Boomtown Festival has returned once again to the Matterley Bowl, and for those of you who’ve attended in recent years—well—it hasn’t bloody changed much.
It’s still a feast for the senses, still massive and chaotic, with more production and art than the rest of the industry combined, and still an absolute monster of a party festival. And with Glastonbury 2024 getting widely slated as rubbish, Boomtown now probably has the best damn lineup in the UK.
Yes, this was the first year that children were officially banned, but honestly, I rarely saw kids in the city anyway. Boomtown is one of the most free-spirited, wild places on Earth, and with a riotous party atmosphere that occasionally gets a bit edgy, I honestly wouldn’t feel comfortable dragging a kid around this madness.
From a production and visual standpoint, Boomtown Festival is fucking impressive. There are nearly 100,000 people on-site, yet it somehow feels compact—crossing it might take the best part of an hour, but if you camp near your preferred areas, you’ll be where you need to be in less than 20 minutes.
The toilets are mostly nice, airy composters rather than those claustrophobic porta-shitholes, which makes them generally lighter and more pleasant. You might see the occasional long wait at peak times, but if you’re smart about it (avoid mornings or just before the headliner), you should be in and out quickly enough.
Inside the bowl, you’ll find the city of Boomtown, the heart of the festival and arguably the UK’s alternative creative scene. It’s made up of six districts, each with its own unique artistic style, philosophy, and music genres. The city is an utterly incredible structure of plywood, paint, and fabric, covered in over a decade’s worth of artistic detail.
In Old Town, you genuinely feel like you’re in a medieval huddle of tight streets, while the post-apocalyptic realm of Area 404 brings to life settings that usually only exist in TV and video games. Botanica is truly beautiful, full of art deco structures covered in enormous amounts of plant life. Meanwhile, Let’sbee Avenue is so visually busy you could spend a whole day just gawking without even interacting with anyone.
The only part of the festival I didn’t enjoy was Metropolis. A stark, liminal wasteland of modernist blue blocks, it felt out of place compared to the rest of the city and gave me a strong sense that I didn’t want to be there. It’s like the bastard child of brutalism and minimalism had a hangover and puked on the landscape.
Beyond the artistic environment, the festival is full of walkabout shows, actors playing their district roles, and all sorts of other oddball attractions. While each show or performance is impressive on its own, together they create a tapestry that truly brings the city to life.
What makes it truly amazing, though, is the deeper narrative behind much of the theatre. If you’re up for it, you can dive right into this twisted storyline. While starting and fully completing the Boomtown story can be time-consuming and frustrating as hell, it’s also an absolutely incredible and unique experience—one I believe is unmatched anywhere in the world.
Musically, the festival is untouchable. With a budget and negotiating power that rivals the biggest festivals, Boomtown seems to have no limits. This year, we saw the triumphant return of Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley, a DJ set from Pendulum, and upstart punk legends Soft Play, among many other massive names.
Now, normally saying a festival is unmatched would be subjective—I’d be saying it because I like the type of music they book. But with Boomtown, that’s not really the case. There’s something for everyone. If you can’t find at least one act you love, you’re either deaf or dead inside.
On the flip side, that also means that a lot of it won’t be for you. For example, I think Origin, the largest stage at the festival, is a steaming pile of shite. It plays boring music in a visually impressive but atmospherically dead—or worse, actively unpleasant—environment. The only thing it’s good for, in my opinion, is attracting the “wrong sort” away from the rest of the festival. Look out into the crowd, and you’ll see an ocean of fast fashion, shirtless lads in bucket hats, and absolutely fuck all that interests me.
But, for whatever reason, people flock there. Tens of thousands choose to spend their nights at Origin, and while I don’t get it, for them, its presence enhances the festival. Hell, I even occasionally enjoy chatting with the “normies,” though in swarms of thousands, they do slightly scare me.
For me, it’s the fact that Boomtown has quite possibly the best folk-punk lineup in the UK that makes me love it. Headlined by Celtic punk legends Flogging Molly, who are by far the best in their genre, various tiny venues in Old Town—my favourite part of the festival—offered an enormous amount of what I crave.
