All Tomorrow's Parties

All Tomorrow's Parties is the king of indie festivals. I cannot say enough good things about this festival. But beware, it is not for people who are not there for the music.

This is a small festival - 2,500 tickets sold - spread across two weekends. We went weekend two. This year it was themed "United Sounds of ATP" and the organizers got a selection of top American indie bands to each curate a day. So Friday was curated by Dinosaur Jr. and they invited the likes of Broken Social Scene, Teenage Fanclub, The Bevis Frond, Dead Meadow, Herman Dune, etc. Saturday was curated by Sleater Kinney who asked The Gossip, the 1990's, the Fiery Furnaces, Joanna Newsom, etc. Sunday, the best day of festival bands ever in the history of time saw The Shins invite Destroyer, The Decemberists, the New Pornographers, the Black Keys and Electrelane, amongst others. The previous weekend had seen days curated by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Devendra Banhart.

The people who go to this festival are hardcore indie fans who want to hear unusual bands, bands nobody's heard of, strange and new things. This year's big draws seemed to be Herman Dune, Lightning Bolt and the Boredoms. There are also the likes of indie karaoke and an indie music pub quiz which stumped us - and we're usually the knowledgeable ones in the room. The people who attend are a bit older than your normal festival goers, and less intent on drink and drugs and partying all night than on watching the bands. There was a lot of drinking going on, but it was on the whole a polite and well-behaved crowd, we managed to sleep at night with minimal noise and people were really friendly in the crowds. There was little of the usual pushing and elbowing going on.

While there were a few bad time clashes - even The Decemberists were annoyed they were on at the same time as Electrelane, it was only really bad for myself because I am very small and in a few cases it was a choice of being able to hear not see parts of sets from bands that I love love love (e.g. The New Pornographers and The Shins) or getting to where I could see a whole set by one band (that would be The Shins!).

The whole event took place at the Pontins holiday camp at Camber Sands, and while the facilities were cleaner and nicer than at a usual festival since we were in chalets and the venues were all indoors in bars (well 2 rooms, one small, one larger), I would recommend to anyone thinking of going to bring as much food as you can as the catering on offer was utterly and completely vile and worse than the usual festival fare, believe it or not. It was also horribly overpriced - a bag of crisps was £0.60 and a plate of fish and chips was £4.95.

On the whole this was a really special festival and I am led to believe that All Tomorrow's Parties is like this pretty much every time they put one on (there's another coming up in December entitled "The Nightmare Before Christmas" curated by Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop at a Butlins in Somerset). Rather than being full of people who go cause it's trendy to go to festivals and blaggers and London glitterati who all want to be backstage and getting VIP treatment, the bands were wandering around in the bars and the venues watching each other and chatting to people as the people there were there to hear some music and the bands were there watching their friends and it was loads of people with a similar purpose.

So yeah, if you like your indie music then go to this festival cause it's ace!