The background
Being an adult is surprisingly hard.
Yes, as an adult, you’ve got what are in the grand scheme of things relatively minor issues to deal with – such as council tax, utility bills, and an ever-expanding list of troublesome health ailments – but outstripping all of these irks by far has to be managing your social calendar.
Now, to be clear, the Bristol Beats Club are far from popular in social situations.
Yep, through an expert combination of cunning and selfishness, we’ve managed to keep our social circle pretty small.
Even so, when it came to checking out which festivals we might be dropping into over the summer this year, we were aghast to find a diary filled with invitations to weddings – 100% of which were to be abroad, obviously – plus requests to show up at birthday parties, family gatherings, and, perhaps most depressingly of all, a life partner’s doctoral graduation.
We’d wanted to get over to Nass Festival – an intriguing celebration of street culture down in the West Country – for a good while prior. How, though, would we fit in our planned jaunt when we’d months beforehand accepted an invitation to a camping weekend marking a relative once again completing an arbitrary loop around the sun?
In the end, there was only one option: the Bristol Beats Club bailed on the camping weekend after a fleeting, mediocre appearance on the Friday evening. Nass Festival, we professed, was more important.
Many ‘friends’ seemed angry. At least, that’s the hope. A stubborn enough grudge, we figured, might see us cut from future camping guest lists altogether.
To up our odds, we keyed a friend’s car while leaving, then flipped them the bird as we drove into the distance. And just like that, off to Nass Festival we went!
The vibe
Nass festival officially kicked off on the Thursday.
Arriving on the Thursday would for sure have been wise. On the Thursday, early revellers set up camp in the blazing sun. The Bristol Beats Club, of course, skipped the customary early entry… and therefore missed the glorious weather punters were treated to not just on Thursday, but on the Friday, too.
In exchange, we arrived to weather much more fitting for July in the UK: thick clouds of various greying shades, on-and-off drizzle and, of course, sudden, heavy downpours.
Weather aside though, arriving at Nass – late – was actually pretty easy. Nass’s on-site staff had clearly worked out the drill over the previous couple of days, and they had us parked up smoothly following expert directions that made full use of the now festival-essential app What Three Words.
We parked up, paused til a dry spell opened up, then jumped out to take in our surrounds. It was immediately clear that this was a festival unlike all others.
Bucket hats. So many of bucket hats.
Worn by girls. By guys. Out of context. And, apparently, without irony.
Dudes appeared from cars shirtless and wearing sunnies, which begged the question: is that how they looked when they left the house?
Strangest of all was the popular fashion combination adorned by Insta-influenced dudettes: bucket hat, bikini top, and a net mini skirt layered over a thong. QED.
The fashion choices – along with a nearby shouting match between a punter who’d taken a wrong turn and a steward who’d subsequently slapped said punters car – suggested Nass was going to offer us an interesting time.
We followed one of the asses to the box office, wondering if bailing on the camping trip had been a terrible mistake.
The entrance
Nass festival, by the way, has some pretty strict policies.
Most concern what you can and can’t take along to the festival, and most are obvious: no drugs, no knives, no plans to overthrow the aristocracy. Some policies, however, seem like they need to be highlighted.
Specifically, you’re not allowed to take spirits to Nass. Sneaking in glass, also, is against Nass regulations. We’d read this in some of the information we’d been sent beforehand but, what with the camping weekend, we hadn’t particularly prepared for Nass in peak state of mind.
And that meant we were rocking up the Nass entrance with a glass bottle of tequila and a big old glass bottle of gin in the Bristol Beats Club coolbox – and the searches ahead seemed pretty thorough. When we saw what the guys were confiscating ahead, panic set in.
We ducked out of line for some last minute rearranging.
“Sir, is this coolbox yours?” asked a lovely lady as we passed through the entrance gates. Why yes, we assured her, it was, and yes, of course she had our permission to search it. There’s nothing untoward to be found in there! Just your classic festival combo of two massive bottles of chilled tonic water, ice, limes, cucumbers, strawberries and absolutely no gin anywhere in sight! Happy?
“Sir, you can’t take this in,” she said.
The Beats Club froze.
“You’re not allowed to take glass into the festival,” she said, picking out a glass Keep Cup we’d brought along for our morning coffee. Our assailant asked if we wanted to take our cup back to the car but, knowing that’d mean running the gauntlet a second time, we simply declined, accepted the confiscation, and waltzed on in to our first taste of Nass proper, a Keep Cup down but with booze in tow.
