REVIEW: HOP FARM MUSIC FESTIVAL, KENT

If your idea of a music festival is 50,000 lairy teenagers rolling around in a muddy field with a grungy band playing on a stage several miles away, then where have you been for the last 20 years?

The days when festivals were exclusively a gathering place for rebellious students, anti-establishment hippies and folk with “alternative lifestyles” are long gone. Obviously those types are still catered for, but now there is another category – families with kids.

Nowadays festivals are an established part of mainstream British summer life and most of them are far more civilised affairs than they were. Anyone who has attended one of the major festivals will have a toilet-related horror story to tell but facilities have come a long way in the last 20 years. Flushing loos, hot showers and pre-erected tents are all commonplace at the 21st Century festival, unthinkable luxuries in the early 90s.

If you’re tempted to take your kids to a festival then, we’d suggest avoiding the big “corporate” events like T In The Park, V, Reading/Leeds or Download. Generally speaking these are geared towards young people and are not particularly child-friendly. Glastonbury is popular with some families and certainly lays on plenty for kids to do, but for me it’s far too sprawling an event to enjoy with your children.

Luckily there are dozens – if not hundreds – of alternative, more intimate, family-friendy gigs for you to choose from. And it’s not all indie rock and current chart hits. There are festivals showcasing bands from the 60s, 70s and 80s, dance, folk and world music. The best offer a mixture of all genres, with some additional entertainment added in for good measure.

Which brings us to the Hop Farm Music Festival in Kent. The first festival on the site was in 2008 with Neil Young headlining, and over the next few years it managed to attract more massive names, including Bob Dylan, Prince, the Eagles and Morrissey. But it was not without some controversy and 2013’s event was cancelled due to poor ticket sales.

The festival returned this year with new promoters, a smaller capacity and a Radio 2-friendy bill. And if that sounds like a criticism, it’s not meant to be. Bona-fide pop legends Ray Davies and Brian Wilson headlined on Friday and Saturday night respectively, and there was a supporting cast that featured the likes of 10CC, Paul Heaton, Echo And The Bunnymen, Caro Emerald and James Blunt. It might not be to everyone’s taste but there was certainly nothing about the line-up that was going to frighten the horses, and to be fair it was some of the “safe” acts that provided the most entertainment over the weekend.

I arrived with my nine-year-old son on Friday evening just as Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbot were beginning their main stage set. Car parking was a five minute walk from the site entrance and as we hauled our gear to the family campsite then pitched our tent, they provided a chirpy soundtrack of Housemartins, and Beautiful South hits, as well as some songs from their new album.

The family camping area was close to the main arena and that’s one of the big selling points of a smaller festival like this. Compared to the big events, at Hop Farm everything is pretty close at hand, meaning you don’t rack up the miles traipsing from one stage to another and there’s no long hike back to the tent at the end of the day.

Tent pitched and quick game of football played, we headed for the main stage in time for Echo And The Bunnymen. Frontman Ian McCulloch was as grumpy-sounding as ever but their set seemed to go down pretty well with the crowd, particularly early classics like The Killing Moon, Seven Seas, and The Cutter.

With darkness descending, Friday headliner Ray Davies took to the stage. For someone who sometimes has a bit of a grumpy reputation himself, he seemed on good form, encouraging audience participation during Where Have All The Good Times Gone, then gently mocking the crowd’s performance as being “as bad as England’s footballers”.

As you’d expect from one of pop’s greatest songwriters, the 45-minute set was filled with Kinks classics like Dedicated Follower of Fashion, Tired of Waiting, Sunny Afternoon (just as it started raining, irony fans), Lola and my personal highlight, an acoustic version of Days.

Davies’ voice may not be quite what it was but the songs have stood the test of time and the Hop Farm crowd loved it. The set finished with a raucous version of the Kinks’ first big hit, You Really Got Me. It was a truly cross-generational moment – with my nine-year-old singing along. It turns out he recognised it from the Alvin & The Chipmunks movie… hey, ho.

With the rain staying away and the sun managing to break through intermittently, Saturday was a day for exploring the festival site, starting with the vintage ferris wheel and helter skelter. A brief visit to the Jazz and Blues tent was followed by an even briefer visit to the comedy tent where the cussin’ and “adult themes” were just a little too much for young ears. But what it lacked in child-friendliness, it certainly made up for with the quality of the line-up, which included big names like Jo Brand, Rich Hall, Russell Kane and Josh Widdicombe.

