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One measure of quite how bold the programming is at new Blackpool festival The Black Lights: within two minutes you’re able to go from the closing notes of a BBC Philharmonic performance of John Adams’ symphonic masterpiece Harmonielehre in an awe-inspiring art deco concert hall, to a DJ, Afrodeutsche, slamming breakbeat techno in a side room as digital visuals canter alongside her and lager swells over the side of plastic cups.
This heartening disinclination to view art as “high” or “low” is what gives soul to this three-dayer curated by the team behind now-closing Salford venue the White Hotel, much loved for their tendency towards underground murk as well as absurdist wheezes, impulses both on show here.
Blackpool has very much been chosen for a reason: as the defining coastal escape for the north-west, the organisers are clearly in love with the town’s faded glamour, and punters are given a recital of a rather earnest Rupi Kaur-ish screed they’ve written to kick off proceedings at the end of the north pier (“Look around, every person here arrived carrying a private dream …”). Given Blackpool’s evident problems – homelessness, substance use, dilapidated buildings – such romanticisation might feel uncomfortable to some; an exhibition hosting Ivan Seal’s excellent paintings in a faded B&B feels like it’s encouraging us to find the uncanny in surroundings that are just the stuff of a working-class holiday. But it’s pointless trying to pretend there isn’t something kitsch about Blackpool, and the overwhelming sense is of earnest affection for the town, including some democratic gestures such as Mark Fell and Rian Treanor’s free drop-in electronic music workshops (one person is witnessed improvising on a plugged-in banana).
Blackpool’s rich dance heritage is reflected in a set by the Caretaker, the north-west ambient musician whose corroded ballroom dance recordings improbably found favour with a huge TikTok audience. Presented with live ballroom dancers in the gilded grandeur of the Blackpool Tower Ballroom, it’s like David Lynch week on Strictly: dry ice shudders across a strobe light as the Caretaker’s dinner jazz instrumentals get overtaken by noise. It’s great theatre, though in truth he’s upstaged later in the evening by Klein, playing billowing plumes of cacophonous guitar noise (and at one point a sudden drill beat) to transcendent effect.
A cornerstone performance of the weekend is a presentation of new music by Blackhaine, a towering rapper and movement artist who looks like a member of Dune’s Harkonnen clan if they grew up in Chorley. His sense of drama has made him an inspiration to the rage rap scene of Playboi Carti et al and here (along with stunning screamed assists from fellow vocalist Sam.Brown) he emits anguished bursts of declarative rap with a surreal flourish: an old-school orange-hued streetlight acts as a second stage in the centre of a vaulted space in the Winter Gardens, and a poignant symbol of a past that’s been lost, for better or worse.
He tees up a stellar Saturday night. Autechre-adjacent collective Gescom play a friskily playful set of giddy, glitching polyrhythmic techno, accompanied by stunning Cerith Wyn Evans-style squiggles of laser light. Evian Christ’s well-practised light show of peach and pink strobes remains psychedelic in its aggression, set alongside triumphantly unironic airings for trance, big beat and Millie B’s Blackpool bassline classic M to the B. Anz and Crystallmess close out to 4am with blog-house classics and other crowd-pleasers.
The festival upends and inverts traditional venues, from Nazar playing kuduro in the Pleasure Beach’s function rooms to Red Laser and Bakk Heia spinning strutting house in Blackpool Catholic Club to Jennifer Walton delivering peals of electric guitar and howls of grief from the altar of a spangled Spiritualist church. Jawnino’s rap tracks are so boisterous he trips the fuses for a second at the Bootleg Social indie club: Westfield, his ode to doing ketamine in a shopping centre, prompts a mosh pit of pure joy. On the sweatbox balcony of the Winter Gardens’ Olympia area, there’s more leftfield rap from Lintd, who offers theatrically enunciated flows over jazz and afrobeat drumming, followed by the set of the weekend: Moin, finding a euphoric new route for post-rock by playing body music informed by UK bass culture.
The Black Lights ends up as a much-needed British iteration of experimental European fests from Kraków’s Unsound to The Hague’s Rewire, particularly given it has even commissioned new work: an as-yet untitled orchestral piece by Mica Levi, a riveting soundscape of far-off screamer fireworks, avian calls and Doppler-effect pitch bending from the strings over sustained bass notes. There are the sort of issues that nearly all first-year festivals go through, chiefly that almost nothing starts on time, but everyone is on a kind of Blackpool time anyway: a holiday mode where the rules of ordinary life, and of a corporatised British festival market, are blessedly suspended.
