Boomtown: Chapter 9 – Behind the Mask REVIEW

Describing Boomtown to somebody who has never been before is an interesting challenge. Sure, you can sell the atmosphere, the craftsmanship, the sound quality, the variety of the lineup, everything, but everyone’s experience of Boomtown is their own, and the only thing you can really guarantee is that they will never forget it. Oh, and they’ll want to go back, you can count on that part too.

Boomtown has been scaling up at a remarkable rate across the past few years and its popularity has been soaring, so much so that this year they reached something of an impasse. The festival physically cannot grow any larger, but even before the lineup was announced, tickets were selling in huge quantities and they easily hit their 60,000 cap. Perpendicular to this was the story, which after last year’s epic revolution has grown into something far more complex with dozens of different interactive breadcrumb trails laid out for people to follow.

The UK festival market is littered with casualties, either owing to budget problems, crowd problems or, in some cases, over-expansion. Increasing popularity can sometimes spell doom for a festival, it gets bigger, harder to manage and then, for one reason or another, it just falls apart, relegated to the annals of history. Lak Mitchell and the rest of the Boomtown team are well aware of that, and they’ve handled their swelling popularity beautifully.

For the most part, Chapter 9 felt like a transitional year. Walking through uptown, in the wake of the governmental collapse, things felt calamitous. In Mayfair wealthy bankers and investors taunted the poor and hurled money at each other. Oldtown was plastered with posters advertising new development schemes, and as the weekend went on, more and more protestors marched through the streets, chanting messages of dissatisfaction. The Wild West, ever rooted in Boomtown’s past, was a crucible of chaos, as was the futuristic DSTRKT 5. Every once in a while, you’d see small groups of hackers snaking their way through the city streets, silent and resolute.

The most obvious change, though, as you might expect, was the ever present spectre of Bang Hai Industries. Officials skulked around measuring up walls and the ominous ‘We Want Your Soul’ slogan was impossible to avoid. Bang Hai Tower loomed over everything and lit up like a roman candle at night. Fair visitors moved through the city looking for answers and found themselves embroiled in all kinds of nefarious activity, whether it be a bank heist or a chance encounter with a disagreeable cyborg.

This was by far the most story driven edition of Boomtown yet, far more complex and broad than last year’s ‘pick a side’ structure. The immersion trail in Chapter 8 had been something of a happy accident, but this year it was part of the plan from day one. “The story has been an ever-evolving beast” Lak told me when I sat down with him on the Sunday. “Now we try to mirror the real world with it, run alongside it in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. There’s been so much going on this year that we felt we needed to expand. We use a cliffhanger format now, and this year we’ve been hinting so much and building up to the point that now we’re here, it’s been a site-wide engagement. The actors have been so on point, the guests have been getting into character and it’s just all gone to demonstrate that Boomtown is so much more than a giant party.”

Turn the clock back a few years and nobody even really knew that Boomtown had a narrative, but now it’s at the centre of everything, to the point where some people are more interested in the story than the music. Certainly, if you wanted to follow the ‘choose your own adventure’ styled trail from start to end, there was little time to do anything else. That’s a shame, in a way, since ideally you’d want to get the best of both worlds, but that’s something which can be taken on board next year, and the idea that the Boomtown crowd is now being supplemented by people who just want to jump headfirst into a giant theatrical experience for a weekend is hugely exciting. Boomtown have a budget for this arm now, and they have the platform to use it.

Boomtown is a music festival though, and it’s unlikely that they’ll ever lose sight of that. As ever, in this regard, it felt tribal. Each district has a distinct flavour, and people often find themselves with preferred areas as the festival goes on. Ska fans stick around Oldtown, reggae fans keep within reach of Lion’s Den, bass heads drop anchor around Bang Hai and DSTRKT 5, etc. This year the largest acts lived more in the reggae, ska and hip-hop world, with Cypress Hill, Ziggy Marley, The Specials, Arrested Development, M.I.A. and even Sublime putting on massive shows. On the more hectic side of things, Dub Phizix ruled the Robotika stage and drum and bass mainstays Black Sun Empire put on one of the most insane closing sets I’ve ever witnessed.

