The little discoveries steal the show at Best Kept Secret. Are those headliners still necessary?

The audience at Best Kept Secret is eager. Logical, because it was a while ago. On Sunday, the area at Beekse Bergen fills up before noon, and the first stream of visitors goes straight to the largest tent stage for the Belgian band Amenra. So full house, and rightly so, because the Kortrijk people give goosebumps guarantee on all their performances. Just like the Sunday closing song Nick Cave, of course.

What an overwhelming show this advanced hardcore band puts on, from bunker hard to soft and tender. And visually everything is right, from the monochromatic cloudy skies on the screens to the stark white beams of light that poke into the eyes of the awakening festival-goers. A great start to day three.

Best Kept Secret has a unique composition. The festival is both massive and intimate, as it has a colossal main stage on the beach at the recreational lake, where just 20,000 people can watch a show, as well as a long ribbon with small tents and dance floors under the trees. This has advantages for the public, who can find a place that suits the mood. But it is apparently also difficult programmatically.

This edition there are too few bands that can handle the huge beach stage. Soul singer Mavis Staples’ band on Friday disappears into thin air, and a completely uninteresting company like Boy Pablo must also feel very unhappy there. If you want flames here, you’ll need to bring something to decorate the place. Alt-J does that for example: the show by the British folk and art rockers is beautiful, because the entire stage is used for a dazzling light spectacle. Whether or not you fall for their somewhat crunchy and studious voice puppet: the image of a gigantic red shark swimming in slow motion over a thirty-meter screen will remain on your retina forever.

The Irish post-punk band Fontaines DC, which normally plays the smaller pop clubs, luckily also saves it on Saturday. Their cutting, savagely proclaimed guitar anger has enough hit power to carry the crowded beach, with Television Mind and Jackie Down the Line as new but already classic punk anthems.

But Best Kept Secret really blossoms around the woods-tucked stages, where smaller indie bands can shine. The American folk band Big Thief will give an unforgettable five-star show on Saturday in the second tent stage, which will be discussed extensively on Sunday. Singer Adrianne Lenker is a vocal miracle of God, and her penetrating recitation is sometimes almost reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s: when she raises her voice, your neck hairs stand on end.

You are forced to listen with all your attention to her undulating and firmly rocking folk ballads. They sometimes sound like the work of the greatest predecessors in music history, from The Band to Neil Young’s Crazy Horse, but at the same time the rapidly growing oeuvre of this band is contemporary and pleasantly cross. And then there is real music playing on stage. The guitarists Lenker and her ex-husband Buck Meek play at each other virtuoso; the number not, for example, turns into a fifteen-minute epic. Also because it goes wrong halfway through: something with the lyrics, or the guitar tuning. But while Lenker tries to retune her guitar, her band builds up the tension with a monotonous groove. The audience sits on top of it and greets every new development in this song-thriller with cheers. It says everything about the magnetic appearance of this band, one of the greatest acquisitions of recent years.

Also remarkable: a show by the very young British band Porridge Radio, in an almost impossible to find tent with the appropriate name Secret. With her solemn singing, Dana Margolin has almost as convincing power as Adrianne Lenker and early indie hits like Back to the Radio are twice as catchy live, in front of a room with only a few hundred people, who increasingly get the feeling that they are running into a new discovery.

You experience the same bliss during the long nights, and during the adventurous dance programming of the 2022 edition. Jamie xx will put together an overwhelming and euphoric set on Friday, as a kind of mosaic of decades of global dance culture, from soul to North African folk music and tight drums. -‘n-bass. But the tent The Floor is also a heartwarming dance church. Host St. Paul receives occasional DJs from bands elsewhere on the program, from Metronomy drummer Anna Prior to Yin Yin, and longtime DJ heroes like the Easy Alohas. The Belgian radio DJ Faisal sets the tent in flames on Saturday night with a pounding and sometimes hilarious set of urban and hip-hop, and restlessly mixed classics from Beyoncé to Jay-Z.

With so many beautiful surprises, you wonder whether this festival could not do without that gigantic and very expensive stage, where perhaps too big and often also somewhat worn out bands like The Strokes have to show their trick. Such an act costs a fortune, and what it yields is mainly a good sing-along party for those few thousand fans. It may be impossible from a business point of view – a festival simply needs headliners to sell tickets with, is the entrenched idea – but still gives food for thought.