Flow Festival

Helsinki is a strange and beautiful city. This year, Finland has also been rated Newsweek’s best place to live in the entire world. Countering this, however, is a stat from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addictions, suggesting that intravenous amphetamine use is the most popular joy-bang the country has going…

Now it’s easy to poke holes in Newsweek’s claim by juxtaposing it with junkie truths when actually every nation on earth has been getting loaded since the big bang. Yet the fact that people are jacking speed up like William Burroughs on a wet weekend in Algiers over here is terrifying… Do they just never come down? Is this how they keep everything so fucking tidy?

There were no easy answers to be found at Flow Festival. No speed freaks, and drugs either. Hell, you couldn’t even take a £6 tin of beer out of the bar to the main stage. This was the only gripe, however, as the reality is that Flow is probably the most fashionable and clean-cut small festival in Europe; everyone’s young, good looking and well dressed. The line-up is cutting edge, too. On Friday you could see every pundit’s favourites The Drums battling with bad sound on the Tent stage, while later the same space exploded into minimal techno deity Ricardo Villalobos’s ground for a set that took in the whole digital spectrum. Meanwhile, finishing up, Magnetic Man’s Benga and Skream played a cheesy collection of dubstep that worships slow and irritating 90’s jungle breaks. And at about 5am they were sat on the steps outside their hotel with an arse-licking public school boy and some American bloke fanning a conversation about how they were gonna take over the USA. Good luck with that, lads.

Saturday kicked off. People seemed to get drunker and there was a group of teenage girls flashing their junk at passersby. Syrian wedding singer Omar Souleyman arrived and entered into a 45-minute deconstruction of psychedelic Levantine dance-pop fixed on chants that drew your mind into the void. MIA closed on the main stage with something similar; an aggressive, relentless carnival of obscure hits furnished with licks borrowed from Suicide and Pink. Sleigh Bells came on toward the end, and the guitarist lent some chords to ‘Meds And Fed’s, and for once, it really felt as if there was something more to MIA than empty YBA sloganeering.

However, two acts utterly dominated the festival finale. The first, Konono No. 1 from The Democratic Republic of The Congo, dressed like cowboys and thumbed weird wooden boxes that made high pitched trance sounds as a couple of guys beat out some light house percussion. And the other was The xx, whose stunning set couldn’t help but dominate everything even if they are shy and gothic.

End result: Flow Festival will steal your wallet and your heart.