Feeling the love of Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival 20 years on

by Margaret Chrystall

Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival 2024 | July 25-27 |

Didn’t mean to write a review of Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival this year. Twenty years doesn’t seem possible.

All those bands, eager musicians, ambitions on overload, the gloriously relaxed ones who just happened to be brilliant, the visiting talents no-one’s ever heard of till Belladrum introduced us, the headliners who have brought the place to life, and changed the game.

Randomly, that probably includes you, Kate Nash (2007, so popular that people were trying to crawl in under the tent), Ed Sheeran (2011) – sides up on the Hot House tent to let a huge audience spill in around it and Lewis Capaldi (2019) – Garden Stage closed for safety reasons to stop people coming in after so many tried to get there to see the man of the moment.

It’s easy to disappear down a rabbit hole once you start going back through the years to look at all the music. So many musicians/ line-ups returned last weekend to help celebrate the 20 years of the festival evolving.

Love was the perfect theme to suit such an anniversary.

Now up to a 20,000 capacity, the festival is as much about meeting the physical needs of a multi-age crowd as satisfying their wildly-different music tastes.

That was summed up by standing at the barrier for the Sugababes headline set on Thursday night  – watching the original trio’s 2002 number one hit Freak Like Me mashing up Gary Numan’s 1979 hit Are Friends Electric? with Adina Howard’s song – with a load of up-for-it teenage fans in front. To me, that was a multi-generational thumbs up to the Bella programme-pickers!

And the other factor these days is everyone’s a critic – though they always were. But now, thanks to social media, it’s not long before opinions on an act’s brilliance or failure to impress, is out there. And all the shades of agree or disagree come up, not days – but seconds later!

So Bill Bailey’s comedy – such as song “I punched a squirrel for Jesus!” – didn’t always hit the mark for the Hot House teatime sun crowd on Saturday. A social media group chat asked ‘Who booked him?’ about the same time a girl walking past me asked the same question of her friend. But loads seemed to love him, so would he have been more acceptable on the Garden Stage? Should the crowd who disapproved somehow have moved?

Everyone always had an opinion, but now its shared and out there – along with thoughts on everything from the travel changes and queuing-to-get-in times with the stories that once took till after the festival was over to filter out there.

Robert Fripp and Toyah Wilcox were fantastic, everyone who saw them said, and wouldn’t it have been fantastic to have that word out there so quick you could head there to catch some of the set?

But now, like a giant borg, the crowd can share and help and suggest and inform on everything from a lost toy or DJ Ross Smith’s pinch-me moment when Ocean Colour Scene’s Steve Craddock came to guest DJ too at Madame Fifi’s Dance tent. This year, you found a mum in awe and praising a group of youths for their generosity in donating a Coop hat her son had been seeking all weekend, or a contrasting tale of a tent trashed and chairs stolen – or a missing trailer with – happily – someone messaging back that they remembered seeing the very one and where it was.

The festival can bring out the best in our community – and document all the millions of amazing moments that are captured by so many smartphones and cameras across one weekend of Belladrum, documenting where our contemporary world of 2024 has brought us all, good and bad.

It must be heaven and hell for festival organisers, sifting through so much information and feedback about the new travel arrangements or getting the different camping zones right for everyone or line-up choices across the stages.

Sophie Ellis Bextor surely earned my Best Act Seeing Off Post Rainstorm Blues with her Thursday evening disco beats wooing us back to smiles at the Hot House stage after a long rainy deluge.

“You look as if you’re standing at the end of that rainbow!” she yelled, looking out as she elegantly wafted about the stage in her giant heels and glamorous gown.

And her almost megamix of her own hits, a splash of Madonna and a sprinkling of Abba, before the inevitable Murder On The Dancefloor singalong, meant that optimistic Sophie and her lyrics – “I’m not giving up on love!” – reminded us neither should we. Soaked or not!

Over 20 years, you can see the rise of musicians that started at Seedlings – the stage to catch the freshest new talent. It happened for Twin Atlantic, famously packing out that tent on their first appearance and rising up to headline the main stage since – back for an emotional closing-the-fest performance at the Garden Stage on Saturday.

Seedlings’ veterans to catch this year included Josh Mackenzie (with line-up The Joshua Hotel) and Phillip Jon Taylor – back there not as PAWS, but in solo guise with tracks from mesmerising new album De Nada plus drummer Lewis Mackenzie and Craig Howieson on bass adding punch to a more raucously powerful live version of album big-hitters such as The Catalyst and HAAR, plus this summer’s Baby Orff cover. And nice to have Phillip’s brief, wry intros – “This is about the existential crisis that is the internet.”

