The Big Chill

Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire

Pascal Wyse
Tuesday August 3, 2004
The Guardian

Pete Tong was doing his thing on Radio 1 last Friday night, direct from Ibiza - phoning around the world, seeing who was playing where, giving a big shout to his DJ comrades. Tom Middleton, who hosted Tom's Top Tent at the Big Chill, seemed happily lost for words trying to put people in the picture: "It's a festival without mud, Pete."

Hard as it is to define it precisely, the Big Chill, celebrating its 10th year, continues to plug an important festival gap. A bit clubby, a bit electronic, a pinch of hippy, some dub, a few novelties - and no angry guitar bands. Angst is not on the agenda. The call to arms here is more along the lines of: "Don't just do something, sit there!" Atmosphere is everything. Mr Scruff, a festival regular, said: "It's a three-day moment. It's hard to pick highlights." One ardent Big Chill fan even happily dismissed the music line-up as "pretty crap", but said he wouldn't miss it for the world - just as a bloke dressed as a comedy traffic warden, carrying a speed camera, walked by to prove his point.

That famous vibe has not been left totally untouched by the festival's expansion; the early days, when a few thousand people got together at the sculpted Enchanted Gardens, surrounded by peacocks, had a feeling you can't recapture with tens of thousands. You could just about fit the original festival in this year's dance tent. And now there's the book, the CD, and the Big Chill bar opening in London ...

But the festival's heart is still in the right place - with the possible exception of booking a blacked-up morris dancing team doing something dodgy-looking about slavery. Otherwise, it's hard to look up from your beanbag while Norman Jay is on the decks, or Coldcut are lighting up the sky, or the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are playing Freak Out in dinner jackets, and think the grass is greener anywhere else.