Bands, food, sunshine and naked ladies at Latitude…

So, Latitude 2015 – the tenth anniversary of Suffolk’s brilliant festival – was one of the best, if not THE best yet.

Suffolk acts
You’ve probably already heard that successful ginger-haired pop star, Ed Sheeran, turned up on Friday night to give a surprise performance in the woods on the iArena stage. We’re pleased to see that Ed has not lost touch with his Suffolk roots by returning to the festival he played in 2011, which he described then as “the best experience of his musical career”.

This year the local acts to look out for were Izzy’s Daughter, SuperGlu and Frett – who all played the iconic Lake Stage.

Last year Dingus Khan made the mistake of advertising their Latitude set with permanent marker. This year SuperGlu sensibly used post-it notes

First up on Friday were the fantastic SuperGlu, a more mature act than last year’s Dingus Khan in terms of both pop and marketing sensibility. Both the band and the crowd had a great time (the main pic above is of band-members Ben and Krista crowdsurfing)!

Then on Saturday it was Frett’s turn, whose well-structured and beautifully-layered electronic-indie was the perfect soundtrack to lying in the sunshine on the grass.

On Sunday, Izzy’s Daughter grabbed their moment in the spotlight. “THAT.WAS.BEAUTIFUL. My mind is still swirling after performing at Latitude Festival”, said the gorgeous Izzy’s Daughter after her mesmerising performance. We agree, it was indeed BEAUTIFUL!

Food
Lasting the distance at a festival requires lots of booze.. we mean food. And our favourite food this year was again pizza. In particular, Volcano’s wood-fired pizza. We liked our super spicy Inferno so much that we took a photo of it before devouring it in about a minute.

The only bad thing about the pizza was the price

Naked ladies
It’s rare that you get to see naked ladies at a festival, but this year we did. However, these ladies were not drunk rock chicks out for a laugh, they were figures of artistic focus. We enjoyed at least 20 minutes at our easels doing our best to capture the ladies’ forms…

Top IP1 artist Howard captures the female form with his pencil

More bands
While the Suffolk bands that played were of course the best, IP1 did uncover another band that we’d like to give a particular mention to. The Hot Sprockets from Dublin are five brothers who came together with a shared love of rock ‘n’ roll music. God bless their mother, is all we can say, for she gave birth to five cracking musicians.

On recordings, The Sprockets don’t sound that amazing, but if you get the chance to see them live at an intimate venue, we’re sure you won’t be disappointed. They played Keith Allen’s Establishment Club late on Saturday night, and their electric fusion of rock n’ roll, blues, folk, psychedelia, and hip-hop certainly made us rock it like a hot sprocket.

Dublin’s Hot Sprockets in electric form on The Alcove stage

We also thought Portishead were brilliant. For a band whose debut album was released over 20 years ago, and who rekindled many of the tracks from that album on Saturday night – they sounded fresher than most other acts we saw. “Backlit against huge visuals, the set was a masterclass of brooding cinematic grandeur”, is how the Guardian described them. We think the band are probably too left wing even for the Guardian, and that if you don’t know your trip hop from your hip hop, then you ned to buy their re-released 1995 Mercury Prize-winning album Dummy.

Sunshine
For the three days we were at Latitude, the weather was perfect. We even went swimming in the lake (but waited until the ridiculous queues had got a lot shorter just before dusk). We also got sunburnt after falling asleep having had a couple of ciders. The whole site looked beautiful in all the sunshine but the dust got in our eyes, ears and pants, which was a bit irritating.

Our crap attempt at the iconic Latitude photo… see Jen O’Neill’s blog for much better photos

We look forward to the same again next year, when Latitude will be 11 years old. Soon, Latitude will be a teenager and we fully expect it to be a well-spoken, arty one with floppy hair and skinny jeans.

We’ll leave you with this trippy video of holograms on the lake at night…