The last two Boomtown Fairs have probably been my all-time favourites in more than 30 years of festival experiences and once again the organisers pulled out all the stops with more fantastic new venues. This year Old Town included the amazing Jolly Dodger pirate ship where the attention to detail was simply mindblowing. The craft area was renamed “Whistler’s Green” and introduced The Old Mine stage, complete with revolving winch wheel, where the acts included some impressive names from World and folk music for the first time.

A whole new area appeared in the form of the Wild West with another 2 new tented venues called Rusty Spurs and Crazy Calamities, while in the woods a dub/reggae area called Tangled Roots was presented in a largish glade with an amazingly bass heavy sound system. Also at the far end of the woods was the Wandering Word with a strange mixture of poetry and hip hop. On top of these there were all our old favourites from last year plus no fewer than 40 mini venues dotted around the various backstreets of the town, many of which were new for 2014.

Musical entertainment, as always, was right out of the top drawer and covered everything from ska to punk to reggae to folk to swing, as well as pretty much every dance genre you could possibly think of. There was the usual excellent choice of food caterers and noticeably less ketamine zombies stumbling around following an apparently successful campaign after the sad death of a teenage girl at the festival last year. In fact the age demographic, whilst still predominantly 20-somethings, did seem to be much broader as a whole this year.

But wonderful as Boomtown undoubtedly is, there were a few things that niggled me this year. The numbers had increased again significantly, with a rumoured 38,000 on site, and this was very noticeable with the venues becoming uncomfortably crowded for the more popular acts. The toilet situation I briefly commented on last year got worse rather than better. There are simply too few loos & those that are provided aren’t signposted and are poorly maintained. To add insult to injury you were invited to pay “£1 for a wee or £2 for a poo” in order to use the posh loos next door!

A 16 can limit was strictly imposed this year on the amount of booze punters could bring in and this was exacerbated by the fact that the previously wonderful Bad Apple Cider Bar was a pale imitation of its former self with a much reduced choice of ciders and perrys, most of which had already run out by the Saturday afternoon. There were ridiculous queues at the bars all over the site, which were totally understaffed courtesy of the frankly hopeless Peppermint Bars. And the sound at a lot of the venues was also very poor this year, especially late at night. I only paid one visit to the usually spectacular Arcadia and left very quickly in total disappointment. A lot of acts were also cancelled while stages were closed or suspended as a result of damage from both high winds and some heavy downpours.

I’ll definitely be back for Boomtown 2015. There is just so much imagination goes into the build and a line up which I personally think tops any other festival, so despite the negatives it still ranks up there as being one of the best festivals in the land. However I do feel that its best days may already be behind us. I hope I’m wrong!