Hamish Hawk Adult DVD The Pill and more wow the soldout crowds at the 15th annual Deer Shed Festival
In the toughest of times for independent music festivals, Deer Shed Festival showed why it is such an impressive event at the weekend with tickets sold out and standout performances from the likes of Hamish Hawk, Kae Tempest, Idlewild and Adult DVD.
Since it was launched in 2010 in the green fields of Baldersby Park near Thirsk this 10,000 capacity event has built a national reputation for being an incredibly civilised and relaxed music and arts festival.
It’s true there are children everywhere and a lot of bubbles in the warm air but the family-friendly ambience should not disguise the fact that the Deer Shed music line-up is like the best of BBC 6 Music caught in a bottle.
Along with its now standard high-quality mix of every musical genre going, from the easy-going to the experimental, there is a quiet strain of eccentricity and a deep appreciation of music history running through a Deer Shed audience which can be detected in the dress sense.
There’s young girls covered in silver, grown women in fairy wings.
A family in leopard print and golden crowns.
All kinds of different hats everywhere and T-shirts of Panic Shack, Nirvana, Part Chimp, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, LCD Soundsystem, Yard Act, Sonic Youth, Pulp, The Doors, Radiohead, the Stone Roses...
The other peculiar but ultimately wonderful characteristic of Deer Shed is the crowd reaction is always genuine.
No one on the leafy site arrives with pre-conceptions and live acts have to earn their applause.
Among the acts which did just that at the 15th Deer Shed Festival were:
The Pill – From the Isle of Wight like Wet Leg, the punky satire of Lily Hutchings and Lottie Massey is the funniest thing I’ve seen for years, though it comes with some real bite.
Honesty - A fascinating Leeds-based art electronica act who sound like an ambient version of The Cure’s most recent album.
Joan As Police woman - A jaw-droppingly sophisticated musical performance by Joan Wasser and her two male accompanists.
Antony Szmierek – A year ago the former teacher from Manchester was like Kae Tempest-lite, now he’s a disco king with literate hippie leanings.
Adult DVD – A huge crowd reaction for this six-piece Leeds band, a gloriously backstreet, dishevelled LCD Soundsystem under the slight influence of Yard Act, who serve up the sort of mutant disco that David Bowie would surely have booked for a disco in Berlin in 1977, if he had booked a disco in Berlin in 1977.
Hamish Hawk – Edinburgh’s erudite, much more charming answer to Morrissey is a darker, more serious prospect these days than a couple of years ago, yet the crowd still respond to one of his ‘early classics’, the gloriously jangly pop of The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973 like it was Common People by Pulp.
Ibibio Sound Machine – Who would have thought the family audience would go wild for Ibibio Sound Machine? Fronted by incredible Nigerian singer Eno Williams, this high-energy mix of West-African funk and disco and modern post-punk and electro, not to forget gospel, rock and soul, would have totally raised the roof – had it been indoors.
And I’ve not even mentioned Richard Dawson or Nadia Reid or Wunderhorse or Sprints or John Harris or Dave Simpson.
Deer Shed Festival will return in July 2026 with a limited number of early bird tickets now on sale alongside 11-month payment plans and ambassador schemes.