We Went To The Bugged Out Weekender, and It Was Brilliantly Mental

After 20 years at the forefront of UK clubbing – championing the legacy of acid house, electroclash and now-worldwide dance acts like Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers – Bugged Out is a relatively young addition to the current throng of UK dance music festivals: a tally I can barely keep up with, and frankly one that doesn’t matter anyway, because the Bugged Out Weekender really is an experience removed from any dance music festival I can (sketchily) remember. 

As a Glaswegian who’s recently moved to London, I’ve had a baptism of fire in how different clubbing in cities only a few hours apart can be. Your average Friday night in Glasgow is a “taps aff!” techno armaggedon of cheap drinks, sweatbox basements and an almost unparalleled attitude of “get-in-about-it”, so the move to clubbing in London – £20 rounds in dive bars, drunken night bus navigation, and lazy pals who don’t want to go to a decent warehouse rave in south because anywhere beyond east gives them hives – has been a stark one. 

Post-move, it’s really rammed home how much clubbing is an incredibly subjective mix of music, location and how willing you are to put up with nonsense in order to even halfway enjoy yourself, and so I thought that a festival weekender in an English holiday resort was going to rate pretty high in the “fuck it, get on with it” stakes. Having roughed it in Scottish clubbing for the better part of ten years I thought I was going in on a silly-yet-hardy note, but after spending three days with clubbers from the English north west, I can safely say I’ve never laughed so hard in my life – for better and worse.

Based in the seaside town of Southport, Pontins holiday resort makes previous Bugged Out Weekender site Butlins look palatial. I confess: I loathe camping at British festivals. Paying hundreds of pounds for a weekend of sleeping somewhere worse than where I live has never sold The Great British Live Music Experience for me, so a chalet seemed like a decent halfway point between having punters piss on my tent, and having punters piss on my own doorstep. At least I had a doorstep, I figured. The chalet’s weren’t exactly high living, but they were mercifully clean and functional and, being one of the few remaining sites of the once-widespread British family resort model, you felt like you were on a holiday with house music getting banged out til 7am – not being led en-masse to an untimely demise in a Carling-and-chips-filled bog. 

The seaside location made for an unexpected vibe-boost too as with no phone signal, you really were cut off from the world. It was a blessing knowing that the crowds weren’t on their smart-phones all night posting myriad Facebook updates about #ladbombs and “sick blends”, as it made the whole weekend much more friendly and direct. In true northern style too, you couldn’t avoid strangers if you tried. Any festival can book a slew of world-class DJs and be a terrible experience if the crowd don’t get into it, and the Bugged Out Weekender had some of the most in-about-it clubbers I’ve seen in a while.

As something of a newcomer to northern English crowds, the Bugged Out Weekender struck me as a rowdy meeting point between the shirtless pandemonium of Glasgow, the to-the-nines glossiness of Liverpool (whose natives had a healthy attendance over the weekend), and day-trippers from Southport and nearby donk and hardstyle-haven Wigan. With the rain mercifully at bay the crowds were happily out in force all night, and I mean force. Hench lads with muscles in places I didn’t know humans could build up muscle shuffled in deep concentration to every DJ set, regardless of genre or BPM, and had their tans, skinheads and new trainers prepped for a weekend of shots and silliness. Girls were only marginally more tanned than the lads, and only marginally less rowdy, but always in warm huddles and the highest of heels. 

Although the fact that the lads seemingly outnumbering the girls ten-to-one gave it a thousands-strong stag-do feel, it was still a welcome change from the overriding #normcore casualness of underground dance music events in London. This was a three day party with northern bar prices and a thick skin, so punters prepped accordingly and made it last. Seeing two Liverpudlians in pristine YSL tracksuits and sunglasses casually pedal-biking around the site on the Saturday afternoon – with blaring speakers strapped to them, doing laughing gas and asking randoms for cigarettes – is a mental snapshot that summed up the whole vibe: we’re here to laugh until our sides hurt.

Paul Woolford, courtesy of the official Bugged Out Instagram.

On site, the main building was surprisingly small – and very Pontins. The centre point of the three venue rooms was a children’s arcade and a reception manned by (it should be noted) unfailingly helpful and friendly attendants, and seeing crews tumble from one DJ to the next between penny games and mildly terrified staff cracked a few smiles. Room 1 hosted most of the bigger, more commercial names across the weekend – Green Velvet, Dixon, Seth Troxler and Sasha – and was accordingly The Big Room of the site: laminate dance floor, large scale LED screen production, and an impressively loud and clear sound system. 

