AN enormous guitar is burning, the body, neck and strings wreathed in leaping flames. Inside, little notes containing the scribbled wishes of children blacken and curl, and join the ashes soaring into the summer night sky.
It's Saturday night at Solfest, near Silloth on the Cumbrian coast, and this crackling pyre is just one of many things going on across a compact but busy festival site.
I am old now and generally spend my weekends pulling up rogue willowherb in the garden, railing against woke nonsense and erecting shelves. But I was curious about Solfest. It's late in the season, a last hurrah for music festivals before the autumn chill descends. And the line-up was stuffed with acts I like. So why not go along?
Things kick off on the Thursday but regrettably I'm not able to join until the next day, squeezing my car down the narrow lanes of the Solway coast, wondering if I'm going the right way. Can it be this remote? It can. The site, when it first heaves into view, is quite beautiful. A sea of lights, a glowing fairground ride, the spires of the huge circus-style tent which houses the main stage.
The line-up was bursting with interest but personally Doves were a massive draw. I realised I've been a fan for 25 years. Their debut, Lost Souls, is a special album. Even now, when the conditions are right, listening to it can take me back to the first time I heard it, at the turn of the millenium, a young teen in a darkened bedroom. The dense production, the mournful guitars, the sombre voices… it conjured in my youthful mind a dark place, rain-sodden, gloomy and devoid of hope. It’s only as an adult I’ve learned that this imagined place is, in fact, real, and has a name: Wilmslow, Cheshire.
Their debut is well represented in the Solfest set list but some of the main highlights come from their later albums: a superb Carousels with its Tony Allen-inspired drumming, an atmospheric Cold Dreaming from this year's Constellations of the Lonely. Doves are cinematic songwriters and Jez Williams wrings extraordinary sounds from his guitar.
They finish with an exultant There Goes The Fear, complete with bonkers percussive coda, and a thumping Black and White Town. And then, quite sublimely, Williams grunts 'Sub Sub track', and these indie rockers launch into the full-on dance anthem Space Face from their pre-Doves project, and transport the audience to the Haçienda.
On Saturday I drift for a while. It's a good festival for drifting. It's a small festival but packs an almighty punch in terms of stuff to do. People are lounging in the blissed out Palais de Phonix tent. Next door, the Tarns Dub tent is a temple of house, jungle, grime, hip-hop and drum 'n' bass. On the main stage, the crowd is bouncing to the punky Celtic folk of Three Daft Monkeys.
Prices on site are fair. A pint of Carlsberg is a fiver, while it's a little more for a fancy Brooklyn's. Cheaper than most festivals, I'd guess. Festival food, meanwhile, has come a long way from the trays of expensive slop you'd get 20 years ago. An intriguing array of food trucks encircles the Solfest site selling jerk chicken, pizza, burritos, curries, donuts, ice cream and crepes. The busiest of the trucks appears to be Primal Feasts, which sits beside a huge wood fire stacked high with slowly charring chickens.
Nature surrounds the Solfest site and is constantly there, in the background. There are sunset views over the Solway to Galloway, and glimpses of Cumbrian mountains. At one point, a vast skein of geese flies overhead in a V shape, stretched across the darkening sky, fleeing far from the festival. Maybe they are starting migration. Or maybe they'd heard about the Primal Feasts stall.
Look, it's true that festival gigs can be tough for performers. Crowds are fickle, and numbers ebb and flow massively through the day. At one point, I was stood watching a very good soul-inflected rock band. Turning round, I realised the crowd pretty much consisted of myself and two young boys dressed as bears, who were playing tig. It was great to experience such an intimate set, but I also felt slightly exposed. There was certainly no polite way of checking the Arsenal-Leeds score on my phone.
Mercifully, the place filled up later in the set. On the main stage, things got busier still for the homegrown talents of Silloth-raised Dub Princess, who has the place bouncing with heavy, soulful dub beats and call-and-response numbers like Too Much Juggling. Dub is great because you can dance to it while holding a drink.
Up and coming indie outfit the Sherlocks sound on the cusp of seriously big things. Of course, being a guitar band from Sheffield, they are going to earn comparisons to the Arctic Monkeys. And why not? The crowd is well into it - one man climbs onto his friend's shoulders and lets off a flare. The Sherlocks play Carlisle's Old Fire Station on November 19 and it promises to be a belter.
For Saturday night headliners Leftfield the place was properly heaving. This was house music of real intensity, miles better live than on record. Their debut album, Leftism, is widely seen as a key touchstone in UK dance music to rival anything by their peers The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. Vocalists come on live during the set to guest on tracks. They end on Phat Planet and the crowd goes wild.
This is a chilled, family-friendly festival with a kids' area for the little ones. Sure, it doesn't have some of the things that bigger festivals like the BBC's beloved Glastonbury have. I didn't hear a single death chant, for one. No tedious posturing flags too. That's not to say it's apolitical exactly. But the chants from the stages are for peace, love and freedom, and who can object to that?
All are welcome here, and you see all sorts wandering round the site. Earth mothers wearing hemp skirts. Older gentlemen with immaculately sculpted beards and wizard robes. Normcore blokes with backpacks. Blue hairs. People in sensible fleeces. Youths in trackies who probably scream at passing cyclists while joy riding round Carlisle in the passenger seat of their friend's Citroen Saxo. All welcome. All embraced.
The next day dawns and it's immediately apparent that it's a peach of a day. The Solway might not be named after Sol, the Roman sun god (see Wikipedia for the true etymology of the firth's name) but it appears He is among us nonetheless. It's Sunday after all.
On the main stage, the Antics - another homegrown group, this time from Wigton - sound great. It's early and people are still trickling into the site but on this showing you'd be mad to miss their Brickyard gig in Carlisle on September 26.
On a sunny Sunday at a music festival, you need somewhere to lounge, and the Drystone stage could be the ideal place. People set up deckchairs and work through hangover cures. On the stage, three guys deliver a set of chilled electro, and a buzzard circles lazily high above.
At every festival, you miss much more than you see. My major regret from Solfest is that I couldn't stay for Mandrake Handshake, a band who have been on my radar for a while, who were scheduled for the wee hours of Monday morning. Their album Earth-Sized Worlds, which came out in February, has never been far from my stereo in the months since its release.
But I couldn't stay. Childcare and other real-world responsibilities pulled me away. That willowherb won't clear itself.
What a blast this festival is. Friendly, down-to-earth, fun. A joyful farewell to the festival season. Driving home, easing the car back down those wiggly Solway roads past trees beginning to turn brown, I thought about another summer coming to an end, and that great burning guitar which had carried those children's wishes up into the sky among the ashes and sparks.
"Catch the sun before it's gone," a certain group of dour Wilmslow musicians once sang in what might be a paean to seizing the day. "Here it comes, up in smoke, and gone."
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