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Where normal festivals are surrounded by 10ft walls akin to a kind of hedonist Alcatraz, Standon does things a bit differently. Just a few paces from our camp is an unmanned country gate, leading to a huge, harvested cornfield on a hill. This is where Sunday starts, on the top of the hill, surrounded by smudgy-faced friends in various stages of space get-up, smoking cigarettes and watching the sun rise. It’s a beautiful, cloudless day, the music from Barbarella’s disco-cow-shed is still ringing in everyone’s ears, and we couldn’t be happier.
The rest of the daytime is spent sunbathing and swimming in Standon’s outdoor pool. It belongs to the manor house, Standon Lordship, and is done up for the festival as Button Moon, complete with Mr Spoon keeping watch over the sleepy swimmers. You’d expect a small outdoor pool at a festival to get trashed; instead, with minimal security, it remains a quiet, tranquil recovery zone throughout the day.
As Sunday draws on, Londoners start to head back to the smoke ready for the working week ahead, leaving significant empty holes in the campsite and the turnout at shows. Son Of Dave still draws a crowd though, his incredible, wordless charisma and eye-opening acoustic skills prompting such enthusiastic calls for an encore that even the security have to give up trying to stop him. He shares his rider with the audience and disperses percussion for audience-participation, and it’s one of the few moments at Standon that you really feel the crowd get behind the man on stage.
It happens again a bit later, as Femi Kuti and the Positive Force headline the main stage. They are introduced by an emotional festival founder, Alex Trenchard, whose backyard birthday barbecue laid the foundations for this festival some five years ago. Femi Kuti, son of the legendary Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, fronts a Nigerian spectacle of remarkable proportions, following some twenty dancers, musicians and singers onto the stage in full African costume. Together they turn a crowd of tired, middle-class Londoners into a bottom-jiggling hoard. Their music, as much political in message as it is joyous in mode, is totally infectious, and while they might not be mainstream enough a name to keep the city types at Standon for an extra night, the set is a blistering and memorable success.
Much the same can be said of Standon itself. Aggrandised from previous years with bigger stages and more punters, the festival improves on last year by attracting a much more diverse crowd, from all-night ravers to young families and even a few respectable elders, and succeeds in pleasing them all. The challenge for Standon Calling, as ticket sales continue to grow year on year, will be to maintain the bespoke elements and attention to detail that make it such a special weekend.
