Connect Festival

Connect 2022. Scotland’s best festival reborn.

In it’s first iteration, 2007 at Inverary Castle, my friends and I arrived for a weekend of muddy camping and one of the best festival lineups I’ve ever seen. Beastie Boys, Bjork, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Mogwai, LCD Soundsystem…it goes on. And that was just the main stage. The setting, the music, the weekend…it was an experience that lives long in the memory and transcends the very Scottish weather and the trek to the campsite.

This year, it returned. A similarly epic lineup and a much easier location. This time working, for the festival (I don’t think I’d even owned a camera at the time of the last one).

As the festival closed it was already my most anticipated weekend of next year. Genuinely that good. From the totally serene ambience in The Meadow and nonstop feel good vibes at the Unknown Pleasures stage to the bigger bands playing at The Grand Parade and Guitars & Other Machines stages.

It helps that some of my favourite bands on the planet were there, of course. Incredible to see The Twilight Sad, The National, Idlewild, Admiral Fallow and some of the best new music from Little Simz, Self Esteem, Cloth and a load of stuff I didn’t know but loved like Caribou and Buckley & Butler.

Even more (I’m gushing now) there was a load of beautiful acoustic sets on the Tiny Changes’ Gardener’s Cottage stage including Fatherson Ross and…The God Damn National. What a moment. It’s hard to take it all in so soon after but seeing them dedicate About Today to Scott on that stage. Well, it was a lot. It was beautiful.

Thanks for having me Connect. It really was a pleasure to be there. Let’s do it again next year.