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Fête de la musique, France
Paris has some great festivals, such as Cercle (22-24 May), with dance music stars against the backdrop of planes and rockets in an outdoor aerospace museum, but the most accessible and democratic is Fête de la musique, which began in Paris in 1982 but is now popular across the country. It is a loose event encompassing dozens of free, semi-impromptu outdoor performances all over each host city, including plenty in Lille, which is even cheaper and quicker to get to than Paris on the Eurostar from London.
While the UK may cock its ear occasionally to English-singing bands like Phoenix and the “French touch” scene that birthed Daft Punk, Justice and more, Fête de la musique is a chance to immerse yourself in the music that rarely crosses the Channel, from spirited chanson to Francophone hip-hop and the breakneck carnival styles of shatta or bouyon, where MCs rattle through commands on tracks of more than 160 beats per minute.
Eurostar goes to Paris 12 times a day from London, and to Lille six times (eight at weekends).
21 June, free, fetedelamusique.culture.gouv.fr
Roadburn, Tilburg
If you don’t mind changing trains after arriving in Amsterdam or Rotterdam on the Eurostar, there are several Dutch festivals to choose from. Le Guess Who? in Utrecht (5-8 November) is celebrating its 20th year this year, and hands over some of the curation to a series of invariably excellent left-field musical guests: the likes of Animal Collective, Lonnie Holley, Mabe Fratti and Stereolab have held the reins in recent years. Rewire in The Hague (9-12 April) is even more out-there, calling on a global array of dynamic artists, from the most pristine ambient to the most audiologist-troubling extreme noise.
But the most prestigious is Roadburn, hosted in the little visited (by Brits, anyway) university town of Tilburg, which is also accessible via a change in Brussels. It has ringfenced its own black, slippery zone of adventurous heavy music, encompassing alt-metal, noise, desert rock, drone and the fringes of punk, hip-hop and electronics. Bands often play albums in full – or two albums, in the case of Japanese legends Boris this year – and thanks to a relative dearth of hotels and B&Bs in Tilburg, many festivalgoers stay on a municipal campsite complete with its own noisy (but not sleep-disturbing) live sets.
16-19 April, €284 (£247); two-day and day tickets also available, roadburn.com
The Black Lights, Blackpool
With rail-friendly Glastonbury taking a fallow year this year, June has a festival hole that needs filling – so the timing is perfect for the arrival of the most promising new British festival in years, the Black Lights. Conceived by the White Hotel, a Salford venue that has become a cornerstone of northern underground culture, it will be hosted across multiple venues – including the beach, hosting “a modern-day War of the Roses in brass”, as brass bands from Lancashire and Yorkshire perform together.
The rest of the music programme draws from the fraying edges of rave culture, ambient, rap and dream-pop, with artists including the Caretaker – whose ultra-poignant compositions have made him an unlikely hero to gen Z on TikTok – as well as industrial-trance producer Evian Christ, lo-fi singer-songwriter Joanne Robertson, and film composer and alt-pop icon Mica Levi playing with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
Blackpool’s location, halfway up the British Isles and close to dozens of large conurbations across north-west England, makes it quick and accessible via train to millions, including direct routes from London, and only one change involved from Glasgow, Newcastle, Sheffield or Bristol.
26-28 June, £150, theblacklights.uk
Westival, Pembrokeshire
Getting top points for rail accessibility is this boutique festival at the south-western tip of Wales, now in its eighth year. It’s just five minutes’ walk from Manorbier, a very sleepy single-track, single-platform station that nevertheless has direct trains from Cardiff, making it surprisingly accessible from London, the Midlands and the north-west.
Sets span the bass continuum, from drum’n’bass kingpins Shy FX and High Contrast, euphoric breakbeat by 4am Kru, and some very well chosen vocalists: ravey soliloquies from Antony Szmierek, and a tour through dub, hip-hop, speed garage and beyond from Ms Dynamite. There’s a wellness area with sound baths, yoga and the like added this year, and if you bring your bike you can get to a lovely sandy beach within a few minutes, or to beautiful alternatives Freshwater East or Barafundle with a bit more westward effort.
2-5 July, £200, westival.wales
North Sea Jazz, Rotterdam
Like the Montreux Jazz festival in Switzerland – itself slightly forbidding but do-able by train on a London-Paris-Lausanne-Montreux journey – the boundaries of North Sea Jazz have been broadened well beyond jazz itself.
Certainly there are classy, populist and yet boundary-pushing jazz names, such as Esperanza Spalding, Nils Petter Molvær and Joshua Redman this year – its 50th anniversary – but there’s plenty of soul (both neo and classic), R&B, disco and African pop, plus artists from the funk-fringed edges of hip-hop: this year the Roots are joined by two brilliant singers in Jon Batiste and Bilal.
Rotterdam is an extraordinary city, dotted with futurist-surrealist architecture, and accessible directly from London.
10-12 July, €145 (£126) a day, northseajazz.com
Dekmantel, Amsterdam
The variety of events and the boldness of the programming in the Netherlands makes the UK look often timid by comparison. Amsterdam’s finest gem is the unmissable annual Dekmantel, held in the forested parkland of Amsterdamse Bos to the south of the city.
The festival is now so successful that its title has become a byword for a certain type of euphoric yet cerebral left-of-centre techno and bass music, and its main stage – a circular arena of wraparound lights and screens – is a pilgrimage of sorts. This year’s most eye-catching bookings include the debut of Jeff Mills’s new show Stargate, all-female DJ supergroup Sass, and collaborations between Actress and Carl Craig, Saul Williams and Underground Resistance, and RHR and Skrillex.
29 July-2 August, €250 (£217), dekmantelfestival.com
C2C, Turin
For an affordable and relatively far-flung festival that can be reached from London in a single day, head to C2C in Turin, requiring just one change in Paris. Not to be confused with the UK country music fest of the same name, those letters stand for “club to club”, and while the festival started out rooted in dance culture, it has lengthened its stride over the course of 25 years, now with one foot in each of the overground and underground.
The first names announced for this year include deep house legend Theo Parrish, playing an extended DJ set, Swedish alt-rap sweethearts Yung Lean and Bladee, Kenyan ambient doyen KMRU, and names from the tastemaking end of pop: Robyn, Oklou and Kelela. It’s also located in the grounds of Turin’s historic Fiat building – the one with the nothing-so-Italian flourish of putting a test track on the roof – now converted into an open-air gallery (the artworks are a little twee, but the setting is dramatic).
29 October-1 November, €152 (£132), clubtoclub.it
