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WHAT FESTIVAL FREEDOM REALLY FEELS LIKE
WHAT FESTIVAL FREEDOM REALLY FEELS LIKE
BCUC bring their ancestral energy to the main stage, forty years of Akabu Queens still blazing, music until 5am in the pouring rain, and a crowd that leans in rather than pulls back. Shambala rewards the curious, and after one weekend we are already converted.
Founded 26 years ago by a group of friends, Shambala has grown into one of the UK's most celebrated and fiercely independent festivals, running on 100% renewable energy, entirely meat and fish-free, and in April 2026 becoming the UK's first employee-owned festival.
Taking place over four days at Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire, it brings together over 700 performers from across the world, from Northampton community musicians to South African ancestral punk, across more than 30 uniquely curated stages and spaces.
With lightning threatening on the way in and torrential rain for much of Friday, Shambala 2026 was not an easy arrival. At other festivals, weather like this sends people retreating to their tents. Here, though, nobody seemed particularly bothered.
This was our first Shambala as Nobody is Watching, and upon first impression during the daylight hours, with families everywhere and a gentle, pastoral energy across the site, we weren't entirely sure what to expect once night fell. The music running until 5am answered that question, along with every genre imaginable tucked into stages and nooks and crannies across the estate.
There is a real natural flow between spaces here that makes wandering feel like discovery. It's easy to get lost and easy to get found again, which seems to give people the confidence to roam freely without the anxiety of never bumping into friends again.
The closest feeling we have to compare it to is Green Man, another one of our favourite UK festivals. That same warm glow, that freedom from judgement, a togetherness and silliness and absurdity that has not been manufactured. Throughout the weekend, for example, we witnessed a jetpack soundsystem-spaceman who stalked the site, with crackling radio interference and ominous commentary unsettling anyone who crossed his path.
Then there were nudist frolickers in the rain, carefree, bare-foot mud trekkers, and of course, The Shambolympics, a Shambala staple. In the evening we then saw the likes of Gabaganoush, playing fast, frantic gabba with circus performers launching themselves around the from the centre of the room, celebrating LGBTQ+ identities with a ferocious joy.
These examples are testament to how well Shambala understands adult play and wonder. It's in a way that very few festivals do, particularly as profit pressures persist and details are sometimes sadly missed.
The food throughout was fully vegetarian and genuinely energising, which matters more than it sounds when you are slogging for four days of mud. The security was present without ever feeling heavy-handed or overbearing, trusting and accepting. And the press accreditation was warm and well-organised, a small thing that made a real difference for us as first-timers.
The music reflects the same spirit of not chasing the obvious, and offering genuinely new experiences for people. The stages flow naturally, but the smaller ones were often the most alive. Paranoid London at Data Mine were heavy and relentless, a real highlight. The Pink Flamingo, one of those secret stages that rewards curiosity and wandering, gave us one of the most understated, intimate moments of the weekend, catching Nubiyan Twist after their main stage appearance in a room holding maybe a couple of hundred people. It's always a pleasure watching musicians find each other in an entirely different kind of space.
Among the other highlights of the weekend, Bob Vylan opened their set with a guided meditation, followed by the usual high-energy and a few new, unreleased tunes. GOAT, whose only UK performance of 2026 this was, brought their hypnotic psychedelic rock to the site to celebrate the strange and the ceremonial. We had spoken to them prior to the weekend, which you can read here.
There was also a strong Bristol presence throughout, which we have noticed increasingly at festivals like We Out Here, and it always feels like home. Kesh bringing some of the An Experience magic to the site was a lovely moment, and seeing BCUC, who we last saw play the Jam Jar in Bristol, on the main stage at Shambala was lovely to witness. Watching them from Solasta, getting the crowd whistling and moving and harnessing their energy together, against the memory of seeing them in a much smaller room in Bristol, made clear exactly what this festival does for artists who deserve the bigger platform.
BCUC were the defining experience of the weekend for us. The phrase 'music as a universal language' gets thrown around a lot to the point that many avoid it, speaking to BCUC certainly challenged this for me. They pormote music as movement, as healing, as visceral collective energy that transcends language and geography and connects a crowd. They spoke to us about their famous whistling at their live shows, about hardship and community, about what it means to build something real together over years of shared struggle. We can't wait to release this conversation in the coming weeks.
Roots Corner was the other anchor of our weekend. A chance encounter with Lee and Natalie (huge shoutout!) led us to the Akabu Queens, the first ever all-female reggae band, formed in London and still blazing forty years later. The group have collaborated with John Holt and Burning Spear and carved a path for women in one of music's most stubbornly male-dominated spaces. That is exactly the kind of unexpected encounter that Shambala seems to exist for, where a random conversation opened a door to a really special opportunity. Their set and the conversation that followed were among the most memorable of our entire festival season.
We also spoke to Madame Electrifie (Jo, Mixlab), who trained nine female musicians of all ages from Northampton from scratch, and had them performing on the Solasta stage within just eighteen months. This was another chance encounter which turned into a really insightful conversation about the reductive weight of being called a 'female DJ', rather than simply a DJ - a theme that surfaced across several of our conversations over the weekend, including with the Akabu Queens.
Dr Meaker brought the classic Bristol sound of rollers and live drum and bass with a brilliant collective of musicians and performers. They were also joined by Zack Polanski, who we had interviewed at WOMAD just weeks earlier, as he got up on stage to introduce an encore that absolutely went off. Tom Hyland from Big Band of Boom, who also runs the Swingamajig stage, spoke about the challenge of retaining the magic of live music when it transfers to a studio recording, something that natural live performers always have to wrestle with.
And then there was Lamisi, who we had previously interviewed alongside K.O.G a couple of years ago and were genuinely delighted to see again. Now signed to Real World Records, she spoke about women in music, and about the Lamisi Fata Foundation, her charity based in Zebilla in northern Ghana, which provides reusable sanitary pads to young girls so they can stay in school, as well as working to empower girls in a deeply patriarchal region. She also spoke about reconnecting with her heritage through the women's clapping rhythms of northern Ghana, which form the foundation of her latest album Let Us Clap.
Thank you to Shambala for such a magical first festival experience.
Keep an eye out for the release of our interviews across the weekend.
Shambala will return on 26th-29th August 2027, sign up for the 2027 pre-sale here!
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