Astronomy and plasticine
With ukelele workshops, a pop-up planetarium and The Go! Team in attendance, Stephen Smith can’t wait for this year’s astro-themed Deer Shed festival
Writing about music quickly makes you cynical about dull and repetitive festivals all over the country, all playing boring music and all with the same sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll attitude. But occasionally there comes along a festival so perfectly concieved that you can’t quite believe that it’s real. The Deer Shed Festival is a perfect example.
This year’s festival is headlined by superb alt-rock outfit I Am Kloot, whose recent album The Sky At Night gives rise to this year’s festival theme: astronomy. On Saturday night, a group of professional astronomers will lead festival-goers on a star-gazing trip, with telescopes and binoculars provided of course.
When not staring at the stars, you will be asked to make a small plasticine alien to place on the papier-mache moonscape for an epic stop-motion film, and once you’ve done that you’ll be able to make an alien mask out of milk bottles. And all this while bouncing around the fields on a free space hopper.
Friday night sees an unnamed Russian cosmonaut hosting an evening of comedy and cabaret, and afterwards, he’ll be helping to send a mysterious object space-bound.
If all the astronomy gets too much, you can always retreat into the wonderful music on offer, including the fantastic Go! Team, the beautiful Leisure Society and the always fascinating Erland and the Carnival. Deer Shed really is a science student’s dream.
Dates: 22nd – 24th July 2011 Location: Topcliffe, North Yorkshire Price: £59 Website: www.deershedfestival.com