Luckily the Kidz Area offered plenty of age-appropriate entertainment to keep youngsters amused, including a pirate themed activities, a craft tent, circus equipment and more vintage fairground rides. Overall we found Hop Farm to be a safe, friendly festival, where kids of all ages had lots to do and plenty of open space to burn off excess energy.

Back on the main stage, the Noisettes did their best to get the early afternoon crowd in the mood, with singer Shingai Shoniwa performing much of the set perched on the edge of the crowd barrier. Next up were the The Feeling, whose brand of Dermont O’Leary-friendly, BRIT School, indie-lite is really not my thing. It was surprising how many of their songs I recognised though. And I did feel a bit rotten about my snarky tweets about their cover version of Blur’s Parklife, when lead singer Dan Gillespie Sells and his extended family plonked themselves down beside us in the Kids Zone later. He seemed a bloody nice bloke.

Later on the main stage, another Radio 2 favourite, Dutch retro-swinger Caro Emerald, really captured the crowd’s imagination with her jazz-tinged, big band tunes. She was followed by James Blunt, whose inexplicable popularity meant he attracted the biggest audience of the day. To give him his due, Blunt doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, which is more than can be said for some of the fans who were crooning along to his better-known hits, tears in their eyes. In a somewhat surreal turn of events, he also did a spot of crowd-surfing at one point. AND NO-ONE LET HIM FALL TO THE GROUND. If ever there was proof that festival audiences have changed, this was it. To be honest it was a dreary way to spend 45-minutes, but I clearly wasn’t the target audience and I’ll happily admit I appeared to be in the minority.

There then followed a brief, but strangely captivating, interlude involving an acrobat hanging from a giant hot-air balloon while floating above the crowd to a soundtrack of weird new age music. All very odd, but enjoyable in its own way.

Then came the moment we’d all been waiting for. Or at least I had. Brian Wilson, song-writer and founder member of the Beach Boys and the creative brains behind some of the most inventive and life-affirming pop music ever produced. Frankly, they could have wheeled a record player onto the stage, plugged it into the sound system and stuck on a vinyl copy of The Beach Boys’ 20 Golden Greats and I’d have been happy.

If I’m honest it didn’t start well. With Wilson sat behind his piano in the centre of the stage, fellow band founder Al Jardine took the vocal lead, opening the set with California Girls, one of my least favourite Beach Boys songs. Wilson looked a bit lost – and Jardine was doing a good impression of being his carer, taking him out for one last night on the town before sending packing him off to the care home.

The set took a while to get going, with a slightly cabaret feel to the whole thing. It wasn’t until Little Deuce Coupe and then a rollicking version of Cottonfields (one of the least Beach Boys-y songs that they recorded) that it really started to pick up. And by the time they played the brilliant Heroes And Villains and Darlin’ (songs number 12 and 13) Wilson had perked up and seemed to be enjoying himself.

From that point on it was just awe-inspiring. Musically the band was excellent and the vocal harmonies as impressive as anything the original Beach Boys produced. The greatest moment for me was when, with delicious understatement, Wilson introduced the next song as “One of the better ones I’ve written”. He proceeded to play God Only Knows – probably one of the Top 10 pop songs of all time. It was followed by a note-perfect version of Good Vibrations that would have blown the roof off, if we weren’t out in the Kent countryside.

The whole thing climaxed with a crowd-pleasing blitz of singalong hits: Help Me Rhonda, I Get Around , Barbara Ann, Fun, Fun, Fun and Surfin’ USA. By the end they were onstage for an hour and a half and rattled through almost 30 songs, most of which were written by Wilson.

Most songwriters would have been happy to have written just one tune approaching his standard in their lifetime. And when you consider how many  great Wilson songs they didn’t perform, you can see why he is fully deserving of the living legend title.

With immaculate timing, as the show came to an end, the heavens opened. But it really didn’t matter. As frail as he was, Wilson, with the help of Jardine and the band, had added a little Californian sunshine into our lives. It was the perfect end to a great two days of festavalling.