How To Boomtown

Out of all the festivals in the calendar, Boomtown has established itself in a relatively short time as possibly the most outrageously enjoyable. If you know someone who has been, they have no doubt frantically been screaming in an almost drunken stupour about just how bloody great it is and how you simply have to come this year. In the belief that most of you value your friends opinions and are in fact in possesion of a ticket and are either a rookie Boomtownian or an absolute virgin we are compiling a list of suggestions that will allow you to truly maximise your enjoyment of the worlds craziest town.

1. Dress the fuck up

Dress in your casuals at your own peril. Boomtown is the kind of twisted alternate reality that punishes the normality that permeates our dimension. Wearing “normal” clothes will identify you as a target, because even those who arn’t employed by Boomtown to go around tripping balls and larping around, are tripping balls and larping around and the people they like to harass most are the ones who they can make squirm! So dress normal if you want to be fawned over by a group of topless girls dressed as top hats, spat upon by a bunched of rummed up pirates or taken under the wing of a skeletal ringmaster who needs extra bodies for his circus. See if you are already dressed up as a character yourself you become immune, because you are then incompatible and safe from their crazy. The only exception to this is when two people dressed as the same character meet, the paradox requires a duel to the death, instantly!

On top of all that Boomtown offers a person the chance to leave their regular self behind and become something more than that… which is highly advisable because your normal self sucks anyway. So dress up goddammit.

2. Make a plan: to have no plan

Boomtown rewards the thrillseeker, the impomptu, the freespirit. You can have a good weekend if you bring an itinerary and plan out what you will do each day, hit up every one of the bands you want to see and give yourself a gold sticker for each thing you tick off the list. But you will have an epic weekend if you just relax and go with the flow bro. So, make vague plans, but have nothing set in stone, because Boomtown will throw random at you like a monkey flings poop (unexpectantly frequent).  So be like water… or just be really high and easily distracted, either way give in to amazement and temptation.

3. Go Columbus on that shit

Some of the greatest parts of the festival are unannounced pop up activities and secret or crowd generated jam sessions. The town is full of doors, most of them open, sometimes it’s to a backstage area where you will either be thrown out or end up in an orgy with NOFX, but most of the times these doors simply lead to a peculiar place with something odd but magnificent happening within. Do not be afraid to just walk around Boomtown like it is your duty to map out every nook and cranny, in fact it is encouraged.

4. Feed your head

To survive at Boomtown you need to have common sense, for starters they let you camp literally anywhere you want. Whilst jumping for joy at such a beautiful and freeing prospect the idiot in you might think “oh boy, I wasn’t gonna sleep anyway, I’ll set up shop right next to my favorite stage”. No. Incorrect idiot, don’t do that. Don’t sleep where everyone else is happy to shit, not literally… well maybe, but you get the picture. Another fine example would be in your attitude towards drugs, if you are an experienced and wordly psychotropic cosmonaut then knock yourself out, but to all the newbies out there, maybe a festival isn’t the best place to go dabbling, yeah that guy in the Fred The Flintstone outfit was awful nice giving you a free baggy of mysterious bedrock, but that doesn’t mean you have to guzzle it like it was poprocks and then go and die/freakout/become a liability. Boomtown is such a trippy fuckfest of surreal anyhow that you can quite easily do the entire weekend sober and feel like you dropped a Hunter S Thompson dosage of sunshine acid. Basically, don’t be a moron, know your limits, party hard.

5. Enjoy some goddamn music

It is very easy to become sidetracked and lost at Boomtown, it is equally easy to find yourself stuck at just one stage. Last year we found that we barely left the Devil Kicks Dancehall due to the fact that Last Gang In Town went and basically bloody booked every last one of our favorite bands. We managed to pull ourselves away under the guise of journalistic integrity but we know the pain you will face. The scope of the expansive and encompassing line up is mind blowing, from dub and reggae, to pirate folk, punk and ska to world music and hip hop. Boomtown really has it all, as you wander around if you hear a balkan beat that grabs your earhole or a thrilling timbre that tickles your fancy, follow it, go in, dance and enjoy it my friend. Finding great new music at Boomtown is criminally easy, but if you needed a couple hints, we will leave you with a couple of the bands we will -try- not too miss.

Demented Are Go
Devil Kicks Dancehall

Last year they put on a performance so goddamn wretchedly enchanting that through some kind of voodoo we wouldn’t be able to skip this set if we wanted to.

Russkaja
Town Centre

They had us as soon as they described their sound as “Russian Turbo Polka Metal”. Performing firmly with their tongues in their cheek this band will rip through a set that is sure to leave the crowd in danger of dancing themselves to death.

Mad Sin
Devil Kicks Dancehall

Putting on a show that will be just as hair raising as the riffs and spine tingling as the bass thumps. There will be fire spitters, there will be madness, there will be prosthetics, there will be a fucking radical time.

Adam Kammerling
Wandering Word

Adam is a poet, rapper and general quick witted, loose lipped, whisky stink creative. Giving off the relaxed but radical energy one would expect from a Bukowski or Ginsberg type character. Go watch him talk words real good.

Easy Star All Stars
Lions Den

If you’re a fan or Pink Floyd or a fan of reggae, most of us are a bit of both. So this rendition of Dub Side Of The Moon in it’s whole will go down a goddamn treat.

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There are plenty more choice picks but we wouldn’t want to bore you, so take a gander at the line up yourselves and let us know what you’re stoked for.

There are a limited amount of Boomtown 2014 tickets still on sale which you can buy here. Alternatively if you don’t mind working for your weekend, they are still after bar volunteers.

See you at Boomtown folks.