theartsdesk at the Latitude Festival 2012: Squeeze, Squelch

As a giggling toddler posed for a photograph next to a pink sheep, a man in a Barbour jacket moaned about losing his garlic-crusher. On the lake, smitten newlyweds enjoyed a gondola ride, while, somewhere else, an elderly couple watched a show so moving it made them cry. Yes, this could have happened in one place only – the leafy surroundings of Henham Park, near Southwold in Suffolk, at Latitude Festival.

The arts event has just enjoyed its seventh July, and retains a vibrant cultural miscellaneousness. In fact 750 music, theatre, art, comedy, cabaret, poetry, politics, dance, literature and everything-in-between acts appeared across more than a dozen stages this time around. “It’s like the Edinburgh Fringe, but in a field,” a spectacled reveller enthused, gesturing with a rolled-up broadsheet, as if to illustrate this point.

Talking of newspapers, this year’s controversy was undoubtedly the introduction of the i Arena (formerly the Sunrise Arena). The change was only in name, of course, affecting neither the general feel of this smaller, more intimate musical stage, nor the variety of bands performing on it. But symbolism is important to some Latitude purists, who bemoan further advances toward the mainstream.

With no fewer than eight corporate sponsors, and now priced at £175 a weekend ticket, the festival continues to develop in spite of their tuts and sighs. I can certainly think of far greater crimes committed that weekend (more on those later), and anyway, isn’t Latitude still “more than just a music festival”?

One of the first acts to answer that with a defiant “yes” was Theatre 503, which staged new play Billy Chickens Is a Psychopath Superstar on Thursday evening. Visceral, satirical and exasperatingly physical, the story of the piece surrounded a charismatic but homicidally unstable cockney gobshite who somehow becomes the media’s flavour of the month.

The Theatre Arena now stands significantly taller and wider than its quainter predecessor, where you could relish the finest pleasure in the world – watching a piece of drama with the sound of rain pounding on the canvas above your head. As Latitude’s campers returned to their tents they were forced to appreciate the sound of rain on canvas all night long. Indeed, Suffolk’s rainfall inspired a survival-like mentality that gave some of us the opportunity to relive our days at scouts, inadequate tents calling for inner lining T-shirts, loo roll and newspaper.

After a lack of sleep I decided to give my brain a workout by going to see an interview with Siri Hustvedt at the Literary Arena. Sure enough, watching the acclaimed novelist, essayist and poet shoot the breeze with Suzi Feay about art, humanity and psychology just about did the job. Bemusingly, though, the tent was only half-filled. I assumed that such academic, intellectual and existential discussions were the things most ‘Latte-tuders’ dreamed of – though perhaps this particular event had simply been overlooked by those who’d been distracted by the other 332 pages in the festival programme.

Even the performers at Latitude are getting younger

Another show in danger of getting lost in this bulky text was Battersea Arts Centre’s ingenious Paper Cinema’s Odyssey. Homer’s cornerstone of literature was told in inventive fashion with a projector, a couple of puppeteers, four musicians and a bunch of paper cut-outs. It was a magical, uplifting hour.

Some performances were not listed in the programme at all. These included many of the shenanigans in the Mess Tent – out in the Faraway Forest – the smallest venue on site. One of its acts was a corset-clad, loud-mouthed Aussie gal, who showed off some of her circus skills (or something) to a crowd of about 30. She called herself Lilikoi Kaos, and delivered 10 minutes of bawdy, brash brilliance. Another equally memorable short performance occurred at midnight on the Writer’s Bridge in which a trapeze artist was carried majestically across the lake by a balloon that changes colour. It sounds achingly pretentious but did inspire genuine wonder. I had some strange dreams that night.

Photographer Marc Sethi's impressions of Latitude 2012

Saturday in the Obelisk Arena, and many would argue the entire festival, belonged to Elbow (pictured above by Jen O'Neill). Topping the bill on the main stage, these gentle alternative rockers with their soaring, anthemic songs, were the perfect star attraction. Everything an onlooker could want from a headliner was present in the set: stunning backdrops, constantly changing images of the performance, good-natured banter with the crowd and, above all, great songs spanning their impressive back catalogue.

