When you’ve been attending festivals for decades, you develop a sense of what works, what doesn’t, and what sets top-tier events apart from those that leave a lot to be desired. Of course, it’s purely subjective – what appeals to one festivalgoer may not appeal to another – but it soon becomes clear when an event is well run, carefully programmed, and able to create good vibes amongst attendees.

One thing I’ve learned since I attended my first festival in the 1990s is that great festivals come in all shapes and sizes, from weekend-long micro-raves and leisurely boutique events, to sprawling four-day celebrations with tens of thousands in attendance. At one end of the scale, you have Watching Trees, Optimo and the Ransom Note’s superb, deliberately small event; at the other, We Out Here, which is fast becoming one of the highlights of the British musical summer.

I first attended We Out Here back in 2021, when the festival took place at a site in Cambridgeshire famously used for the more raucous and hedonistic Secret Garden Party festival. Back then, I hosted an ‘in conversation’ session with Winston Hazel in the talks tent (an edted recording of which you can hear here) before heading across the site to DJ in the rollerdisco. I left the festival thinking that the organisers – most notably Gilles Peterson and the team behind the fantastic Dimensions, Outlook and Soundwave Croatia festivals – had hit the mark.

I returned this year after three years away, this time with my Bedmo Disco DJ partner Gareth Morgan and his family and was genuinely blown away. In fact, I was so inspired that I decided to make We Out Here the focus of this month’s episode of Join The Future on Noods (itself a fitting idea, given that Noods were one of a handful of community radio stations offered the opportunity to showcase artists on their roster via the WOH Radio and Studio Monkey Shoulder stages).

The nature of the format means I couldn’t get into a massively detailed review – if that’s what you’re looking for, I’d recommend this detailed day-by-day report from Joe Muggs on the Arts Desk. Instead, I focused on offering reflections while playing music related to artists, DJs and labels who featured at the event (or in some cases tracks picked to represent certain key themes and elements of the event’s musical and cultural DNA).

You can listen to Join The Future on Noods, S4E7: We Out Here Special via the embedded Mixcloud player below. You’ll find a full track listing below that. Links to shows from seasons one to three can be found on our ‘audio’ page, while a recap of season four so far has just been published here.

Tracklisting
Matthew Halsall – Natural Movement
Brian Jackson – Path To Macondo/Those Type of Blues
Only Child featuring Ampo Fiddler – U Bring Me Vibes (12″ Edit)
Transission Towers – Go Slow (Beat Crooked)
Kuniyuki – People
Louie Vega presents Anane – Nos Vida (Masters at Work Mix)
Maddslinky – Reject
Nubiyan Twist and Nile Rodgers – Lights Out (The Reflex Revision – Bedmo Disco Radio Edit)
U-Bert – Got To Make Sure (Pablo Mix)