MAGIC IS REAL // BANGFACE 2024

MUM THINKS I'M AT A YOGA RETREAT

This was my first Bang Face, so you’ll have to forgive me if this reads like one of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. It is hard not to feel like a tourist when a festival’s culture is so notorious and heralded. In a way, it’s hard to believe that Bang Face can be popular enough to sell out entire to festival crowds. But this music is internationally popular, and its followers take this annual pilgrimage very seriously. The weekend prior, I was at London’s techno festival, Transmissions, where it felt, ironically, like nothing really happened. A progressive stream of trippy rollers, but no hype, no drops, and no gun fingers. I am assured that Bang Face is the antithesis. I take the ticket on a whim, and whimsy feels like the right impulse to follow.

WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Writing a review of Bang Face feels perverse because any attempt at analysis seems to miss the point. The most concise description I have heard for the frenetic, anarchic energy of Bang Face is as “the opposite of a safe space”. There is something dangerous about Bang Face, and a good litmus test for any counterculture is considering who wouldn’t feel comfortable there. I liked imagining a bemused Brendan O’Neill or Mark Corrigan trying to make sense of it (I’m Louis Theroux, I’m Louis Theroux…). So the crowd is a mix of people who feel like they belong nowhere else, with adult babies, gimps, and the clientele in general who can make the festival feel as bizarro as a comic book convention. I see goblins and aliens and a man attempting to attack people if it wasn’t for the leash round his neck held by a cosplaying anime school girl.

BANGUS MAXIMUS

With all that in mind, I’m a little struck at how professional it all feels. Despite its niche, Bang Face’s appeal has somehow managed to outgrow its baby clothes. Bang Face-at-Butlins has given the festival an elevated status that can feel a little above its station. As I enter the main entertainment pleasuredome, there are the familiar sweets of sin: arcades, fast food, and fairground rides. But at its centre, the first Bang Face act I see, The Acid Morris, an acid Morris dancing troupe, are doing some kind of workshop on horse husbandry, though no-one else around me seems to understand what is happening either. This is the kind of anarcho weirdness I associate with the festival, and the lavish surroundings make it seem all the weirder.

TRIAL OF THE GODS

The main room, ‘BANG ROOM’, is a good example of this. The cavernous space has ultra HD screens and a squeaky clean sound system. I think most of the artists at Bang Face are more familiar with sweaty basement raves and underground venues. But in the slick environment of the BANG ROOM, that same intensity takes on an almost exalted quality. Sets like that from Mandidextrous have their kicks and drops amplified to almost surreal proportions. The bigger names that the festival has grown to include, like SHERELLE, Special Request, Helena Hauff, test the limits of the system. One thing that is so special about Bang Face is that its notoriety for hard music invites DJs to bring their hardest records, to stretch the extremities of their own taste. You could go and see a familiar name, but hear their ‘Bang Face set’: the dirty dregs of the USB.

CLEAR HISTORY

Maybe this is why the extremists of yesteryear, like Dillinja and Luke Vibert, sounded so tame in comparison. There was a time this genre had its spiritual home at Bang Face. On most line ups, they would have been the most left field acts on the bill. But here, they seem old fashioned and predictable. Bang Face thrives on intensity, and when acts play it safe, it stands out. In the 90s, many of these artists came from a style nicknamed ‘drill & bass’, but Simon Reynolds quipped that it be better termed ‘droll & bass’ to capture its mischievous character. The prankish personality of those years seems to have laid the groundwork for so much of the festival’s ethos of fun and playfulness. Aphex Twin’s distorted grin seem to lurk around every corner.

BACK ONCE AGAIN WITH THE KRILL BEHAVIOUR

Indeed, Bang Face puts all other festivals to shame in how fun it is. Between sets, you could head to the beach, take to same crazy golf course, or go full holiday camp with go-karting and laser quest. There’s also the pool party, at the centre of which is a never-ending cycle of MDMA’d bodies swirling around as a DJ plays deafeningly loud trance edits. DJs like Spongebob Squarewave play the Squarepants theme into YMCA into Robbie William’s ‘Angels’. The Bang Face mantra seems to be: there is no such thing as progress without some carefully mediated regress. Hudson Mohawke closed Bang Face with an absolutely masterful set bringing together everything that is so good about this festival, closing with a breakneck version of Vengaboys’ ‘We Like to Party’. I’m left grinning uncontrollably.

I’VE FAILED MY FAMILY

The spirit of fun, hedonism, and openness also brings with it an important queerness. But this year there were also infamous reports of security guards physically abusing and ejecting trans attendees from toilets. The Bang Face organisers may want to brush this off as an issue with Butlin’s third party security team, or just an inevitable consequence of the rampant scaremongering around trans people in toilets today. The incident has now ballooned to the point that even JK Rowling has chimed in. Bang Face needs to reckon with this if it wants to maintain the inclusive renown it enjoys. The "opposite of a safe space” can ring true in every sense.

WE MUST IMAGINE SISYPHUS BANGING

Bang Face’s music exaggerates in volume and speed, and crucially its ability to fuse as many genres together as possible. One pundit tells me that Bang Face is the best festival because it contains all music, either in pastiche or earnest. There is a history of appreciating extremity in all its forms here — they even once hosted Napalm Death. I couldn’t help but compare my last experience at a music festival at Butlins, Bloc 2015, where I saw Dean Blunt perform a melon-twisting theatrical show of strobes, saxophones, smoke machines and noise. I would have loved a Sunn 0))) or a NAILS on the bill: to contain the festival’s own anomaly. Bang Face is a festival that takes fun very seriously, but it doesn’t always take itself seriously enough. But with this year’s theme as ‘myths and legends’, if you can't handle the festival at its most Dionysian, do you deserve it at its most Apollonian?

WHAT WE DO IN LIFE ECHOES IN ETERNITY

This is an element of Bang Face that I admit to struggling with. Through its pursuit of the ‘life’s a gas’ hedonism and humour, Bang Face eliminates any attempt at earnestness. This leads to an almost decidedly anti-political outlook that can have its limits. To take a comparative example, the last festival I attended was Sweden’s Norbergfestival, stylistically not too dissimilar in its appreciation of hardcore, gabber, and donk (though Norbergfestival is admittedly more ‘cool’ and chinstrokey than Bang Face). Norbergfestival hosted Palestinian artists, held discussion groups, and plastered the surroundings in flags and keffiyehs. At Bang Face, during IT’S BRITNEY’S BITCH, a Britney Spears remix show, the DJs chanted “First we free Britney, then she frees us.” This détournement of the Palestinian slogan gives a bit a bad taste in the mouth, especially with the festival’s positioning just before a grim anniversary.

WHY AM I CRYING?

The art critic Robert Hughes once critiqued Russian Constructivist art by asking, “What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?” Bang Face gives precedence of entertainment over any falsely lofty aspirations other festivals may want to signal. At its core, Bang Face promises no less than to offer a weekend full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. And isn’t that all we can really ask of a festival? At its worst, I want to grab it by the collar and tell it to grow up. But at its best, Bang Face succeeds in pleasing and amusing on an unparalleled scale. Applaud, friends, the comedy is over!

• Published
• Oct 13, 2024

• Credits
• Words by Georgie McVicar