Anyone who has been visiting Latitude Festival for several years, one arresting observation that never escapes you is how busy it has become. For a third consecutive year, the capacity has remained at 35,000 – a reasonable level for a medium-sized festival, yet still three times what it was in 2006. Many of the faces behind this statistic are young ones - teenagers who, partying in gaggles of 15 or 20, you’d expect to be attracted to somewhere a bit more lively – like Leeds/Reading Festival, maybe. Put another way, at Latitude, you’re now more likely to meet a red-eyed lad called Dekky spilling Tuborg over himself than you are a fortysomething chap called Oliver eating falafel – contrary to popular perception of this “middle-class festival”.

Unsurprisingly, there isn’t a soul under 25 in the Film & Music Arena on Friday, where avant-pop violinist Hahn-Bin (pictured right) took to the stage to deliver a typically flamboyant and effortlessly perfect performance presented by the Royal Albert Hall. He was followed by a trio of darkly comic gems from the London Short Film Festival. Friend Request Pending, the first, was about two elderly women with an alarming Facebook obsession. A psychotic London copper’s shift quickly descended into nightmarish mayhem after he mistakenly took a hard drug in Disappoint You, while Long Distance Information – exploring familial fragmentation with a tale about a son who accidentally calls the wrong father, but still manages to communicate just as well as the pair fail to realise they aren’t related – completed the set.

A good few clusters of little people, however, could be found linking arms as they weaved in and out of a full house in the Word Arena, where pop icon Lana Del Rey (pictured below by Andy Sheppard) and a string quartet performed a set of epic singles on Friday. Wearing a white dress and taking delicate drags from a cigarette - at a guess, a Lucky Strike - in between songs, the bewitching singer-songwriter crooned her way through hits like "Blue Jeans", "Video Games" and "National Anthem". And yet she did nothing to suggest that she, and her music, isn't simply a beautiful, but somehow empty, nothing.

Even the performers at Latitude are getting younger. Who could forget Harry Baker, the 20-year-old rapper-turned-poet who had his audience in stitches with a dessert-themed reworking of Ed Sheeran’s single “The A Team”? But there was absolutely no doubt as to who owned the Poetry Arena. Weaving impassioned stories and sound advice into jaw-dropping rhymes, Scroobius Pip appeared at home in front of the thousands who’d gathered to see him on Saturday night. People were spilling out of the tent, and into the neighbouring food queues, as the Essex wordsmith remarked: “This is the largest spoken word crowd I’ve ever seen.”

Carrying a healthy sense of humour outside of his melancholic verse, Pip joked about fans illegally downloading his self-released first album No Commercial Breaks, and how, aware of this, he had created a “guilt button” on his website for them to pay up. Suddenly, the stage was showered with flying coins and notes, which, although disbelieving, he dutifully collected. “People shouldn’t throw money at me when I’m on stage, because it distracts me and then ruins the show for you guys,” he said, bending down to pick up another quid. He was worth every penny, and his mesmerising set ended with a full two minutes of applause, before the awe-filled crowd reluctantly dispersed – hopeful of an encore.

Lang Lang had something to do with the arrival of blue skies, which arrived around the same time he headlined the Waterfront Stage, where crowds had gathered on both sides of the lake, and across the Writer’s Bridge, to catch a glimpse of the classical pianist. They witnessed a performance, including pieces by Schubert and Chopin, that was every bit as elegant as Lang Lang’s entrance – via gondola (pictured right).

So those were my highlights – bar one. Thrash metal and anti-Conservative sentiments, anyone? Yes, #Torycore, in the Literary Salon, involved a woman screaming “A HEALTHY AND FLEXIBLE ECONOMY” and other short excerpts from George Osborne’s speeches as Chancellor as some dude played power cords really, really loud. “And now,” she said, very calmly, when that bit was over, “I’m going to read out a list of the Lords who voted for the Health and Social Care Bill, and their links to the private healthcare sector.” Then she erupted again.

The contrast between Lang Lang and #Torycore describes the sheer spectrum of cultural plurality that Latitude continues to represent. It remains remarkable, miraculous even, how arts followers of radically different persuasions are squeezing – and squeeze (and squelch) they did – through the same entrance gates, year after year. Latitude hasn’t become so inflated that it’s not still an artsy, lefty, intellectual event that continues to attract artists, lefties and intellectuals. But, as the swathes of sloshed young people demonstrated this year, not exclusively.

Photographer Marc Sethi's impressions of Latitude 2012

Photographer Marc Sethi's impressions of Latitude 2012: click on the images to enlarge