Belladrum Festival 2010

After selling out weeks in advance of the weekend, with 26,000 people onsite over the Saturday and Sunday, it’s safe to say that Belladrum (affectionately known as Bella) has become fairly well rooted in the Scottish festival calendar, managing to live up to its crown as the tartan heart.

I’m ashamed to admit that I almost didn’t even go this year. With only a handful of bands like Feeder and Badly Drawn Boy that I wanted to see, as well as suffering a bit of festival fatigue, it seemed less of a hassle to do something else. When plans to head to Nottingham to meet ‘Stop Eject’ came apart at the seams, we decided last minute to head up the road to Beauly after all.

It was a good job that things turned out the way they did, as it ended up being one of the best festival experiences I’ve had, and I’ve had a fair number. The whole affair has a noticeably cosy size to it; just enough that you won’t get bored or feel claustraphobic, and just enough that everything’s close by. Whilst they could conceivably expand significantly given the growing demand for tickets year on year, there seems little desire to balloon the event into some sort of bloated monolith.. which is just as well. Part of Bella’s whole charm is in its boutique-but-nice nature - people seem to let the highland air infect their lungs and souls and relax their being for a time. Whilst there are still fairly thorough (draconian you might say) security on the gates, everyone is far less highly strung than you might expect. Instead of shrugging off the friendly banter that ritually goes on with the police in the campsite, the local constabulary actually took the time to get involved and talk and interact with the festival revelers jovially; the difference in attitude and atmopshere here is tangible.

Despite a strong folky influence as you might expect, we had the usual stramash of different genres across the many stages across the site. The ever-temperamental Badly Drawn Boy caused a fair amount of consternation by telling the packed out tent that the ‘guitar sounds so shit’ that he was ready to walk off. This seemed to be quickly forgiven with a chorus of cheers ringing out for the opening bars of hit ‘Silent Sigh’, until he only sang along for about 30 seconds before resorting to flicking through his iPod whilst the backing music carried on. Things weren’t made much better by telling the quickly emptying tent that ‘If it had been any other night I’d have come on to entertain you, but this is a really hard stage to play on.’

Elsewhere there were less hiccups - Feeder playing a blinding set to headline the mainstage on the Friday night, and the relatively safe KT Tunstall making a ‘surprise guest appearance’ in the second biggest venue, the ‘Hothouse’