G! Festival: The last festival on Earth might also be the purest
The scene is thus: You’re sitting in a steaming beachside hot tub with a glass of natural wine in hand as the headliner performs mere metres away. The soft, sloshing Atlantic Ocean provides ambient applause. Thick fog rolls over the top of the surrounding mountains like nature’s moody smoke machine. And you think about a quote you once read: ‘It is true, I am living a life’.
You are glad to be in the Faroe Islands. You are glad to be at G! Festival. And you are glad to be living.
A few hours earlier, your plane tumbled through the clouds into a valley so green and vast that you imagine the landing must’ve resembled something akin to a winged sausage being thrown down an astroturfed Oxford Street to the mystic trolls or pterodactyls that surely patrol this land. The presence of a puny airport in something so pristine and ancient feels uncanny. You joke about how landing in such a place is ‘a very grounding experience’, but nobody laughs.
As you emerge from the plane and are greeted by the firm handshake of the crisp North Atlantic air, which you read in the in-flight magazine is the cleanest in the world, alongside a feature about the Islands’ most progressive weaver, the uncanniness of the airport intensifies. But as you find yourself with your passport stamped, baggage reclaimed, and perched in the back of a cab within 12 minutes of touching the tarmac, you begin to think of this place as less of an airport and more of a taxi rank that sells duty-free fridge magnets.
You chat with your driver about where you are headed and what sort of accommodation you have acquired. He is incredibly vague but somehow remarkably reassuring. This is a paradox that, initially, you can’t quite fathom. For the time being, you put it down to the fact that his calming Faroese manner outstrips his concerning lack of necessary details tenfold.
In time, you begin to realise that things simply don’t seem to go wrong in the Faroe Islands; at worst, they just temporarily waver.
The sanctified nature of the archipelago is a fact that your better half urges you not to mention for fear that it will jinx the serendipitous spell of the sleepy islands. You reassure her that not even the British Military could disrupt the smooth-running sensibilities of this sacred place. In a land of 55,000 people, there is simply not enough wiggle room for things to go awry, so the people pull together, in their own casual, languid way, to ensure that nothing goes wrong for long enough to cause a problem. You expect that same principle to extend to G! Festival.
You will, however, have to do further reassuring of your better half later that evening when you are dropped off at your accommodation by a timid 19-year-old who tells you that he is ‘pretty sure’ this is Jøn Tyrill’s place. This gingerly teenager also tells you that the front door is unlocked, and Tyrill has prepared a room upstairs on the right for you.
You take his casual word for it. But as you lie there that night, you wonder whether, at any minute, a Faroese couple will stumble in, inform you that your room is actually their room, and demand to know why the fuck you’re casually curled up in their bed.
Alas, that thought barely troubles you. For one, the fact that the front door was unlocked but nobody was home proves that the people in these parts are so laid-back that if they returned home to see two strangers inexplicably snoozing on their bed, they would probably leave them undisturbed and take the sofa for the night instead.
Secondly, you remember from the drive over that there’s so little crime in the Faroes that their prison has a crazy golf course and no fence to contain the odd drunk driver ensnared by the Sheriff. Thirdly, you think back to all the slack wholesomeness that preceded the moment you rolled into what may or may not be Jøn Tyrill’s spare bed, and are enchanted enough to simply take a chance.
After all, taking a chance has gotten you to G! Festival, and you have been richly rewarded for doing so thus far. In fact, within hours, you have watched Bass Elvis, a local impersonator of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, who uses music as medicine to treat his schizophrenic condition, perform in a school playground.
You’ve also seen Gø, the Islands’ premiere jazz rock collective, offer up a blitzkrieg of intoxicating beats in a barn that still smells strongly of animal matter. And you’ve been inspired to write a Nordic detective series that focuses more on the will-they-won’t-they love story of the mutually widowed lead investigator and pathologist, thanks to the neo-traditional, mystic Norwegian folk of Uld.
You have been beguiled by the most original rap performance you have perhaps ever seen, thanks to Marius DC. You’re charmed even further as his father stands in the crowd beside you, somewhere between the craft beer bar and the children’s zipline, and shouts along to his son’s riprousing chorus: “Fucked up on drugs”. As far as you can see, nobody at the festival is, in fact, fucked up on drugs.
You’ve pictured these isolated islands in bygone years as their established superstar, Eivør, performs in a manner so unique and so perfectly encapsulating of the mist-covered mountains behind the stage that her genre can only accurately be described as Faroese. You also realise that her keyboard player is a multi-instrumentalist you have seen perform with three other bands at the very same festival so far. And although you’re eyes are wet with the single malt scotch that they served at a whiskey and cigar pop-up just around the corner, it is a realisation that moves you closer to understanding the true heart of creativity.
The next morning, as you sweat out the beers in the on-site beach sauna after a refreshing trudge in the Atlantic, you further ponder exactly why it is you find G! Festival so life-affirming. Why every single person there seems to do so, for that matter. Is it because within 15-seconds of emptying a drink down your gullet, a child will tug your sleeve and ask for your empty cup, and you later learn that they get 10DKK for every one they return, meaning that some of the greatest young grifters in the cup retrieving game can earn around £500 over the course of the festival?
Although you initially somewhat resented that fact, your financial frugality subsides, and the charm of kids getting a cut of the money that adults spend on alcohol certainly becomes part of the life-affirmation. And so does the local chiropractor sneaking in Underberg to sip on as he nods along to the English electronic act Ebbb.
So does the nine stone six year old trudging back from a plodge in the sea at 9pm as his parents get wasted listening to electro futurists Frankfurt Helmet, who, despite travelling almost 9,000km from China to play in a barn in front of 300 people in sensible knitwear, express their gratitude for being able to perform at “one of the greatest festivals on earth.” All of it, somehow, becomes the reason.
You realise all of this is what you want from a festival. It is an escape from the norm. But it isn’t, as many other reports have stated, ‘strange’. You arrived fully expecting to describe it like that yourself. You even told your boss, ‘I’m off to some strange festival in the Faroes’. And while it is demonstrably quirky and unique, it is not strange. In truth, it is the perfect embodiment of what live music can offer the world. It is an eclectic celebration of community, creativity, and life.
Places like Glastonbury can exhaust, enrage and leave you feeling trapped in wearing familiarity. These great, big, commercial festivals can serve as a frustrating mirror of that which you sought to escape. But as you stand on a beach ensconced in the mountains, mist, and mystique of the local music, you find something small and improbable. Not a nine-stone infant, but a community stitched together by art and a willingness to surrender the usual script.
This, you realise with an implacable sense of pride, is what true escape looks like: not a frantic sprint from reality, but a gentle diversion into a simpler, sweeter, more serene life, where the littlest things erode your defenses, like the incessant nods and smiles of locals or the greatest music you’ve ever heard in a barn that reeks of cow patt, amount to stupifying heights, like the story of the mossy mountains .
And as you return home and lock your front door, unlike the relief that follows most festivals, you long to be back in Gøta, entering the accommodation you never even had a key for, at what may or may not have been Jøn Tyrill’s place. You never did find out. All the same, as you flick the kettle on and sigh, you are gladly assured: it is true, you are living a life.
