The Big Chill Festival

The Big Chill festival was as its title overtly suggested by day provided a blissful arena for relaxing in the picturesque grounds of Eastnor castle.

Spots of chill heaven included Lazy land, and other plethora of interactive art forms to explore to cater for any individuals idea of relaxing, from skanking to dancehall to a spot of Shakespeare re-enactment The Big Chill had it all.

Jack’s top picks included recreating a scene from Robin Hood with the team from Videopia, a travelling ‘eurodisney on wheels’ who recreate all the classic’s with amateur volunteers from members of the public, Jack’s happened to be Robin Hood, and we thoroughly enjoyed our ten minutes on the silver screen.

There is many an interesting thing to look at when clomping through the festival site in your muddy Hunters. Things that caught Jacks eye include David Shrigley’s art installation which includes a placard entitled ‘ants have sex in your beer’. Banksy contribution stirred some environmental emotion using blindfolded Jungle Book characters lining up for execution to demonstrate the rapid deforestation of rainforests.

Performance highlights included the fantastic Patrick Wolf, jumping from key board to piano to guitar to microphone all throughout each song for the whole set, what a talented man. He was sporting a rather fantastic black and silver jumpsuit to boot, talented and on trend, Mr Wolfe we salute you.

Headliner’s The Massive attack gave a an equally sizeable performance, accompanied by some shockingly flashing statistics about just how many thousands of bombs have been let of in Afghanistan to emphasize cases of human error in the world, complimenting the Big Chill’s environmental ethos. Constant green guilt trips are visible all over the festival grounds, electronic signs reading slogans such as, ‘Dont Leave anything behind’ manifest in your mind so when it came to packing away Jack’s tent we felt more than obliged not to leave our post festival mess to the plastic gloves of the Oxfam volunteers.

Other top performers include; Layo and Bushwaker who kept us dancing till the early hours, Redlight and Breakage, all performing in the Starburst area, which was illuminated by glowing cubic towers, apparently reminiscent of Stone Henge.

Headliner MIA gave the best performance of the weekend, packing a set with lasers, MC’s, energetic bumping and grinding, and even mingling with the audience. Kicking of her set with classic Purple Haze, and raving consistently to new electro dance classics produced by ex boyf hubby Diplo, sadly her set became sabotaged at the climax. Prompted by the songstress’s invitation to the audience to join her on stage, security buckled under the force of fans preventing her from even singing the opening lines of Paper Planes, which spoilt the set slightly.

All in all Jack found Big Chill a festival which held such vast creative scope for its visitors, we could not fault it one bit. Even the toilets didn’t run out of toilet paper the whole weekend, and if you were caught short then a Guardian vendor was only a short walk away.