God bless Barn on the Farm.
Not only is it one of the best music festivals in the United Kingdom – but somehow, it’s also become the hub of a community of music fans that feels more like a set of kindred spirits than a group of festival-goers.
Let us explain. You see, Barn on the Farm isn’t like most festivals. Instead of a multitude of artists being booked at random by numerous stage managers, you get a lovingly hand-picked line-up, curated throughout the year by a small team of music lovers.
Instead of a wealth of various stages, and a series of headache-inducing clashes between them, you get three beautifully boutique performance spaces, and a series of set times that have been painstakingly calculated to minimise clashes between them.
And as for the attendees? Well, instead of a cluster of pissed-up teenagers and questionably-shirted Dads On A 40th Birthday Bender, you get… Well, a family.
.
Barn on the Farm is, at its heart, a celebration of family.
Let’s start with the line-up. A large chunk of the acts on this year’s line-up have played lower down the bill at prior editions of the festival – in the form of Easy Life and Holly Humberstone, two of them are amongst this year’s headliners.
Barn on the Farm has always been about nurturing new talent, and they’ve always gotten it right. The likes of Lewis Capaldi, Ed Sheeran, The Vaccines, James Bay and Ben Howard have all graced the stages of Over Farm, Gloucester over the last decade – and, to us, the fact that both Bay and The Vaccines have opted to return for this year’s edition speaks volumes. There’s no ignoring the fact that this is a very intimate gig for these two arena-filling superstars – yet, they’re here.
Of course, that’s not take away from the Barn debutants scattered across the festival line-up. Bombay Bicycle Club deliver a quintessential festival headline set, and one that shows why, years after their breakthrough, they’re still one of the most in-demand (and reliable) festival acts in Britain; breakthrough pop star Griff spends her forty-five-minute set prowling across the Outdoor Stage like she owns it while dropping 10/10 pop bangers at a frankly alarming rate; and national treasure Sam Ryder sparks the biggest singalong of the weekend with a performance of his serotonin-in-song-form smash-hit, Space Man.
.
And yet, for One on One, the highlights of the weekend weren’t always the music.
It was the feeling. The environment, and the people, and the sense that you were part of something bigger than just another music festival. Every year, you see the same familiar faces – and as each year passes, a few new faces join the flock. And then, without fail, they come back – again, and again, and again.
Because that’s what Barn on the Farm is all about, really. It’s not just a world-class music festival, and it’s not just a weekend away in a field in Gloucester – it’s a community of like-minded music lovers, who all congregate in the English countryside every summer for a little slice of escapism.
We don’t know about you, but we can’t think of anything better.
Are you reading this wishing you were there? Or did you go, and are experiencing some serious post-Barn blues? Well, either way, here’s a set of photos from Barn on the Farm 2023 to help you through it:
