Rockaway Beach Festival 2024 – Reviewed

Rockaway Beach Festival at Butlins, Bognor Regis, never fails to put a post-New Year smile on our faces as it’s one of the most consistently well-curated line-ups in the festival calendar.

Rockaway Beach 2025 – tickets on sale now

With just two musical stages and a central ‘speakers corner’ to navigate, the festival is super-compact, and the organisers time the performances perfectly so the only ‘clashes’ are at the end of each day, and tend to be between bands who will attract quite different parts of the audience.

What is definitely almost unique to Rockaway is its ability to pretty much guarantee every single act a huge crowd. It doesn’t matter if you are playing at midday on Sunday – you can expect a room packed with hundreds of people.

And what’s more, prices are more than reasonable – especially if you come as a group! Booking a six-person room including breakfast and dinner comes in from just £62 per person per day, and for that you get almost 40 bands who are a brilliant mix of emerging talent, established underground favourites, and big-hitting headline names.

Given that within a few days of the festival closing its doors this year about half of next year’s tickets had already sold, we recommend you move fast to avoid missing out…

2024 was definitely up with the 2023 edition as a weekend to remember – as once again we came away with a pocketful of new favourite bands to watch out for on line-ups throughout the coming year.

Last year’s prize catch was VLURE, who went on to wow the BBC Radio Introducing DJs at Glastonbury after the band got a place at the festival through the respected ‘Emerging Talent Competition’, and subsequently got voted as Scotland’s best live act.

This time around we hooked Chalk as probably the most exciting new prospect…whilst being overwhelmed by the outpouring of joy created by SNAYX (who we have been championing for the past year) and also impressed by the growing maturity of Ditz (who are becoming even more anti-establishment every time we see them).

Elsewhere Enjoyable Listens continue to confound everyone by managing to wrap lounge crooning vibes inside a cool indie shell, and we were dumfounded by Lonely Tourist – simply because we couldn’t work out how someone who has been doing what they do so well has been doing it for so long without hitting our radars!

Are there any downsides to Rockaway?

Not many, truth be told.

You might find you have to up your budget if you are vinyl junkie, because the record fair may find you rather quickly adding to your collection… and the relatively cheap bar prices might leave you with a somewhat sore head in the morning.

And OK – let’s get the elephant out of the room… it is Butlins and it is Bognor… but genuinely don’t let either of those facts put you off… because one thing we haven’t mentioned yet is the high standard of production values in both of the live rooms.

We have read a few complaints about vocals maybe being a bit on the quiet side at times – but overall the sound was excellent, and the stage lighting rigs are excellent, meaning that shows look as good as they sound.