After the travel chaos that plagued the opening day of Bearded Theory last year the organisers pulled out the stops and opened gates a day earlier for the 2019 chapter – and so, thankfully, entry to the site was a breeze.
So for anyone who was once bitten, twice shy after the 2018 gridlocks we can safely say that it is 100% safe to come back as long as in future years the festival maintains this approach.
Nothing was ‘officially’ programmed to start until Friday – but of course this is a proper old-school grassroots ,festival, and it shouldn’t therefore have come as a surprise to anyone to find Beans on Toast playing to a packed out Woodland stage just before the sun went down – or the likes of Stevie Simpson serenading the Something Else Tea Tent audience after dark.
We loved the moment when Beans lobbed a phone that had been shoved in his face as he tried to sing down in the crowd to the back of the arena… it wasn’t a good choice of timing after all to try and get a close up picture just in the middle of a song about how he hates mobile phones… The phone was, of course, back with its owner in a matter of minutes – it was, after all, that sort of crowd.
Photos by Sara-Louise Bowrey
Flickr API error: Invalid API Key (Key has invalid format)