Room 2 by contrast was less than half the size and decidedly more club-feeling, with carpeted floor, draped ceiling and far dimmer lighting. Being carpeted and draped it was an absolute sweatbox barely past midnight, and so felt like more of a dive-in experience than Room 1 – which seemed to attract half-interested wanderers and “mothers meetings” between friends until further into the morning, rather than those looking to bang it out early on. Leading the Friday night on a strong note were Erol Alkan followed by Andrew Weatherall b2b Daniel Avery, who all provided a healthy mix of electro, disco, techno (with some weirder, psycheadelic strains later on) and kept the opening night playful and interesting, considering the dominance of hands-in-the-air chart house across the weekend.

Room 3, the smallest of the lot, was essentially the dance floor of the adjacent pub, and so when packed out was rowdy as hell. DJ EZ’s much anticipated set saw it heave and with his notorious, rapid-fire DJ style, whacking him on in Room 3 was probably designed to create a “should have been there, mate” moment on the Saturday, and a nod to a resurgence of fandom that’s seen his Boiler Room sets go down as the stuff of legend. It was an emotional roller-coaster for the heads though; starting off strong with a half-hour-of-UKG-power which unfortunately, gradually, fell to the selection wayside despite his impressive technique. The crowd began to thin out over the next hour (particularly after he fudged a blend into eternal crowd-pleaser 99 – ‘Rip Groove’), and ending on a dubstep remix of Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ had many walking out in screw-face confusion.

Room 2, the sweatbox, courtesy of the official Bugged Out Instagram.

Overall though, the small yet considered line-up was a success. The Saturday night line-up in Room 2 – of Chicago house hero Kerri Chandler, BBC Radio 1’s Heidi and Numbers’ Jackmaster – saw a wide spectrum of house woven together. As one of the more legendary figures on the bill, Kerri’s deep, soulful grooves drew out a more chilled element of the Saturday crowd; his set acting almost as collective breather in a night that got markedly busier than the one before. Other highlights included Funkineven, whose delivery of Detroit techno bangers and smattering of old school funk was now-characteristically solid, Todd Terje’s live set was so joyful that I couldn’t help but grin from ear-to-ear (if there’s an album released this year that sounds more like “COCAINE!” than his, I want to hear it), and Montreal’s Jacques Greene dropping Young Thug – ‘Danny Glover‘ made me realise that I forgot that rap existed for two days. 

Mental snapshots that made Bugged Out so memorable included: bumping into a man who actually owned a Nandos black card, thus proving they exist and that the world is not a cold dead place; the chalet party at 951 with tequila cocktails, a Donna Summer sing-along, a surprise DJ set from Jackmaster and a “taps aff!” riot when he dropped Beenie Man; the top-up electricity and heating running out mid-afterparty; and spotting the elusive Dancing Misanthrope throughout the weekend, knowing a set would be worth sticking around for if he getting was into it. 

With any festival there’s standout moments that make it special, and the THUMP pool party with The 2 Bears was one of the most unexpected ways to spend an afternoon at a music festival that I can remember. The British clubbing public generally isn’t used to pool parties or hearing dance music in an alcohol-free setting, but the easy-going spirit of Bugged Out prevailed. Glamorous girls showed up pool-side in perfect make up and bejewelled bikini’s, most belly-flopped onto inflatables to near-constant cheers, and two impossibly hench lads dished out balloons of laughing gas, all as recent XOYO residency signees The 2 Bears played a high-energy set of classic house, disco, and the occasional Talking Heads jam. We even had an appearance from The Dancing Misanthrope, who duly shimmied away in his own little pool-side world from start til finish.

When the sun finally split through the clouds for the last hour, I wouldn’t have swapped Pontins for much else. Rather than having an afternoon of queuing for dodgy festival food, or being hungover in a bogging tent, THUMP were cannon-balling into a sun-sparkled pool to the sounds of The 2 Bears. It was about as uninhibited and silly as you can get without a drink or a dance floor and, as much as I’d like to say it was all down to THUMP’s party alone, it was really down in large part to the spirit of the northern clubber. Dance music festivals in the UK have the not-unrealistic capacity to be fairly snobbish and stifled affairs no matter how good the line-ups are, and I saw more smiles at Pontins than I have all year in London. So, thanks Bugged Out. We had a good one. 

You can follow Lauren Martin on Twitter here: @codeinedrums