Latitude Festival 2021: 'It's like living inside a memory'

There was a moment during the Chemical Brothers’ storming set at Latitude – the first major festival to open at full capacity since the pandemic shutdown last year – when it really felt as though the great British summer festival season was back on its feet. As the electronic duo blasted the Suffolk fields with their squelchy, Nineties block-rocking beats, a double flash of lightning lit the sky – a special effect that briefly put their own spectacular light show to shame. Then the rain started to fall. But instead of fleeing for shelter, the crowd roared even louder, tipped their heads back and danced like lunatics set free from the asylum.

It would take more than a spot of inclement weather to wipe the smiles off the faces of Latitude’s revellers Indeed, smiles were everywhere, as the unmasked hordes intermingled with a dazed joy that, over the weekend, grew from dreamy discombobulation into full-on, all-in-it-together optimism.

Here, once more, were people queuing for beers and burgers (well, craft lager and hummus wraps, Latitude being the most unapologetically middle-class festival in the land) with no attempt at social distancing. Strangers struck up conversations with their camping neighbours; vast crowds danced in giddy delight to actual flesh-and-blood musicians; near-feral kids with painted faces scampered about collecting returnable beer cups in huge stacks to make pocket money to blow on candyfloss and ice cream.

“It’s quite surreal,” said Gaz Coombes of Supergrass as he looked out from the Obelisk stage on a Saturday-morning crowd bathed in sunshine. “It’s like living inside a memory. But it’ll come back to us.” The Britpop quartet were always a good band to get the party started. Here, they led tens of thousands in a hearty singalong of their 1995 smash Alright, the 45-year-old Coombes roaring “We are young! We run green! Keep our teeth nice and clean!” without irony or embarrassment. “Still not a bad little song,” he noted, correctly.

Another Britpop veteran could be found on a floating stage on the small lake at the centre of the 4,000-acre site, after arriving for his performance on a punt guided by a gondolier. Ever a quixotic performer, Damon Albarn, the 53-year-old mastermind of Blur and Gorillaz, led nine musicians, including a string quartet, through an atmospheric, groovy set of obscure or as-yet-unreleased solo songs, mixed with just a handful of shining hits from the softer side of his back catalogue. When a hum of electronic feedback overwhelmed the sound system, he cheekily asserted that it was a “new ambient water piece” he was working on. Even the sound of upbeat dance collective Rudimental echoing down the valley from their simultaneous set on the main stage could not put Albarn off his stride. “It’s wonderful when all the different worlds come together,” he said, smiling graciously. “This is a proper festival!”

Indeed, the whole thing felt like a hugely welcome return to our music-loving nation’s great communal ritual for letting off steam. Everyone present at the festival (part of the Government’s dubious Events Research Programme) had to show proof of a negative lateral flow test – which, in theory at least, made this gathering of 40,000 just about the safest spot in the country. Not all passed: Fontaines DC, the passionate Irish rockers had to withdraw after one of the band tested positive.
Still, there was no stopping this party, and on Friday night Wolf Alice reigned supreme. The dynamic quartet have risen from the north London pub circuit in a few short years, and their swaggering, seductive set surely proved that they now belong among Britain’s rock elite. In a short black dress and matching guitar, frontwoman Ellie Rowsell came across as a fabulous mix of Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde with a dash of PJ Harvey on the side.

There is such a compelling balance of forces at work in Wolf Alice: sweet and sour, soft and hard, feminine and masculine, folk and grunge, melodiousness and heavy metal attack – that it keeps everything shifting in interesting ways. Their songs aren’t obviously singalong material but the huge crowd sang along anyway. “Latitude, we’re very f------ emotional right now,” admitted bassist Theo Ellis. The feeling was entirely mutual.