In The Woods

A few weeks ago I volunteered to be an assistant engineer at the small, "secret" festival In The Woods, started by a guy called Charlie from the band Laurel Collective. It's in its seventh year and it's very impressive. It was sold out with about 750 tickets. It has two main stages, a poetry stage, a barn for small sessions, a movie tent, a silent disco and a massive bonfire.

I was working on the 2nd stage. Our music started at 12:30. We were soon faced with power cuts as the generator failed. We had to postpone but after a while everything was back on track. There were some great bands with huge varieties of equipment that meant each change around was a bit hectic.

The band in the photo is Nordic Giants. They arrived with quite an entourage; two band members, a couple of tech support and their own sound engineer. We had to strip the whole stage and they moved all of their equipment on, quite unusual. But it soon made some sense as they turned out to be a interesting multimedia project with film and live music and lights all in sync.

Other notable acts on our stage were Stealing Sheep, Tanya Auclair and Eska. There was also a secret set from a band called Man Like Me, who I hadn't heard of but got a great reception. The main stage had the only band I had previously heard of: Dog Is Dead. It was headlined by Alt J. Both of these groups had played at last weekend's Reading Festival