Latitude

It seems that the British summer has become saturated with music festivals, from the grandaddy of them all, Glastonbury, to small village fairs with big ambitions. Whether you are into folk, jazz, RnB, heavy metal or even classical music, there is a festival out there for you. Festivals, such as Glastonbury, do their best to attract as wide a range of audience as possible and offer almost every conceivable musical genre, along with all manner of extracurricular activities, most of which are still firmly entrenched in its alternative/hippy origins. Latitude, on the other hand, is a relatively new festival (this year was its fifth edition) that offers a diverse programme of cultural events that seem to be aimed firmly at the Guardian-reading middle classes.

The festival is very much a family affair that offers everything you could want to satisfy your cultural needs from comedy to drama, from film to dance, with lashings of indie music. My first visit to Latitude was in 2008 and what struck me most was how much it resembled the Edinburgh festival, except compacted into a long weekend and stuck in a field in Suffolk, and for all intents and purposes it is still like that. In fact, three years on and the festival looked exactly the same, as if it hadn’t moved. This certainly made life much easier, knowing where to go in order to catch the next act or event from the eclectic schedule. What is also nice is the whole performance arena is fairly compact so you are rarely more than 10-15 minutes walk away from the different stages and tents. It does mean that some of the louder bands tended to bleed into the quieter places, such as the literary and comedy tents, but not to the level of it being a total distraction.

Read all about Latitude Festival in Film & Festivals Issue 29