The relationship between the pandemic and the summer festival season has, unsurprisingly, proved far from harmonious. As the lockdown has rolled on, music events have fallen like dominoes – Glastonbury, Primavera, All Points East among them – the months to come now marked by an absence of revelry and also something of an economic void. Last year, more than a quarter of UK adults attended a festival, and the combined concert and festival industry was valued at more than £2.6bn.
Touring musicians have proved remarkably enterprising during quarantine, streaming home performances, guitar tutorials and DJ sets, and launching various charity fundraising initiatives. But as the novelty wanes and a new normality settles, a question arises: is there a way that a real-life music festival can be replicated in the virtual world?
In Totnes, Devon, Sea Change festival was launched five years ago by the owners of the town’s much-loved Drift record shop. It has been propelled by goodwill and great taste, consistently drawing an impressive and diverse line-up (this year promising Aldous Harding, Squid and Shirley Collins over three days in May) and making great use of its location (events sprawling across the town’s civic hall, church, cinema, pubs, industrial units, and, more recently, the Dartington Hall estate).
The decision not to postpone or cancel but instead reincarnate the festival online, sooner and for free, was bold but also canny, and perhaps indicative of the loyalty that has quickly grown between Sea Change and its audience.
On Friday afternoon, the lineup was still a work in progress: even at that late hour artists were being added to the weekend’s bill, and there was the surprise announcement that Jon Savage was “going early” with a 4pm Twitter discussion of his new book, an oral history of Joy Division. Over the following two days there would be contributions from the Cool Greenhouse, the Orielles, a Gene Clark documentary and David Keenan’s tarot readings.
Saturday evening belonged to the record label Erased Tapes, with an impeccably chosen taster menu of its roster, including a split-screen performance by the exquisitely voiced Douglas Dare and Manu Delgado, and the Pakistani-American composer Qasim Naqvi performing a modular synth set from his kitchen in New York. Sunday brought Tim’s Twitter Listening Party, in which the Charlatans’ Tim Burgess explored seminal albums with the musicians who made them – everything from Gwenno’s Le Kov to the Breeders’ Last Splash.
Many of the sets proved brief affairs, reflective perhaps of our short online attention spans but also echoing the festivalgoer’s tendency to meander from stage to stage, catch a song or two here, the tail-end of a reading there – Billy Bragg performing a timely rendition of No One Knows Nothing Anymore, followed by the poet Will Burns reading from his new collection Country Music. Some events were broadcast simultaneously but kept online so one could return, or hop between the two.
It took a moment to adjust and to realise that one does not need to remain glued to one’s laptop but could instead enjoy Max Porter and Bonnie Prince Billy’s It’s Going to Be a Bright New Day, or the Hot Singles Club DJ set while doing a spot of yoga, taking a stroll or fixing a stiff gin and tonic.
The key to the weekend’s success was that by moving across platforms — from video streaming to Soundcloud, Twitter to Spotify to Instagram live – and providing links to explore works further (or purchase online), it managed to create both texture and a sense of companionability. Not once did it feel a flat or lonely endeavour; rather it found a great swell of congregation.
This is not a format that will work for every festival, but for an event like Sea Change, marked in real life by its intimacy and warmth, it proved a triumph: glimpses of a festival that might have been, certainly, but also its own entity, particular to the strange new nowhere in which we now find ourselves. As the official festival poster states: “I went to Sea Change 2020. And also I didn’t go to Sea Change 2020.” The odd thing is, this musical nowhere wasn’t such a bad place to be.
