I was a little worried about how this would pan out. We've been camping with our kids before and we've even taken them to a festival for a day (Summer Sundae in Leicester), but how would they cope with four days at Latitude? My fears were heightened by the weather forecast for the weekend. It looked like a lot of rain was coming our way
So we packed wellies and raincoats, sun cream and sun hats and set off to see what the weekend would throw at us. - I don't want to sound too negative here; I was really looking forward to going and really couldn't wait. I just didn't know how our children would cope with it.
We arrived on the Thursday at about 2PM and after a bit of a trek from the car park made our way into the family campsite. There was loads of space and we quickly found a great spot near enough to the loos (but not too near!) We set up our tent and saved a spot for our friends who were arriving a couple of hours later. This was easy and though the campsite did fill up a bit it was nothing compared to my previous experience at Glastonbury where every available patch of ground ends up with a tent on it. We had brought quite a bit of camping gear. Thankfully, there were useful trolleys for hire at £10 for 1.5 hours and, considering I had three journeys lugging gear from our car, I didn't resent paying for these.
Once our friends had arrived and set-up their tent we wondered down to the bottom of the field. There was a Ferris wheel and swing boat rides, only £1 a go, plus loads of free activities for children. Sticker art, wool art/weaving and a theatre workshop for kids, which reminded me of 'Legs Akimbo' from the League Of Gentlemen. I initially thought this was the Children's Area of the festival. It was only when I saw the queue starting to form at the end of the field that I realised this was all just part of the Family Camping Field and we hadn't even entered the main site yet.
We joined the queue as they opened up the route to the main site and wondered past security and along a woodland path. The Children's Area was the first part we saw and that was dominated by a huge helter-skelter, £1 a go, which of course all the children wanted to go on. We realised this was going to be an issue every time we passed one of these rides and we had to start saying 'no' or we would go through our money very quickly. Thankfully there was so much more to see and do the children were quickly distracted. We ventured out of the Children’s Area and wondered over to the Poetry Tent.
There is a lot of spoken word performance at Latitude, as well as theatre and dance, and it was the first time I had attended a festival that gave so much dedicated space to non-music events. This is great and my wife and kids spent quite a bit of time in the Literature and Poetry tents. I have to say I would much prefer to watch a band whilst drinking a beer, so most of this isn’t a big pull for me. The Poetry and Literature tents were packed, sometimes with queues outside, so my opinion is certainly not shared by many of my fellow festivalgoers. The line-up of speakers was very good as well: Aoife Mannix the poet read extracts of her work and John Cooper Clarke headlined on the Sunday night. There was a chance for ladies to fawn over Professor Brian Cox with a recording of The Infinite Monkey Cage and Marcus Brigstocke performing a live version of The Early Edition - all of which I completely missed but I would have liked to have seen.
The non-musical highlight of the weekend for me was watching The Theatrical Olympiad by And Remember…. We Care Productions as various members of the audience had to compete for gold, silver and bronze medals for their performance of extracts from Shakespeare. Five and six year old girls had to angrily read an extract from Coriolanus and middle-aged men had to read an extract of Kate’s part from Taming Of The Shrew. I particularly like the very silly opening dance with the Olympic rings and the hilariously pompous theatrical manner adopted by Christopher Brand in his performance.
I did see quite a bit of music; on Friday First Aid Kit were fantastic, Kurt Vile was very good and Metronomy were great. We saw some of Bon Iver but not being that fussed by him we left early.
On Saturday Baxter Dury was a little dull, Django Django were great, but could have done with being on a bigger stage and Elbow were fantastic headlining. We even had a firework display as their set came to a climax.
On Sunday we saw Rufus Wainwright, who was great, Alabama Shakes, who were great and Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, who were OK. I then left after watching the first couple of Simple Minds songs, as I’m not that bothered (my wife stayed and loved it), to see Battles. I really like Battles and when they finally played they were fantastic but they had loads of sound problems and were delayed in starting by about thirty minutes. Their song ‘Atlas’ was particularly good. I then returned to watch some of Bat For Lashes and catch up with my family. They went to wonder back to the tent while I went back over to the I Arena to watch Slow Club who were really good. Paul Weller Headlined and was essentially OK - except for all the Jam songs he played which were amazing. He played four of them, ‘Start’, ‘In The City’, ‘A Town Called Malice’ and encored with ‘Eton Rifles’. If he had just played Jam songs he would have stolen the show.
I didn’t see as much as I would have without our children in tow but it was great to take them and to become involved in the festival from their point of view. The workshops making things, the experimental sound tent and the fantastic Greenpeace tree-net climbing area were particular favourites. I also liked the fact that we got to enjoy the festival experience as a family. It did rain, but mostly at night and although there was mud, especially on the busy tracks, there were still lots of grass to sit on when the sun came out on Sunday. As long as you take some wellies and a raincoat you’ll be fine.
My only criticisms are:
The price of the food. Most meals are around £7; which, if you are feeding four, mounts-up quite quickly. Most stalls did do children’s portions for around £4 but they didn’t advertise this and it was only because we asked that we were able to order them.
The other thing is the fact that you can’t take your own booze in. It is a bit of a pain. They were searching a few people and it would be a bit of a nightmare to try and smuggle in some beer and have it confiscated. I’m used to Glastonbury where you can take in as much as you need. We always still buy beers there as well but it just adds to the atmosphere of freedom if you don’t feel like you’re being policed. There is also the deposit system for the cups; you pay a £3 deposit for a plastic cup, which you get back when you hand it in. This does cut down on litter so is a good idea from that point of view but it makes it hard to buy a round for your friends.
The fact that the Horrors clashed with Elbow, but you can’t have everything.
All in all a very enjoyable experience and I think we will go again next year. I liked the fact that there was enough going on for it to seem like there was always something to do without it being the size of Glastonbury. The woods are a lot of fun to wonder through at night and stumble on a bizarre performance or DJ set and thankfully I got the chance to do that on the Saturday night.
Next time I might even listen to some poetry, but I’m not making any promises.