Another folk-punk highlight was the Old Time Sailors, who arrived late but still delivered a two-hour set in the Shamrock Tavern, featuring a mix of traditional songs, Dreadnoughts covers, and their unique takes on rock standards.
The Shamrock, offering a mix of trad, folk, and folk-punk, probably edged out Fools Leap and Hanger 161 as my favourite venue this year. Featuring bands like FFTP (Fist Fuck the Pope/Police/Freedom for the Travelling People) and artists like Deja Vu, who delivered the dirtiest folk set you’ve ever heard, Boomtown’s only Guinness bar really delivered.
Typically my favourite stage, Fools Leap didn’t grab me as much as usual this year, likely because I didn’t spend as much time there as I’d like. Still, the Old Town Hub offered by far the best atmosphere anywhere in Boomtown—you could convince me it was the main stage for an amazing 1,500-capacity event! Highlights from the Fools Leap included Chainska Brassika, performing their tenth Boomtown gig with aplomb. Their loud, intense ska, complete with a great horn section, had the crowd throwing themselves onto the dancefloor, moving and shaking like they had the medieval dancing plague.
Baltic Balkan, offering Balkan beats from Lithuania, continued the fun at Fools Leap. Although they’re theoretically a folk act, the result is far more ravey. Festival DJ legend Chris Tofu also played a set of remixed rock classics, which were surprisingly popular in the “folk” area.
Closing the stage was SPOINK, a live techno outfit from France who improvised all their sets. Hyper-energetic, they were the ideal act for their slot—an absolute fucking blast.
Normally, I don’t see much at Buskers Wharf, located in the middle of Old Town, but this year was different. The Trouble Notes, playing a mix of folk-pop covers and originals, and Clusterfolk, delivering incredibly lively trad, created two wonderful dancefloors that kept me firmly rooted there—far better than anything outside Old Town at the time.
Moving on to Area 404 and Boomtown’s premier punk venue, Hanger 161, run by Cambridge-based punk promotions collective Last Gang in Town, I witnessed one of the best sets of the festival. 8Kalacas delivered a madcap mix of ska, punk, metal, and cumbia they call skacore. Starting with a small crowd, people kept coming in, checking it out, and staying, swelling the friendly but fast mosh pit that quickly formed. Many new converts left convinced that 8Kalacas was their Boomtown highlight.
Another standout band at 161 was the Inner Terrestrials. About as punk as you can get, they fuse ska with heavy punk and strong themes of social and economic justice, travellers’ rights, and anti-fascism. Regulars on the UK festival scene, their inclusion on the lineup did a lot towards making Boomtown feel, at least aesthetically, like a “real independent festival”.
Hanger 161 also delivered new discoveries, like The Baby Seals—an intelligent young punk band who were funny and talented in equal measure. Keep your eye on them.
Beyond Flogging Molly, the Engine House, Boomtown’s main rock stage, also hosted other fantastic bands. Dubioza Kolektiv, a group of musical nutjobs from Bosnia, delivered a smashing round of Balkan mayhem, with elements from many festival music genres thrown together in a riot of fun.
“Fun” was the watchword for what I saw on that stage. Following them, gypsy-ska fusion band Caravan Palace took the stage. Hailing from Paris, they delivered a wild set incorporating electro elements into a really enjoyable show. Headlining that day, the Dub Pistols showed why they are festival legends. Playing to a younger-than-usual crowd, many of whom hadn’t seen a Dub Pistols gig before, they kept the energy up from Caravan Palace and Dubioza, adding their own British twist to the silliness of the night.
So, now’s the point where you get to judge my taste in music—beyond the venues I listed, I think I saw two other musical acts: Pete & Bas, bringing their old man grime, and Damian Marley, both on Grand Central—supposedly the festival’s second stage.
