A music festival in the Faroe Islands

The G! Festival

All this weekend the usually tranquil fields of Worthy Farm in Somerset are being trampled by more than 150,000 people, drawn together for Britain’s biggest music festival, Glastonbury. For many of them, the event has achieved the status of a venerable national institution but when I attended my first Glastonbury in 1998, I knew it would be my last. Within hours I had managed to lose my tent and my friends.

I still hadn’t found them by nightfall and spent the night attempting to sleep between a random tangle of guy ropes and tent pegs. The older I get, the stronger grows the suspicion that large music festivals are more hassle than they’re worth. The food is routinely poor, prices exorbitant and there are simply too many people to properly enjoy the music.

Thankfully, there is an alternative. About 800 miles north of Glastonbury, in a seaside village clinging to the very edge of Europe, preparations are being finalised for a very different kind of festival. Undeterred by its inaccessibility or the fact that its population numbers just 500 people, the fishing village of Gøta in the Faroe Islands has staged its own version of Glastonbury, the G! Festival, since 2002. This isn’t a local village fête but a fully-fledged music festival, and each year more fans make the pilgrimage there from across Europe – though with an expected attendance of around 5,000, it’s a long way from crowded.

Jon Tyril, the local musician and entrepreneur who founded the event, says: “I haven’t been to Glastonbury so I can’t compare but our biggest attractions are the sense of intimacy, the welcoming feeling and friendliness of the crowd. There’s practically no crime or violence, you can try a bit of everything and actually hear all the bands. You can bathe in the Atlantic ocean, or sit in a sauna while your favourite band is playing only a few metres away on the main stage.

“I remember the chairman of the local football club saying that he would eat his old hat if I could ever get 5,000 people to turn up at the beach to hear music. But we met that mark within three years.”

For me, the chief appeal of G! is the location. Gøta is on the island of Eysturoy, a 40-minute-drive north from the capital Tórshavn, and its combination of green mountains, coruscating blue sea and cute, turf-roofed houses is idyllic. The main stage is constructed right on the beach, an armada of yachts and fishing boats bob rhythmically out in the bay, and tents are scattered all around the village.

Visiting bands normally stay in private houses in the village (or another village nearby), while the villagers open their homes to the festival crowd and invite them to eat and drink or to use the toilet or shower. And though it’s small compared to Glastonbury, it’s huge for the Faroes. “In our biggest years [2005 and 2006] we had nearly a fifth of the entire Faroese population here,” says Tyril. “That also creates a very special community feeling, since almost everybody knows almost everybody else.”

There are stalls offering locally brewed beer, Föroya Bjór, at decent prices, and all kinds of food from juicy steaks to whale meat (an acquired taste). On my last visit, a second stage was set up on a football pitch, while DJs performed in a dilapidated fish-drying shack.

While the Faroese music scene isn’t as well known as those of its close neighbour Iceland, the country has produced artists such as singer songwriter Teitur Lassen, world music ambassador Eivør Pálsdóttir and blues rockers Boys in a Band, all of whom have made waves internationally. This year, as always, local bands will be balanced with international acts, including Danish electro rockers Nephew, Icelandic electro pop band FM Belfast, and Polka Bjørn & Kleine Heine from Norway.

Though unique in many ways, G! is part of a wider trend towards smaller “boutique” festivals in more remote locations. In the Scottish highlands, the 2,500 capacity Loopallu festival in Ullapool is now in its sixth year, but Traena, in northern Norway, takes the prize for isolation. Limited to 2,000 people, it takes place on an island with a population of 381 people, a five-hour-boat ride from Bodø on the northern coast. If that weren’t enough, some of the gigs take place on a different island, halfway up a mountainside, in a vast cave.

The acoustics are apparently excellent. But my favourite thing about these tiny festivals is that when the lights go down, you’ll always be able to find your own tent.

G! Festival, July 15-17, www.gfestival.com ; Loopallu, September 17-18, www.loopallu.co.uk ; Traena, July 8-10, www.trena.net