Beautiful Days (festival)
| Beautiful Days | |
|---|---|
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| Genre | rock, alternative rock, folk, punk rock, dance, experimental |
| Dates | August |
| Location(s) | Escot Park, Ottery St Mary, Devon, England |
| Years active | 2003–present |
| Website | |
| http://www.beautifuldays.org | |
Beautiful Days is a music festival that takes place in August at Escot Park, near Ottery St Mary, Devon. The festival was founded by, and is managed by the band The Levellers and was first held in 2003. The festival has no corporate sponsorship or branding, leading to Virtual Festivals proclaiming it "the festival that sells out ... by not selling out". In 2011 Beautiful Days was pronounced "Best Family Festival" by the UK Festival Awards, later winning the "Grass Roots Festival Award" in 2015, as well as the "Best Medium Festival" award from FestivalKidz the same year. Every festival has sold out in advance and the current capacity is 17,500.
The Levellers began the festival at Escot Park in 2003, after a previous venture the Green Blade Festival ran into licensing difficulties. The Levellers' singer Mark Chadwick explained the thinking behind the ethos of the new festival in an interview with eFestivals
"The whole reason for doing it is that many festivals are shit. They just haven't got that right element of cultural exchange. We're trying to get that 'weirdness' back into festivals, which is the whole point of doing it ... as soon as the corporate hand sticks its tiniest bit in, they're fucked."
The festival is held on the third weekend of August, the same weekend as the V Festival; Chadwick stated that although this was not originally deliberate, he liked it because "the ethos of the festival is (the) antithesis of V."
Beautiful Days has a more diverse range of musical artists than many other festivals. Headline artists have included reggae (Lee "Scratch" Perry, The Wailers), alternative rock (James, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine), punk (The Stranglers, The Pogues), post-punk (Killing Joke, Public Image Ltd), country rock (Steve Earle), folk rock (Frank Turner), dance (Leftfield) and blues (Seasick Steve). A number of acts from outside the US and UK which may be less familiar to festival crowds are booked each year; in recent years these have included Tinariwen (Mali), Seeed (Germany), Katzenjammer (Norway), Dubioza kolektiv (Bosnia) and Hoffmaestro (Sweden). Traditionally, The Levellers open the festival with an acoustic set in the Big Top on Friday afternoon, and close it by headlining the main stage on Sunday, followed by a firework display.
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Wikipedia