More about: Forwards Festival

Festivals in and around Bristol have a tendency to exist within niches: ArcTanGent showcases math and post-rock, Tokyo World caters towards drum and bass and hip-hop, while nearby WOMAD’s loyalists are beholden to the tastes and curation of prog-rock good-guy Peter Gabriel.  The gap in the market which Forwards aims to fill in its debut year is in being a festival which makes a genuine effort to curate a cross-genre (as well as cross-discipline) line-up to rival any of the capital’s most celebrated day-festivals. 

Initially, its aim to “challenge what metropolitan festivals can be today, and how they can do good, from the inside out [through] social initiatives and a space for discussion and debate” may seem like a cynical attempt to appeal to the city’s inherently politicised and activistic identity (this is the team behind the infamously vapid Coachella, after all). However, upon arriving at their debate and panel area, ominously daubed The Information, it becomes clear that this is, at the very least, a place for genuine and sincere discourse and debate. Saturday kicks off with writers Shon Faye and Travis Alabanza, whose honest, confessional and outspoken conversation about the realities of love and romance becomes the self-appointed “unofficial pre’s for Charli XCX”, while Sunday sees England and Liverpool football hero John Barnes make an impassioned plea to view race and class as an intersection, and is diplomatic enough to grin-and-bear the shouts of “you’ve got to hold and give, but do it at the right time” that greet the end of his conversation with Bristol poet Lawrence Hoo. 

Jamie xx and The Chemical Brothers are undoubtably safe bets as headliners, but they don’t in and of themselves hint at the gold lying buried beneath; this is not merely a weekend filled with breezy house, nor nostalgic big beat. Instead, it hosts some of the most subversive and stupefying pop music currently in, around and clinging onto the edges of an increasingly fractured and ineffable musical mainstream. The weekend’s most startling performance comes in the form of Sudan Archives, whose violin-strewn R&B combines the baroque and the brash in a way that is sincerely untapped. Clad in a chain mail hood, she paces back and forth, surveying the audience as if challenging them to whip themselves into a frenzy as raucous and defiant as the one she inhabits. Although it is only 2pm, the audience willingly obliges. 

Across the Clifton Downs, on the main stage, Little Simz delivers the kind of assured, effervescent set that seems second nature to her at this point in her career. Vulnerable one minute, defiant the next, and always confessional, her flow is as silky as it is laser-sharp. She tells the Bristol audience that it’s a year to-the-day since Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, her fourth studio album, came out, and what a year it has been; from Glastonbury to Primavera, from Ivor Novello to BET nominations, she has been across the world and back earning her place not only at the top-table of U.K. hip-hop, but as one of the most incisive and essential rappers in the world. Less dazzling is Fred again.., who demonstrates that, although his rise to stardom seems immutable, his viral Boiler Room session is little more than a schtick. Saccharine and cloyingly humble, the on-screen messages of wide-eyed gratitude before each track and the Francis Bourgeois-esque camera angle showing him play whack-a-mole with a sample pad are endearing but little else. That being said, a few of the festival’s more dance-oriented sets fall flat; whether it’s the open-air staging, insufficiently punchy sound-systems or simply a disinterested audience, Overmono and Caribou fail to generate the ecstatic reveries that seasoned festival-goers will know they are more than capable of delivering. 

Similarly underwhelming are Khruangbin, whose inclusion not only at Forwards but at virtually every other festival this summer, demonstrates the skills of their booking manager, if nothing else. Easily quaffable at a festival but lacking enough substance to really win over hearts and minds, the drab weather only serves to emphasise how out-of-place their inclusion feels. The same cannot be said, however, for Charli XCX, for whom a headline slot would have felt more apt. There is little to say about Charli that hasn’t been written verbatim by critics and fans alike, but no praise ever veers into hyperbole when it comes to hyper-pop’s matriarch. A blistering set cherry-picked from across her decade long recording career, the crowd is gleefully animated enough during her Icona Pop feature, I Love It, that there’s no need for a “I thought this fucking song was big in Bristol. What the fuck are you doing?” 

If subversion of what an inner-city festival can be is Forwards’ raison d'être, it achieves it by vibrating between the mainstream and the radical, the ethereal and the urgent, the sung and the spoken. And if it starts as it means to go on, it is bound to become a staple in the British festival season; a final, joyous blow-out before the leaves start to fall and normality resumes.

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More about: Forwards Festival