★★★★★
Review: Truck Festival, 26 - 28 July 2024. Tickets for 2025 on sale now.
It’s a week since the 26th Truck Festival finished. For those not familiar, Truck Festival is a smallish (25,000 people), popular indie music festival held annually in Oxfordshire, England. Truck prides itself on its intimate, family friendly, and laid back atmosphere - which is a great way to showcase its diverse line-up across 8 stages over 3 days.
This year’s Truck Festival was my fourth and, in my opinion, the best one yet. This year, a lot of thought went into correcting many of the small irritants that in the past could add up to a negative festival experience.
This year’s family camping section (called Zodiac) was thoughtfully improved by just moving the path leading to the entrance. Instead of a deeply rutted, never ending path that regularly claimed trolleys and victims along the way, this year’s entryway was moved to a smooth, compacted part of the field. Unlike past years, I didn’t see any trolley disasters or struggling parents giving up halfway. It’s just a little thing, but a positive experience at the start of the festival makes a huge difference.
Another major improvement was the daily rubbish removal from the campsites, with proper big bins. Last year, rubbish, which was collected in almost domestic sized bins, wasn’t removed until the end of the festival and the last day of the festival was fairly grim.
This year’s Truck showcased its biggest ever section for children - called Little Truckers - the fenced off area was almost a mini-festival in itself. Truck has always been child friendly, but this year took it to another level. I truly believe that diversity of audience leads to positive and magical experiences - so this increasing support of families is very welcome.
With over 150 acts, nobody can attend everything. My usual goal is to go to between 3-6 acts each day. The more space friendly layout, and many more shaded areas available, made this goal much easier to achieve than in past years.
For me, the very best set of my whole festival was the IDLES, who played on the main stage on early entry Thursday. Fierce, passionate, angry and hopeful, the IDLES haven’t lost any of their ferocious, post punk energy. I generally don’t listen to the IDLES at home, but always love their live performances. This year’s Truck set had many moments of savage magic including seeing lead singer, Jo Talbot, leading the audience of thousands in a chant of his suggested new national anthem, “F*ck the King” - which you can watch at 3.36 on the video below.
Another magical moment for me was the spontaneous dance party which erupted across the festival site on Saturday night, at the end of Wet Leg’s set on the main stage. Some clever sound person decided to blast out Careless Whisper by George Michael across the entire site and everyone spontaneously burst into unselfconscious singing and dancing. Dancing and singing spontaneously with thousands of people, in the dark with, a warm breeze, under the stars was an experience I won’t forget. You can watch the moment in the video below.
This year’s Truck was wonderful, positive, well organised, and so much fun. Tickets for Truck Festival 2025 are on sale now.
If you enjoyed reading this review, you might enjoy reading my review of Truck Festival 2022 - which gives a bit more explanation of the festival's origins and name. You can find that here.
All photographs ©️ C.Flutsch
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