For many outsiders, that’s the definition of Boomtown – sheer, unchecked madness – but in truth that’s only a small part of a far larger whole, and many sections of the festival are very relaxed, as evidenced by Whistler’s Green, a quiet corner of Boomtown which was gifted with a major line-up upgrade this year, including seminal jazz acts like GoGo Penguin, Portico Quartet and Sons of Kemet. The story most certainly wasn’t the only tool the Boomtown team used to counteract the negative and utterly unfair reputation the festival has languished under for so many years. More importantly, they took the record breaking crowd numbers very, very seriously indeed, rolling out a huge drugs awareness and harm reduction campaign and even bringing in The Loop – a drugs testing service.

“Public safety is our number one priority” Lak told me. “We have this platform of tens of thousands of youngsters who are obsessed with the Boomtown brand, some of them even have tattoos, and they listen to us because we’re them, we’re not corporate, we’re grassroots, we’re a family, this is everyone’s festival. For that reason harm reduction and education is at the forefront of it all and I’m so proud of what the team has achieved.”

He’s right to be. The Loop’s testing centre was impossible to miss, nothing about it was an afterthought, or lip service. Fiona Measham and her team tested some 1,132 samples: 55% were MDMA, 17% were ketamine and 10% were cocaine. High strength pills and a dodgy MDMA substitute called pentylone were the biggest concerns, and warnings were issued for both, but around 90% of the drugs brought in were confirmed to be as advertised. I also spoke to some of the on site medics, who relayed that compared to the previous year, markedly less people were coming in to the medical tents having had a bad reaction to something.

Boomtown is not the only festival to suffer a drugs related fatality, not by a long shot, but their independent nature has made them a prime target for rabid, sensationalist media outlets. That in mind, the fact that they’ve made safety their top priority would be fantastic by itself, but add to that the attitude of firstly accepting that people will take drugs and then encouraging them to do it as safely as possible has made them a beacon of responsible, progressive festival management.

“The war on drugs hasn’t worked, people are accepting it so let’s educate people.” Lak continued. “It’s trying to fuse that with the story, there was a lot of talk about how to present The Loop, and in the end we dressed it like part of the set, so it felt like a part of Boomtown. We even called it ‘drug testing’ straight out. We also brought Beans on Toast in to give a speech at the opening ceremony. Everyone knows him, everyone respects him, so for him to give a speech to 20,000 people, not preaching, telling it straight, it wasn’t ‘don’t do drugs’ and it was really really powerful. We’ve got the biggest platform of young audience members in the country, and we can speak to them directly, we are hitting the live audience and the social media audience. All channels.”

It’s certainly something to be proud of, and it allowed the festival to really settle into itself in a way it never has before. The media still found a way to stick the knife in, this time over the long queueing times brought on by the larger crowd, increased security and muddy site, but as Lak pointed out, people sometimes queue for 12 or more hours to get in or out of Glasto, and rarely does that make headline news. Papers can pick on Boomtown all they want, but they’re doing a remarkable job against a litany of unique challenges. If the cost of safety is waiting a bit longer to get in or out, I’d call that a victory.

So, how did it all turn out? Well, by festival’s end, the financial sector was in dissarray, the bankers were literally begging for money on the streets. Until the CEO of BHI turned up and bought it out. In an instant, Boomtown, as an entity, was claimed by BHI, but as they broadcast their message across the city, the hackers attacked the mainframe. At Bang Hai Tower, their attempt seemingly failed, but over at the Sector 6 nuclear plant, the system shut down, and in both cases a new arch-agitator was revealed in the shape of a mysterious hooded woman. Who was she? How much does she know? We’ll have to wait until next year to find out, but to sum up, this was the biggest, maddest, most incredible leap Boomtown has ever made, and to me, it feels like they’re only just getting started. See you at Chapter 10.