It was at that point the unmistakable stench of high-strength marijuana – a stench we’d be unable to escape for a single second while at Nass – hit us square in the face.
It’s possible the searches aren’t as thorough as Nass make out.
The USP
One of the most interesting things about Nass is its celebration of ‘street’ culture.
At Nass, you’ll find skate competitions, BMX brawls, and graffiti stations littered around the arena (and, it turns out, the campsite… although the legitimacy of the latter remains unclear). On paper, to those not particularly into the scene, all the street stuff probably sounds pretty naff. But it’s clear Nass’s USP gives even indifferent punters something other than music to delve into. Those into skating and whatnot can’t fail be taken aback by tricksters 360 hardflipping Red Bull’s roadgap… and those not so into the scene will find the feats more impressive still. Once we had our tent up, it was Nass’s street scene the Bristol Beats Club began to explore, heading over to the mini-ramp looking for fun.
We were hoping to see backflipping BMXers, or maybe Tony Hawk. So when we stumbled upon a bunch of people wheelie-ing on mountain bikes from which front wheels had been discarded, we were a bit perplexed. It seemed obvious to onlookers that it was only a matter of time before one of the competing idiots lost their balance, slammed onto their front forks and died.
Hoping to witness a viral fail video live, we stuck around for a bit, but once it became obvious that the shirtless riders – terrified as they were of playing out their certain death – were pretty much abandoning their bikes en masse within seconds of getting going, we moved on.
The skating
Red Bull’s Road Gap was definitely not the reason we first became interested in Nass.
To be honest, as we wandered over to check it out and the stage’s (if you could call it that) MC (if you could call him that) asked a still-far-to-sober-for-interaction crowd to embrace, we were even more skeptical. But as there remains no other festival on the circuit in which punters can watch decent skaters, the Bristol Beats Club ploughed on!
Behind a small, fenced-off area, two quarter pipes flanked an artificial trench, and skaters were sequentially dropping in before pulling some kind of manoeuvre over said trench. Whenever they did something particularly exciting, the MC gave them cash, straight up, like human performing monkeys.
In fairness, the skaters were landing impressive moves fairly frequently, and we were pleased to note that there was more to this whole street thing than the petrified, wheelie-ing, failing mountain bikers. Before long, our increasingly blurred vision was struggling to keep up with the skaters. We were enjoying ourselves! Then, inevitably, the heavens opened and everyone watching ran for cover.
As far as we could tell, the contest ceased.
The arena
Most UK festivals, as you’ll know, take place in farms, on grass.
There are no roads in said fields, which means a quick downpour is all it takes for you to be wondering round amongst floating cow shit. But at Nass, the rain really wasn’t a problem!
That’s because Nass takes place at Shepton Mallet showground. The Bristol Beats Club are still unsure of precisely what a showground actually is, but countryside folk seem to suggest it’s where farmers quite literally show off ‘beautiful’ livestock. (Which is probably where the rumours come from.) Whether or not that’s true, it turns out showgrounds make for ideal festival venues because… roads! Trees! Shelters! And fields! When the sun’s out, sure, bounce up and down on grass that, unlike Lollapalooza Berlin, won’t destroy your knees. When it’s not, head under trees! Get into a barn-like shelter! Take your chance and enjoy an elongated trip to a plumbed-in (yep!) toilet. And, post-rain, you can roam around the festival still in your Converse by sticking to the tarmac roads that connect key festival landmarks.
And that’s exactly what we did once the rain had eased a bit. Clearly, in England in July, we probably weren’t over the worst of it, but did that really matter if we were in a barn – a permanent, physical structure – with a roof over our head? We figured not.
Which is exactly how we ended up watching the women’s and girl’s Prop Park skate contest while foregoing Biig Piig’s mainstage set. We were dry, which was a plus. And, in the Prop Park, the continuous stench of weed did briefly abate. Still, as that was only because the smell of sheep piss was more maringally more pungent, we weren’t particularly keen to stick around. Once the droplets on the barn’s tin roof became fewer and further between, we decided to check out some of Nass’s music.
Some music
We arrived at the Easy Life set early and armed with our dancing converse.
We were excited. This was, for the Bristol Beats Club, the act to see. It was also the act that would clearly segue the festival from day time to debauchery; the act that somehow seems to kick things off. The act that, in post, imparts the feeling that, oh yes, now we’re going.
I hate to break it to you, Beats Clubbers, be we left the Easy Life set bitterly disappointed.
