@pre@boing.world2026-08-25 11:23:35
Spent the weekend with a few friends at Beautiful Days festival out in Exeter, which is the one that The Levellers run and fill with mostly 90s bands.
So lots of old men on stage and in the audience. Including me. It's me.
Weather was mostly good as you'd like. Not quite as too-hot as it's been lately and only The Undertones made the weather gods angry. After the end of their wet set the double rainbow promising no more rain proved a true promise.
Mostly either old things, or things I'd never heard of, because I haven't really paid attention to music since the 1900s.
Young new folks seemed to be mostly half Welsh, and included Gwenno who was beautiful in her cat-mask and sang a song in old Cornish about cheese, Gina Larner who was playing country rock with her beautiful sparkly country boots, Trampoline who had one guitarist replaced by a cardboard cut-out for some reason I missed and are from Swansea, and Ben Brown whose rider included a lacy fancy dress and seizable stick - his merch song as he danced around and stripped off the ten tee-shirts he sells and was wearing all at once for the first half apparently was memorable.
Old folks on stage included Billy Brag, who is so right-on and woke you wonder why all the other musicians are so apolitical. Madness, who have banger after banger but lack some energy now they're so old. The Undertones, who angered god by still singing about Teenage Kicks in their sixties, Super Furries who, inexplicably drew a much smaller crowd as people watched the Proclaimers instead I guess. The Divine Comedy, who acts very sophisticated mixing cocktails on stage. Also The Wonder Stuff who still mock their own audience but got us all nostalgic and emotional, they're loved and welcome in my home too.
And of course the Levellers who fill the field because they don't put anyone else up at the same time as them and so WAY up on the hill behind the ice cream van where you can't really see but at least you can move.
The Nanaz are both old and new, in that they've only been playing for a few years and yet are already each as old as the grandad bands playing here singing songs about menopause and being told they used to be beautiful.
It's a lovely smallish festival, big enough to have choices and headliners, but small enough to walk across, with hardly any bandwidth and which is too far away really. That drive home was very tedious.
Bravo though though. Hope it outlasts the Levellers, and both keep going for decades more. Hope to be back.
#music #festival #uk #beautifulDays
