closer to speaker stacks to get the full effect. Trojan really didn’t disappoint when it came to feeling the sound waves.
DJ Spinna
After grooving to Vanessa Freeman – she later appeared with her crew, the all-female Eves Drop Collective featuring Colleen Cosmo Murphy in the On Rotation arena – a scoot round other venues showed Love Dancin’ was not the only place where things were going off.
The Bowl played host to reggae selectors Channel One and then Iration Steppas: Steppas are such a beguiling stage show, their rat-a-tat lyricism relentless. They left their fans exhausted but blissed.
More reggae was served up on Saturday afternoon by The Scientist – his live dub felt the perfect warm up for an evening that upped the BPMs significantly, via DJ and producer Four Tet.
The main stage boasted newer names, a clash to the more heritage-style acts the festival’s older crowds loved for the memories of mis-spent past times.
Thundercat, the Grammy-winning bassist and singer Stephen Bruner was another act who drew people towards him and hypnotised with a set that referenced hip hop, reggae, soul and disco and gave us some tunes from his new album Distracted, playing them live for the first time.
Later, Chicago RnB man Peven Everett explored how fast and then how slow he could play music and keep a crowd with him (the answer: he could do what he liked, with a voice so crystal clear and a backing band who looked like the offsprings of Funckadelica and Parliament).
A word about the site: the usual festival stuff applies– a big main stage, smaller venues in stretch tents. Despite selling out and increasing the capacity by 3,000 this year, there is just so much space to chill out. At no point did it feel crowded, and the lack of mobile phone coverage did not hamper meeting your mates.
It just did not feel like the chaos you usually associate with thousands of music fans coming together to get down for three days.
Dotted about are the usual festival traders offering food truck grub and booze. They included the Cranbourne Chase Cider Bar – delicious scrumpy made about half a mile from where it was served up. I’m a fan of the dry stuff, and their dry cider is the driest, wet thing I have ever tasted. It fuelled a perfect weekend.
Like all of We Out Here, it was simply delicious.
https://weoutherefestival.com/
