VISIONS festival – review

Band Fucked Up at VISIONS festival. Photograph: Pooneh Ghana

A sunny Saturday in August marked the entrance of VISIONS onto the festival stage, with a line up split across electronic beats, guitar noise and singer-songwriter fare, featuring headline performances from Jeffrey Lewis, !!! and Fucked Up.

In terms of scale and character, VISIONS fell somewhere between Dalston’s Land of Kings and the Field Day one-dayer in Victoria Park, offering up a mixture of well- and lesser-known acts to an in-the-know audience.

Marking a departure from the single-venue policy pursued by its precursor, SEXBEAT’s Radfest, this year’s festival was staged across three sites in the London Fields locality.

This largely worked well, with only the 10-minute walk between Netil House and Oval Space threatening to interrupt the unity of the festival (but giving music fans on a budget a chance to stock up on cheap booze and food from local shops on the way).

The three-venue approach also gave the organisers an opportunity to group acts based on musical style. Oval Space played host to electronic, beats-driven performances from acts like the Soft Moon and Public Service Broadcasting, while the windowless gloom of Netil House’s ground floor set the scene for distortion-heavy offerings from bands like Iceage and Cloud Nothings.

The wood-panelled confines of the London Fields Brewhouse provided a more intimate environment for individual acts such as East India Youth and Molly Nilsson.

While the close categorisation of acts made it easy for fans to negotiate the line up, it did mean that VISIONS couldn’t quite match the eclectic feel of Radfest in previous years, where the same stage could play host to a hardcore act one moment and a surf-pop band the next.

Nevertheless, VISIONS got off to a strong start, with attendance numbers high, venues well-managed and performances well-received. If the organisers can put together a similarly powerful line up while maintaining the festival’s sense of locality, expect a strong return in 2014.