We spent one day at Flow Festival this year, our first ever visit but the tenth time this festival has taken place. Flow Festival is quite under the radar in the UK (though that may change as Outpost Media has been appointed for next year). We only heard about it through trying to find a place to see Kraftwerk 3D after their shows at the Tate Modern sold out earlier in the year. I feel like we discovered a hidden treasure. Even though we were only there for one day, Flow turned out to be festival gold. Not too crowded, great line up, lots of arty activities in case you get tired of music and great food.
As we were daytrippers, our Flow experience was pretty compact. We stuck with our ‘priority’ acts – Public Enemy and Kraftwerk – and ddin’t see a lot else except Grimes, who played some new stuff which sounded very 90s/ St Etienne (in the best possible way). However, the line-up across the whole weekend was fantastic, with
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, My Bloody Valentine and The Knife’s Shaking The Habitual Show.
The Kraftwerk show was everything we wanted. We danced a lot. The 3D was actually quite impressive. At one point the guy in front of me ducked as a huge satellite flew out of the screen to impale him.
Importantly, Flow also has great merch. I was a big fan of this peach and blue tote bag, but there was also a specially designed line from R/H.
The visual identity of Flow is better than any festival I've been to, with really lickable graphics and colours everywhere and hardly any sponsor branding to make things look ugly. Even, Nokia, the main sponsor, just put the word 'Lumia' a couple of places (see my photo of their bar below) rather than throw their logo in.
The Flow branding was done by Finnish design agency Tsto and their site has some beautiful case studies that are well worth a look.
Views from Flow Festival
Read Drowned in Sound's great review of Flow Festival here.
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