When the band eventually made it on stage, they were, all told, around half an hour late. They apologised for the ‘fuckery’ and explained all of their gear had been caught in the downpour – which was entirely understandable – but the devastating thing about playing festivals is there is simply no room for imprecision. The next act must come on. As Lana Del Rey proved at Glastonbury, should the schedule slip, someone gets cut off. And that meant Easy Life played a set cut dismally short. Worse, it was cut short to make way for what you could only describe as pop sensation Anne Marie, which, we were about to find out, was simply salt in our wounds.
More music
Regular Beats Club listeners will almost certainly be unfamiliar with Anne Marie.
Her music isn’t exactly the stuff we tend to cover. Still, she’s for sure got some bangers in her arsenal, and given everything had gone a little bit woozy by the time she strolled onto the Nass festival main stage, we saw no real harm in sticking around. In trotting said bangers out one by one, Anne Marie kept a swelling Nass crowd entertained.
But there was no doubt the crowd were witnessing a manufactured act. If ‘witnessing’ is even the correct term: for the most part, those around the Beats Club weren’t so much watching the set as they were filming it through their phones.
The whole debacle, if we’re honest, had us feeling a bit sad, although even we couldn’t hold back laughter when Anne Marie rolled out Clean Bandit’s Rockabye.
Yep, Anne Marie sang on the original track, of course, alongside Sean Paul. Sean Paul, though, was not at Nass festival. In such circumstances, normal behaviour would surely be to play the track Paul-less. What you absolutely must not do is play the vocals of a Jamaican dancehall artist not present at the festival as part of your backing track. Alas, that’s exactly what Anne Marie did, giving us all a good laugh in the process.
Although there’s no official comedy bill at Nass, it turns out you can find it if you know where to look. We laughed off our sad little faces and bailed in search of authenticity.
The tipoff
At music festivals, often, it’s when plans go awry that the really cool stuff happens.
We’re pleased to report that the rule of thumb holds should you ever shoot down to Nass. We stumbled away from the Anne Marie set looking for something a bit more authentic and, after what must surely have been minimal searching, before us arose a Land Rover that’d been converted into a DJ booth belting out hardcore DnB. The ‘stage’ had the attention of about 30 people, all of whom were there for nothing more than the joy of the music. The Land Rover was a spectacle. Still, at this set, there wasn’t a smartphone in sight.
Beats Clubbers will all know that, at the Beats Club, we aren’t exactly DnB connoisseurs, but this out-there and unexpected set was a proper Nass highlight. We smiled. We drank. We raved. We temporarily considered changing the name of our operation: from this moment on, we’d be the DnBeats Club!
We tried it out on a few of our compatriots, and we were swiftly advised against the switch.
And just like that, all of a sudden, we felt a little bit out of place.
The Wu Tang
Luckily, as everyone knows, Wu Tang Clan ain’t nuthing ta fuck with, which is why we’d planned on turning up to their headline set in a timely manner anyway.
We therefore headed over to watch Nass’s most anticipated act control the Nass crowd just as a puppeteer controls puppets. Hit after hit they played to pretty young things adorning the band’s name on recently purchased tees.
Eventually, the pyrotechnics went up, which at festivals like Nass have become something of an alarm in reverse: when the stage before you starts erupting in flames, it generally signals it’s time to disperse. Our seasoned festival senses suggested as much, and so we skulked off.
As we did, we couldn’t help but notice:
Yep, the entire outdoor arena still stunk of weed.
The Hangar
All good music festivals must come to an end, and that’s especially true after ingesting 750mls of gin and a litre of tequila.
There is probably no better place for a late-night boogie at Nass than The Hangar, which we just about managed for at least 20 minutes in the gap between Wu Tang Clan’s set ending and someone feeding us chips topped with the odd combination of cheese, mayonnaise, bbq sauce and ketchup.
It was a strange way to end our outing at Nass, admittedly. But, as we’ve hopefully made clear, at music festivals, it’s when plans go awry that really cool stuff happens.
We’ll therefore wrap this by saying Nass is a small and mighty festival that’s worth checking out.
The summary
Nass festival: head on down for street culture, good music, and unexpected, random fun.
And with that, we’re off to trademark our new invention.
Chips topped with the odd combination of cheese, mayonnaise, bbq sauce and ketchup.
It might need a catchy name.
But we’re good with stuff like that!
So peace out.
We love you all.
Bristol DnBeats Xx