Supersonic Festival: Working backstage, Steve Shelley, old factories, Swans, and Brum skateboard shop midnight dancing

Ventured up north to Supersonic Festival, and had a wicked fun time. I volunteered on Saturday and Sunday night, working backstage on Saturday and then at the Old Library stage serving endless pints of beer on Sunday. The festival was held in a really cool location, an old warehouse called ‘The Custard Factory.’ The best stage I thought was the Old Library; a grandiose factory room with 1930’s huge glass windows. On Friday night this room hosted the electro beats of Dead Fader to denizens of dancing brits, and on Sunday afternoon it was the perfect location for Peter Broderick to perform an acoustic series; he abandoned his gear and jumped into the middle of the crowd with his violin to sing into the massive acoustic space. The entire festival was a potentially-confusing melange of music, everything from hardcore, electro, experimental noise, folk, metal, DJs, etc. However, it was clear that every act was carefully chosen as high quality leaders in the underground music scene in the UK + beyond, and the mix was perfect.

Saturday night volunteering backstage was … interesting. While avoiding militaristic ruling from a grumpy volunteering supervisor, myself and my bartending cohort, Ben, managed to keep a steady stockpile of beers for ourselves under the serving table while chatting with many musicians, including the dudes from Hallogallo, (such as Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth!), and watched amusedly as the night went on and all the musicians in the green room steadily became increasingly high and intoxicated. At one point, one musician from the States with long curly blond hair stopped to grab a few pints and then pulled out three bottles of nailpolish. He started to paint his nails, passed the nailpolish to Ben who also started to paint his nails, and then to two other musicians who came up to the bar who also started to paint their nails while I just continued to pour beers for them all. I did not paint my nails with Blondie’s polish. I guess this is what normally happens back stage.

Along with exploring Birmingham, which is actually a really interesting city (very large, industrial, loads of abandoned factories and houses, huge great oak trees, massive mansions), the weekend at Supersonic was very memorable. To wrap everything up on Sunday night, I ended up informally DJ-ing with a new friend, Adam, from behind the counter at a skateboard shop (he basically just played Wu Tang videos from youtube). This skateboard shop had been ‘secretly’ selling beer to festival-goers all weekend long. Good dance party. Good fun. Good friends.

Here are a few of my top picks from the weekend:

DEAD FADER

DEVIL MAN

MELT BANANA: experimental Japanese hardcore

PETER BRODERICK

HALLOGALLO: performing songs from Neu!, includes Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Neu! member Michael Rother

FACTORY FLOOR:

SWANS