Mojo - The Music Magazine

John Robb finds his inner Viking at Norway’s (not Brighton’s) Hove Festival.

HOVE FESTIVAL IS DIFFERENT. For a start, it’s named after the Viking word for party. It’s also situated on an island at the southernmost tip of the thousand mile-long nation of Norway. It should be all rain and mud and smell of burgers and burning plastic but it’s none of those things. The organisers are keen to have an eco agenda and the litter disappears as fast it’s deposited and no-one burns piles of rubbish like post-apocalyptic survivors.

Hove is light all night and packed full of super-healthy-looking Norwegian youth who drink like crazy and seem to like an impossibly wide range of music. One moment it’s metal and the next minute it’s the latest hip band from Brooklyn and it seems like the same people going crazy for both. For the ever-increasing army of traveling British youth who are taking advantage of cheap aeroplanes and a better knowledge of what the mainland has to offer, festivals like this are a gift.

Many say that it was Jay-Z who ruined Glastonbury’s ticket sales but that’s rubbish. No-one really cares who headlines at Glastonbury as long as the experience is up to snuff. And “experience” is what this new breed of continental Eurofestivals are all about (who could knock Serbia’s Exit Festival – set in an impossibly beautiful castle outside Novi Sad?) and there is no reason why Hove cannot join this high decibel summer circuit. After all, Norway’s packed with rum rock culture (The Refused, Gluecifer, black metal generally) and only 90 minutes from London by plane.

Jay Z himself is headlining the main stage when I arrive on Monday evening. The pantomime villain of Glastonbury acquits himself well with a huge moshpit and a big and bold live show. The high point is when the music shuts down for the crowd to boo at a large backdrop of George Bush and then for the crowd to cheer like crazy when the picture is switched for Obama. The only problem with this trick is that Obama’s natural rock’n’roll charisma easily outshines Jay Z’s.

The problem with it never getting dark is that you can never tell what day it is. The night passes quickly in a blur of forest and foliage, nature is breathing down your neck, bats flitter up into the sky avoiding the high decibel posturing of Avenged Sevenfold, who somehow manage to combine tender neo-emo moments into gonzoid stomping nu-metal. The band are clenching their fists and heavy metal buttocks in the site’s Amphitheatre – which is hewn out of solid rock and is an amazing venue. In fact, metal is well represented at Hove with the likes of Killswitch Engage, ex-Sepultura frontman Max Cavalera’s magnificent Cavalera Conspiracy and Coheed & Cambria making a right old racket in the glades in the following days.

Meanwhile, on the pop front, The Wombats get the packed tent on the other side of the site going so crazy that the floor caves in and the organisers have to build a fence around the hole before the band can continue. Vampire Weekend somehow go on after Avenged Sevenfold and not sound all twee and quiet. In fact, they sound big and powerful and their excellently wonky post-indie sits far better in the big outdoors than it does on record. But it’s Hercules & Love Affair who win the day, combining A Certain Ratio’s funky gloom with a flamboyant party vibe courtesy their flouncing transvestite frontperson Nomi (replacing Antony Hegarty) – looking far too feminine for the more short sighted males in the house.

Tuesday’s itinerary offers extra-rockular activity – namely, a boat trip to Viking burial grounds on a nearby island. We toast the spirit of dead warriors before sailing back to the festival to catch the melodic punk rock rush of Bad Religion. This is swiftly followed by the full-on political-punky Pogue hoedown of Flogging Molly, who are enjoying their American top five album with a tour that stomps on the bones of the Neo-Con Bush regime with their pithy words about the saddest-ever chapter in American politics.

Suddenly it’s Wednesday and, predictably, Babyshambles don’t turn up – shame, as the fresh air would have done young Doherty good. The Babyshambles story now is a series of clippings that the late Sid Vicious would have been proud of - all cancelled gigs, court step appearances and drug busts. No-one ever mentions the music, which is the one thing he is really good at. Crystal Castles also have to pull (beanpole vocalist Alice Glass is “tired”) so we have to content ourselves with a late night DJ set from Castle keyboard manipulator Ethan Kath. He plays some fantastically warped electronic tunes that, bizarrely, cause another dance floor to collapse. Maybe Norwegian wood isn’t as good as John Lennon thought it was.

We return to the chalet that had been kindly given over to the massed journo army and laugh at rival hacks drunkenly nearly burning the place down by putting a coffee percolator on the stove. Exploding in a hail of shattered glass and stinking plastic, it causes more pollution than the rest of the festival put together.

As long as you can be sure of avoiding dangerously dumb rock journalists, Hove festival comes highly recommended. These days, the multiplicity of music festivals means they can’t sell tickets on the bands’ names alone. We can see all these groups any time of the year. A festival now needs a flavour. It needs a hook and Hove has hooks in spades. The promoters have a neat idealistic eco idea and they have the most beautiful festival site in Europe.

It would be well worth checking out the cheap flights for Norway next year and learning just what the Viking meant by “Hove”.

John Robb

Find out more, and enjoy the weird cartoons at hovefestival.com