Tim Hughes meets the brains behind the low-carbon, largely acoustic Tandem Festival

Generations of Oxfordshire schoolchildren have known it for bracing breaks in the coun-try, communing with nature and learning about the environment.
This weekend, more grown-up visitors are expected to do the same at a new, wholesome music festival.
Forget about mud, moshing and ear-battering speakers, Tandem Festival, which takes place at the Hill End Outdoor Education Centre, at Farmoor, is aimed at fun of an altogether greener variety.
While the line-up is impressive, Tandem aims to shake up the festival world with its attitudes — being big on talent but low on hassle, mess and carbon.
The event is the brainchild of musician and sound engineer Nicholas O’Brien, and takes place this weekend at the scenic 62-acre outward bound centre.
Music comes from a bill with a strong folk and world music bias, inclu-ing Mercury-nominated folk-singer and song collector Sam Lee, theatrical Balkan dance band Sheelanagig, indie-folk band Moulettes, genre-crossing groove merchants Alamakota, Zulu-inspired Stornoway spin-off Count Drachma, and Oxford burlesque-flavoured Gypsy folk/ska/flamenco act Scarlett in the Wilderness.

Oxford Mail:

Saddling up for Tandem: Moulettes

“It’s going to be a fantastic festival,” said Nicholas, who has spent the week preparing the undulating site for what he hopes will be hundreds of music-lovers.

“Everything is basically in place, now we just have to make sure people know what we are doing.”
The festival has a licence for up to 1,000 people, though Nicholas is expecting up to 700 to join the event, which starts tomorrow and runs through until 1pm on Sunday — when the site will be returned to its usual use in readiness for the following week.
Nicholas, who grew up in Paris and came to Oxford to study audio engineering, stressed the festival’s pan-European links were as important as its acoustic and ecological aspects.
He said: “The whole motivation behind it is to celebrate a European approach to music and culture. Music to us is a perfect way of bringing people to other issues and discovering them.”
Stages will be run by Oxford’s Catweazle Club, which hosts open-mic sessions at the East Oxford Social Club, and will be bringing artists such as Megan Henwood, Art Theefe, Matt Chanarin and Faceometer; Paris-based Nomadic Sessions, whose acts include Namaste, Sophie Ter Schure, Jack Durntall, Capucine and Blatt; and Holland’s Nightscapes, a location-specific production company based in a squatted grain storage facility in Maastricht, and who will be staging sets by Birds That Change Colours, Radar, and Dictator Chips.
There will also be gigs by Steph West, Bethany Weimers, Little Brother Eli, Roundhouse Choir, Sam Taplin and Ed Pope. Late night revels will be presided over by Bossphonics DJs, or involve low key music around the campfire.
Nicholas will be playing four times — alongside Evan McGregor in duo Bambino Dell’Oro, and with Scarlett in the Wilderness, Alamakota and Blatt. He said: “The germ of the idea was to bring together musicians I have met. We want Tandem to be the UK’s numer one pan-European festival and have invited projects from Europe to curate their own stages.
“The line-up is diverse, exciting and intriguing and we want to challenge the audience with lots of different styles of music.
“Listening will be key, with acous-tic performance spaces from barns to yurts that will bring you closer to the music, enabling the rediscovery of sound without large amplification. We will also have one main amplified stage to keep your hips gyrating.”

Oxford Mail:

Travelling man: Sam Lee

He has learned from Oxfordsh-ire’s environmentally-friendly Wood festival, near Walling-ford, about how to stage a music event with minimum ecological impact. Like Wood, there is also a programme of workshops with an overwhelmingly ecological slant, focusing on such skills as bicycle maintenance, making music from waste materials, creating a communal ‘love blanket’, furniture re-shaping, spoon carving, vegetable growing, icecream making, yoga, beekeeping and history and nature walks in Wytham Woods. There will even be a communal speed dating session and late-night film screen-ings. And while families are welcome, activities are squarely aimed at adult revellers rather than children.
Some of the activities will take place inside the Hill End Centre’s buildings, while other will be outdoors.
Tandem has also teamed up with the first Low Carbon Oxford Week and Oxford Bike Week to promote green transport, with people urged to travel to the site by bicycle.
Nicholas said: “It’s a beautiful setting and we hope we will be back every year. I’m really looking forward to seeing how people are drawn in.”

  • Tandem Festival
  • Hill End, Eynsham Road, Farmoor, Oxford
  • Tomorrow (Friday)-Sunday
  • Tickets: £70 for three days with camping. Day and non-camping tickets also at tandemfestival.com

Oxford Mail:

Count me in: Count Drachma

Listen online

THIS week’s featured artists on our Local bands Showcase are Tandem Festival stars Count Drachma.

Listen to the Rex Domino remix of their African anthem Mantshontsh' Emsamo.

If you are an Oxfordshire artist or in a band, please send us an MP3 of one of your tunes to share with our readers.

Songs generally receive thousands of listens giving priceless publicity to artists in our community. To send a song, click here...