Connect Festival 

Royal Highland Centre

****

 

It was billed as the music festival for mature music fans that was launched with a bang 15 years ago with big names such as the Beastie Boys, Bjork and Primal Scream.

But despite winning a Best New Event award in 2008 and attracting 15,000 festival goers in each of its three days it made initial losses and disappeared in 2009.

Organisers blamed high running costs and the effects of the financial crisis of 2007–2010 featuring the big banks bailout.

This weekend DF Concerts, the organisers of T in the Park and TRNSMT festivals staged the resurrected Connect 2022 style having promised some of the "biggest names in the world" when first suggesting the idea.

It was billed as an "entirely new festival experience but retains many of the qualities of its namesake from 2007 & 2008" - including another crowd of up to 15,000.

It attracts less than a third of the TRNSMT audience - but with arguably a more eclectic offering appealing to those who want to hear more challenging and inventive artists.

The big change is the venue. While the grounds of Inveraray Castle on the banks of Loch Fyne were originally picked for its unrivalled beauty, the fringes of Scotland's capital are definitely rivalled.

Instead of being out in the wilds, in 2022, the semi-rural environs of the Royal Highland Centre is the venue for this weekend of music and arts.

Camping can be done, but not with your own tent and the toilets are by and large clean. Making this the festival for those who don't like festivals.

It probably could not have got off to a worse start though.

With Friday headliners, trip-hopsters Massive Attack, unable to play, socially-aware punk kings Idles took their place amidst calls for refunds.   They were initially turned down, but then accepted.

At the end of a rainy first day there were huge areas of emptiness on the main stage at the Royal Highland Centre Showground and no more than 2000 hardy souls watching Joe Talbot and co explode through a taster of their back catalogue from a manic Never Fight A Man With A Perm to 'crowd' favourite Danny Nedelko.

They may be one of the most exciting rock bands live around, but perhaps have little crossover love from fans of Massive Attack.

Those who did not show for the first day missed a festival highlight - a mesmerising and intimate set featuring the soaring vocals of actress Jessie Buckley and the effortless guitar mastery of former Suede man Bernard Butler. Sometimes sat on a tiny sofa on what looked like a makeshift stage, and sometimes trying to avoid Butler's head going through the cotton sheeted roof, they are a compelling combination both musically and personally.

Saturday brought the sun and far greater numbers with geeky electro-dance kings The Chemical Brothers the big draw.

Homegrown talent is a feature of the festival - but it was a surprise arrival that produced probably the most engaging performance of the whole weekend.

Scots singer-songwriter Kathryn Joseph took the place of a cancelled Low before the arrival of the Chemicals and her stark songs of "abusive c*nts" were brought to life live.

Her in-song persona was commonly sat in front of a piano giving death stares to the audience while spitting out words such as: "Are you bleeding out onto the floor, into my mouth? Are you screaming out into the dark of your inside?"

But while songs like Of All The Broken are dark and bewitching, when she finishes there is a smile, a "thank you" and crackling humour providing nuance to this intense but captivating parade of oft-bleak poetry.

"I played Jupiter Rising [a small Scots art and music festival], sober I don't recommend it," she quips.

Elsewhere she refers to herself as an "old lady getting away with it".

And as people  made their way to the main stage for Bonobo she giggled and said: " “I don’t blame you, that band probably knows their notes."

The Chemicals may not leap around the stage like it was on fire, like Idles, but their mixing, mashing, enticing sample teases and big tunes from a breathless Block Rockin Beats, an intoxicating bass riffed Go and the exhilarating Hey Boy Hey Girl sent the crowd into a state of delerium, it seemed. Or was it just me?

What sets the duo apart is the visuals, including on-screen monsters turning into evil magicians shooting out laser beams into the audience, and enormous gigantic moving robots – providing an incredible visual experience.

Scots post-rock overlords Mogwai have to play second fiddle on Sunday to headliners US indie combo The National but produce probably the highlight of the whole three days with an effortless, single-minded set of mainly instrumental light-and-shade distortion brilliance. One of their most recent releases, Ritchie Sacramento may be one of their more accessible tracks with singalong lyrics, but it retains the essence of their edgeiness. Surely a band that can be described now as a national treasure.

The National with new music to sell and headlining on the final night, are an oft downbeat offering but swaggering anthems like the glorious Bloodbuzz Ohio and the underrated The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness become impossible to de-earworm. If you were allowed to have lighters they would be often aloft.

They even had time for a 'secret' acoustic session on a stage devoted to the charity Tiny Changes, the charity a formed in memory of tragic Frightened Rabbit front man Scott Hutchison.

Aaron Dessner, founding member of The National said: "Scott was a really close friend of ours, and like you guys, we were huge fans of Frightened Rabbit. We were devastated when he left. This charity is amazing, and any awareness we can raise for mental health, we want to do that because we all struggle with it.”

The Herald:

Rewind 13 years and concerns that audience numbers and sponsorship would decline, and the cost of covering policing and the diesel to transport equipment to the Connect site at Inveraray Castle, led DF Concerts to put the festival on ice, and a planned relaunch in 2010 failed to materialise.

High infrastructure and servicing costs, combined with an older audience more likely to have been affected by expensive mortgages and redundancies during the credit crunch rather than the typical 18- to 25-year-old festival-goer, prompted the organisers to intitially temporarily pull the plug rather than "compromise the festival's high standards and disappoint fans".

So with the cost of living crisis more than echoing the credit crunch of 14 years ago and the disappointing numbers on Friday - could we be losing Connect again? It seems not. Next year it will return.

Speaking of the future, event manager Katt Lingard said: "It’s a little early for us to be looking too far ahead but we can’t wait to hear feedback from fans this weekend. It’s going to be an amazing three days with some very special moments throughout. We’re excited about curating the line-up for 2023 already.

“After many months of planning, we’re so glad to have finally relaunched Connect Festival and what an incredible comeback weekend we’ve had. With a fantastic line-up of over 80 artists across six stages and thousands of incredible fans every day - it’s been special.

"We’re already thinking of ways to make it even better and I’d like to thank the artists, the fans and everyone who has worked extremely hard behind the scenes to make this festival happen. I can’t wait for next year already.”

Asked about why Connect had made a return, she said: "It is something we’ve been looking at for a long time but wanted the overall experience to be just right. A lot has changed in the festival market since the last Connect, and festival goers have different expectations since 2008.

"The overall offering needs to be broader, adding to the draw of the line-up. Whether its restaurant quality food or areas to relax, take part in yoga or some of the most memorable surprise intimate performances they’ll ever experience, we’re building a festival which lets fans immerse themselves in a unique and extraordinary celebration of music and the arts.

A spokesman for Connect added: “Ticket sales across the weekend are broadly in line with expectations given it is the first year of the event, with Saturday and Sunday being our two busiest days.

“The site is like nothing Scotland has seen before - it's so beautiful and is one of the most sustainable festival sites in Scotland.

"Feedback from festival goers has been so wonderful and we can't wait to do it all again next year."