It’s exciting to catch a band literally making their Belladrum debut. And at Seedlings on Saturday, Inverness four-piece The Chosen Lonely stepped up for the first time – singer Steven Barclay confessing he’d nearly lost his voice while flyering everyone to come along to this set.

But there was no sign of any vocal trouble in songs such as Jamie’s Light where Steven’s voice can soar out, be plaintive, but also rousing in the chorus melody, “But I am fine, it doesn’t matter any more …”.

It also shows off the band which has been a long time coming for Steven ­– feisty, full-on drums from Donna Smith, Andrew Stewart on bass, and keyboards and backing vocals from Andy Bannerman. Solo, great. Band, a powerhouse.

And maybe no band expresses the power that comes from working and playing hard and building something big out of promising starts, like Forgetting The Future did from this year’s line-up.

A big step for them to move south from the four-piece’s home in Thurso to face the test of band life on new territory. But Forgetting The Future aren’t forgotten here in the North. From before their arrival on the main stage, many hometown fans were there, ready and waiting in front of the Hot House stage supporting them – including two young superfans frontman Robbie NcNicol paid tribute to, before starting off a Happy Birthday Bella sung by the crowd.

The band’s indie rock now comes turbo-charged, Sam Cowan pumping out the beats behind the drums, but all four super-focused on the songs and signalling through every bone in their bodies that what the crowd gets coming at them is as irresistible as possible.

Robbie – always a charismatic, ever-moving frontman – is turned up to 11 for this set, acting out the angst on songs such as Have You Settled? and its brilliantly on-off sound staccato chorus.

Forced to walk away before the guaranteed McNicol crowd-surfing moment sets the punters alight, you hear Robbie explain: “We’ve been coming to this festival since we’ve been eight-years-old – it’s the best festival in the world!”

They probably finished up with Small Town Syndrome, a song that has always sounded restless for a big future. But surely there’s not much longer to wait …

If you missed them, they will be one of the acts to catch up with when Black Isle Calling returns them to the Highlands on September 13.

So…

Best musician of the festival for me  – no pressure – I end up going back to the festival’s early days.

Yes, you can see why Twin Atlantic on the Garden Stage made perfect sense as headliners there.

The massive, amazing light show, the crowd rushing towards their places in front of the stage. Not in amongst it, this time, but choosing to see the drama of the set unfold from the darkness and dampening grass up on the hill, it felt right. Still new songs coming – latest single Meltdown had just been released the day before, frontman Sam McTrusty told us. There’s a new album too. Time, gaps, a reboot, a comeback – and it turns out that Saturday’s set was a tragedy averted.

“Belladrum, I’m losing my voice up here,” singer Sam confessed.

“I was going to do my best not to bring it up. I woke up this morning with no voice. But this festival means so much to us, there was no way I wasn’t going to be able to sing.

“So I took the big steroid injection in the right cheek for you!” he laughed, revealing his bum’s sacrifice.

On Free, yes, he was right, we could sing louder. And louder again for old favourites like Crash Land and Make A Beast Of Myself and the crowd helped him sing even the words of just-out new one Meltdown and then the traditional Twin finale Heart And Soul, perfect for belting it out and feeling emotional at the end of a festival, watching the fireworks and trying not to bawl your heart out because it’s the end.

It’s not really the end, anyway. Next year’s tickets are already announced. Next year’s acts are being booked now.

Looking back over the weekend, Belladrum 2024’s big standout set for me reminded that even 20 years in, so much is yet to come…

In a half-hour set in the Verb Garden – which hosted readings, interviews with musicians and readings from writers, Gaelic poets performing and reminiscences and poems on Scottish female football – there was the low-key return of a musician who has performed many times at the festival, but was also at that very first Belladrum in 2004.

Then, The Lush Rollers were a rising local star line-up, with the harmonies of brothers Willie and Tabs MacAskill at the heart of its alt-country/ Americana.

Sadly, Tabs is no longer here. But master singer songwriter Willie, singing solo with guitar, played some of the Rollers’ classic songs – Something In My Eye, Drinking All Day Long and Leaving Me Lonely.

“He’s so good!” someone stage-whispered in the seats filling up between songs as Willie played.

There were newer songs too that I hadn’t heard before – Back Door, Cowboy Song No 5 (based on a song by Inverness-Denmark musician Steve Kelly) and a devastating take on loss in Waves, the intimate performance creating a pin-drop silence in the tent.

At the end of the set, there was a huge reaction from the crowd to Willie’s performance.

Verb Garden organiser and MC Hamish MacDonald, thanking him for his set, grinned: “You’re the only person so far in the Verb Garden to get screams!”

Willie will be back in the studio to record this year, we were told.

And you couldn’t help feeling the love for a return gig embedding itself into the future.

Belladrum’s 21^st next year, anyone?