While I like both Pete & Bas and Damian Marley, I found both their sets slightly disappointing compared to what I’d seen elsewhere. Maybe the stage was too big, or maybe there were just too many people for my liking—either way, the atmosphere and energy just wasn’t there.
Now, while I’ve spent nearly 1,800 words raving about how good Boomtown is, it’s not perfect and has a few key problems.
First, it’s inherently a capitalist endeavour. With 18% owned by Live Nation and existing in a capitalist society, the festival has to make money. While the tickets, at just over £300, are good value for what the festival offers, they absolutely get you on the extras. They use a completely unnecessary cashless wristband system (which I’ve successfully boycotted for two years running), and drinks, food, and merchandise are expensive as hell. While food prices are merely bad, £7.50 for a can of beer is a fucking robbery.If you have time, and not money, going all out at Boomtown is a terrible decision. You’d be much better off going to two, or even three fantastic smaller indepedent festivals.
The second problem is the sheer quantity of stuff to do. I reckon the best way I can illustrate this is by giving a short list of everything I wanted to see but couldn’t due to clashes or exhaustion: Mad Apple Circus, Lydia and Sebastien, Panda and the Moniums, Vibronics, Tankus the Henge, Cut Capers, Delilah Bon, Monkey Bizzle, Spongebob Squarewave, Dubkasm, The Lagan, Fidget and the Twitchers, OBF, Gentleman’s Dub Club, Mr Tea and the Minions, Mungos Hifi, Soft Play, Dizraeli, Bassey Gracey, Beans on Toast, Yoko Pwno, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Gen and the Degenerates, Henge, and Riskee and the Ridicule.
That’s 30-odd acts. That’s a whole damn festival’s worth of acts. A damn bloody good festival at that. Look, it feels wrong to complain about too much good stuff to see, but choosing not to see 30 acts hurts—I’m still imagining my mirror-world Boomtown 2024, where I saw that list instead of what I did. It’s not necessarily better, just now lost to the mists of time, and that makes me feel sad and a bit nostalgic. From a practical point of view, this is great though—any dropouts are essentially replaced in your mind, as the clash you were worried about is now gone.
Now onto my final gripe with Boomtown—and I hate to be judgmental here, because by coming to Boomtown, they’re trying to improve… but it’s the bloody punters. A substantial number of Boomtown ticket holders are, to put it kindly, culturally underdeveloped.
Imagine 20-year-olds, girls in cheap fast fashion bikinis with melting makeup, lads without shirts but with overdeveloped (and utterly useless) glamour muscles, and both sexes almost uniformly wearing bucket hats. Unfortunately, they seem to be on less ketamine and drinking more than last year, which makes them less floaty and harmless, and more fighty, problematic, and just plain unpleasant.
It seems like this demographic is making up a growing share of the festival’s punters year by year, and honestly, in places, it just gives Boomtown a slightly grim edge. Whether it’s folks getting a bit aggro or just way, way too fucked up, this demographic—this target audience for Origin, as I like to call them—really does bring the vibe down. Like, while I only had a few rough incidents myself, a little harrassment for “looking at someone wrong” and being swarmed a bit while in character, nothing left me particularly worried, but I heard plenty of bad rumours about people being absolute little shits.
The thing is, while I’d love to say the solution is to abolish Origin, cut away the cancer and not replace it, I can’t in good conscience ask for that. I know Boomtown serves as a de-normification pipeline, and I know Origin is a crucial part of that—attracting the normies to be fed into the pipeline, which passes through Metropolis into Area 404 and Old Town. I know that if, from a group of ten lads, one of them starts thinking for himself, grows his hair out, and starts spinning fire, that’s a massive win.
As much as I want Boomtown to be a cool party exclusively for cool people, I know that’s not what should happen. Its cultural significance is too great, and while it may be the perfect playground for me and my mates, for some, it’s their first exposure to free thought.
Boomtown isn’t a perfect festival, but it is a massively significant and impressive one. If you’re even remotely interested in the idea of it, I’d strongly encourage you to go—if you’ve read this much of my rambling without getting bored, you’ll clearly improve the festival’s vibe.