Farr Festival 2017 review: Great guests but erratic sound in beautiful Hertfordshire

Floating Points, Helena Hauff and Sad City were among the big draws at the eighth edition

The boutique festival’s strong line-up was let down by persistent sound problems (Khris Cowley)

Farr Festival, which last weekend held a successful if by no means flawless eighth annual edition, may happen only half an hour north of King’s Cross, but it feels far more distant.

The festival’s home is Bygrave Wood, a small forest in isolated farmland 10 minutes’ drive (but at least an hour’s walk) from the market town of Baldock in Hertfordshire.

It’s a beautiful and surprisingly isolated-feeling environment for a festival so close to the capital, though in both of the years I’ve attended its relative remoteness has become a source of slight concern when attempting to leave, due to the unwillingness of many local taxi drivers to venture there in the middle of the night.

Nevertheless, Farr is a pleasingly compact and visually delightful festival. Its site is split roughly in two, with three of its largest stages (Adventures In Success, The Shack and the Hidden Palace) situated under trees, and an open area with four more stages (The Factory, Campfire Headphase, Brilliant Corners and The Shala), excellent food and drink trucks and lovely sunset views over the meadows.

Floating Points playing at The Shack on Sunday morning (Khris Cowley)

Local noise restrictions have been an issue at previous editions of Farr and this year was no exception, despite deals apparently having been struck with the police and local residents (or relatively local – not a single house is actually visible from Farr’s main site). The problem reared its head periodically over the weekend, though it was constant on the Adventures In Success stage, rendering sets from a frustratingly excellent list of names including Helena Hauff, Ivan Smagghe, Young Marco and Suzanne Kraft virtual write-offs.

The most jarring and disappointing example of all came during Floating Points’ DJ set early on Sunday morning at The Shack, and resulted in one of the world’s great soul and disco collections being reduced to a pointless, tinny whisper. “There’s nothing more depressing as a DJ than looking out and seeing nobody dancing,” a friend who had played earlier said to me as Floating Points, through no fault of his own, looked out on precisely that. Bygrave Wood has been Farr’s home since the beginning and is clearly special to its organisers, but a move elsewhere may eventually be necessary if its sound offering can’t be significantly improved.

Organisation is another area Farr could do with upping its game on: getting stuck on the site in the early hours is a real concern for anyone not camping, and more than once I saw groups of festivalgoers huddled disconsolately waiting for transport. Farr is a relatively small festival and a certain amount has to be forgiven, but word travels about this sort of thing, and Farr would do well to invest some of the money from this year’s record crowds (6,700 were on site on the Saturday) into improvements for the next event.

Campfire Headphase was one of Farr’s most interesting stages (Khris Cowley)

For all that, Farr had its share of wonderful moments too. Joyous sets by Adesse Versions, Omar-S and Mr G at the Hidden Palace stage were played out at reasonable volumes to large, buoyant crowds, and life was similarly good over at the Campfire Headphase tent (named, of course, after a Boards of Canada album).

A weekend-long identity crisis aside – the tent was billed as an “ambient” area, but walking past it brought pounding kick drums into earshot as often as it did wafting pads and samples – the tent was generally an intimate treat, with energetic sets from John Swing and Rising Sun among the highlights.

5am on Saturday morning was a peculiar time to suddenly revert to the stage’s original ambient raison d’etre via the wonderful, samples-and-loops-heavy music of Glasgow producer Sad City. When the floor finally cleared of those waiting in increasing frustration for the drop, however, his show unfolded into one of the weekend’s best.

Farr Festival is run by a lovely bunch of people with excellent taste in music who are doing this for all the right reasons. None of its problems are insurmountable, but they do need to be seriously addressed if it aspires to recognition as a truly vital stop on the summer festival circuit.