After two summers without Lowlands, the most important Dutch pop festival started again on Friday. Without many headliners, but with old-fashioned enthusiasm. “Here we go, here we go, here we go.”
Finally a Lowlands after three years? Then the always so exuberant Lowlands fan club is of course eager at the gate. After the long festival lockdown, there were some withdrawal symptoms among the public devoted to the Biddinghuizer festival. It wants to go in Friday morning, and quickly, because the indie sensation Wet Leg is programmed early, in one of the largest festival tents.
Fortunately, the public can also enter. There is a farmer’s protest, which was announced in advance, but it is of the playful kind: a tractor is parked at the entrance between the festival site and the campsites, a handful of farmers from Zeewolde are handing out carrots and apples. If desired, the farmers can enter into a discussion with the Lowlanders.
‘The discussions are sometimes heated,’ says campaigner Celia Hoekman of the Flevoland Farmers Sense group. ‘But it also leads to interesting conversations. And that is good. We have to work it out together anyway.’
The population of Lowlands likes to do that anyway. The sense of community is as usual as soon as you enter. The factory pipes, flamed black-orange, are back in place, the green dance cathedral Bravo is also still intact. Everyone happy.
Everyone to Wet Leg
The solidarity is even greater when it turns out that almost the entire Lowlands audience wants to see the British band Wet Leg, on the Heineken stage. There is no more chicken at half past one. Remarkable for a band that played three months ago in pop hall Ekko in Utrecht, for a few hundred people.
Wet Leg is not the very first band of the festival, but it feels like an initiation, especially when the group soon Law Dream plays: ‘Let’s start! Here we go, here we go, here we go.’
“It’s hot, isn’t it?” says lead singer Rhian Teasdale. Well, indeed. In the Friday sun and in the Heineken tent it seems as hot as it was a week ago, although the thermometer says otherwise.
In the course of the performance Wet Leg shows themselves to be a charming, but still fledgling and shy band. Not so strange, because the wonderful debut single chaise longue appeared two years after the previous Lowlands edition. The Lowlands public does not mind and offers Wet Leg a sweaty hug.
It goes further. Up the terrain. Not much seems to have changed. After two corona years, there was no money for all too spectacular novelties: Lowlands incurred a lot of costs during the pandemic years, which could not be recouped. The small Lima tent is still the same. The big open Alpha cavern too. What is new: on the connecting street that connects the two halves of the site, the Current, the new stage for the spoken word, is a kind of factory shed with a facade of aluminum corrugated sheet, shining in the sun.
Explosions at Frenna
In the largest Alpha tent, one of the first real parties breaks loose at 2 o’clock with Frenna from The Hague, a fiery rapping protagonist in his own, remarkably spectacular show, with dazzling visuals, explosions and pillars of fire. After three years of waiting, it is clear here how much interest the Lowlands audience is in: at the first spring beat it goes wild far beyond the Alpha. The fact that the technique breaks down halfway through (pat, sound off) is an insurmountable problem for Frenna. The head is really off now.
The party continues quickly, with a band that was also created for that purpose. In the Heineken, the Bosnian party orchestra Dubioza Kolektiv plays a blaring Balkan punk and skaset, which is received like holy fire from the festival heaven on this first Lowlands day. The public dances the wooden decking to splinters and dives into the rain for a while, when suddenly a huge downpour hits Biddinghuizen. In that respect, too, the Lowlands feeling is back.
Cancellations
Whether that will continue is, of course, the question. Lowlands (like almost all major festivals this year) had to deal with a nice list of cancellations, mainly from American acts, seized by corona fear and concerns about the traveler’s attacks at European airports. The empty spaces that caused the cancellations of Noah Cyrus and Ela Minus, among others, have been filled cleverly and at lightning speed, but a glance at the program for three days shows that Lowlands is coming out of the corona time somewhat hesitantly, and that this edition will not automatically will be legendary. Actually, on three festival days, there are only two really big headliners on the bill: Arctic Monkeys and Stromae.
But if Lowlands has taught us one thing over nearly thirty years, it’s that success doesn’t just depend on big names. Smaller acts can rise above themselves at Lowlands, or be lifted high by the audience. If the hungry Lowlanders want it, Lowlands 2022 will be unforgettable.