You can tell what a festival believes in by where the crowds crush the hardest. At Latitude, it's in the forest for the up-and-coming acts, the Listening Post for the poetry and the Waterfront Stage for the ballet - as much as the main stages, sometimes more.
On Thursday evening the Disco Shed was already spilling its glitter into the trees, and over at The Listening Post the queue for Hollie McNish had closed the tent before I could get in. My peevishness at missing it was quickly replaced with delight that a poetry reading was oversubscribed on the opening night of a festival that also books stadium acts.
FRIDAY
We started early on Friday with the naive energy of first-day revellers, queuing for an age only to give up on getting The Smallest into the nets – a woodland kids' area where children clamber through colourful webbing rigged high in the trees. We passed by someone announcing that "the funkiest thing you'll see all weekend is... Danny Doing The Crossword!" (reader, I believed him) to queue again for Circus Zambia's Afronauts, a UK festival exclusive, and were turned away at the flap of a 500-capacity theatre tent that had filled two hours early.
We recovered in the Zen Den, where The Butterfly Wheel were giving woo-woo Mazzy Star, all reverb and incense (it was superb) then took our sunhats to the Obelisk Arena, where Gok Wan was hollering "WHO REMEMBERS THE 90s!" at a field that emphatically did with already-spirited abandon. South African but Berlin-based singer-songwriter Alice Phoebe Lou brought her fine-boned indie strangeness to the afternoon; Dry Cleaning delivered their deadpan spoken-word art-rock to exactly the right festival for it; and the honey-voiced soul singer Jalen Ngonda delivered a dreamy set. Over on the Waterfront stage, BalletBoyz marked their 25th anniversary with duet excerpts from Still Pointless – Liam Scarlett's Serpent set to Max Richter among them, and Shu Xin's Ripple, fluid and beguiling, danced with punters drifting past behind the stage as if world-class contemporary dance were simply part of the scenery. Which at Latitude, it is.
As the light went, The Last Dinner Party turned the evening theatrical before David Byrne turned it euphoric. His set – solo material folded into the Talking Heads songs that dads have spent a decade teaching their teenagers to love – produced the loveliest demographic on site all weekend. I held out for "Strange Overtones," then dashed to catch Tom Grennan on the second stage, which cost me "Psycho Killer" by minutes – I am still not over it. Grennan, for his part, was a machine of professionalism and excitable energy, the whole field pogoing as one through "Full Attention," "Found What I've Been Looking For" and "Little Bit of Love."
We strolled home past the Trailer Park, a hidden warren of tiny venues and ragbag theatres, where The Teenagers had made new friends and were learning the important life lessons of crowd-surfing and dancing in open-sided caravans in the woods.
SATURDAY
Saturday morning was spent wandering the woods for woodfired pizza by the BBC Introducing stage then past a disco-ball-speckled UFO to the Sunrise Arena. A few months ago the algorithm gods blessed me with a run of videos by a young man called Hugo Hamlet – a bona fide viral "sensashe" (his words) – so when the name surfaced randomly on the bill, I went. So had a small congregation of similarly-summoned others, draped across their camping chairs in a state of collective musical-magical delirium. They had the look of people not entirely sure how they'd arrived there but absolutely certain that it was where they were meant to be. Hugo had the crowd hooked from the word “Bonjarella”, through his song that went something like “I’m a sexy omelette, you’re the Eiffel Tower… you have the power”. He was funnier than half the main-stage names in the Comedy Arena and had more charisma than David Byrne. This, not the headliners, is what people come to Latitude for.
Back at the big stages, Cian Ducrot proved himself to be one to watch before Vanessa Carlton played to a field politely fending off heatstroke in the bleachers for the song she wrote in the early noughties – “A Thousand Miles" landed like a glass of cold water; the mid-life number about her garden, less so. Tom Odell channelled a young Chris Martin through his emo-pop ballads "Heal" and "Best Day of My Life," all the way to the inevitable "Another Love." Teddy Swims - fresh, as he reminded us more than once, from Coachella - brought the most production-ready set of the weekend and the emotions to match, stopping more than once to wipe his eyes and stepping aside to hand whole moments to his incredible band and backing. "Guilty," saw the rasp and power on full display; by "Lose Control" he'd all but stopped singing and let the field finish. He pulled Carlton back out for a duetted "A Thousand Miles," then detonated a Van Halen "Jump" cover we absolutely hadn't seen coming, after which a drone show scattered its images over the arena: eyeballs, butterflies, shooting stars and, in a wink to festival history, a huge pink sheep.
SUNDAY
By Sunday the site had both softened into the communal flinging away of schedules and agendas, and hardened into hysteria as small children took out their exhaustipated rage on the hull of a wooden Greenpeace ship with saws and hammers. We were covered in park dust and facing the grim reality that we hadn't done a single yoga disco class, listened to any of the book talks nor seen any theatre. There was no open-water swimming this year due to algae in the lake which, given everything else the weekend asked of my energy, was probably a mercy.
Nearly every conversation I'd fallen into all weekend began "back in the 1900s" – a sentiment which reached fever pitch for Alex James' Britpop Classical, with guest singers (Phil Daniels and Republica’s Saffron) and a live orchestra performing absolute bangers such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; "Common People" and "Wonderwall." Beth Orton was ever-so-slightly underwhelming amid the festival churn, marking three decades of Trailer Park with "Central Reservation" and "She Cries Your Name" to a crowd that admired more than it ignited. The waft of David Gray’s "Babylon" reached us on the breeze.
And then came Self Esteem. On paper, her gospel of self-worth speaks straight to you in a disarming way – several of her songs I'd defend without hesitation, and "Focus Is Power" closed her set as a powerful communal sing that I eagerly opened my lungs to. But. Taylor and her dancers moved as a sealed unit, all glances and in-jokes and a choreography of belonging performed among themselves, and the effect was less communion than clique. A show ostensibly about solidarity managed to feel like the wrong side of a school playground: you were welcome to watch the popular kids, but I left feeling oddly like the girl who wasn't picked. Perhaps that was just my Sunday festival state of mind.
"Anyone else have a mental breakdown in 2023?" Lewis Capaldi asked the field on Sunday night, then, into the silence: "Just me?" It's been a long road recently for the Scottish singer – a Glastonbury collapse that year, two years away to mend – yet here he is taking the piss out of himself, bouncing between raw confession and daft comedy, sometimes in a single breath. At one point he clocked a fan's handmade menopause sign, read it out, dedicated the next song to everyone going through it – then got the giggles because the lyrics were so spot on, and had to abandon the track and start again. By the time he reached "Someone You Loved," the comedy had burned off; he barely needed to sing it, the field taking it off his hands note for note as the fireworks went up. A breakdown survived, a stand-up routine and a mass singalong in one set – and, twenty years on, exactly the note Latitude wanted to go out on.
Festival director Melvin Benn said when you create something you adore, "you nurture it in the same way that you would nurture your kids" and twenty years in you can see exactly what he means: the fierce pride, the terror of it growing up wrong, the refusal to let the biggest names crowd out the small ones peering courageously out from the trees.
You can see exactly what he’s saying. A half-remembered line of Mary Oliver drifting out of the Waterfront Stage on opening night couresty of Sonder: Headlong, was a reminder that you can't always be cautious, and that everyone milling around you is carrying a whole complicated life of their own. That is what Latitude sells, underneath the pink sheep and the drone shows: not just cracking headliners, but the permission to wander freely into the woods and be surprised by what you find there.
