Clubs

It’s no accident that the Big Chill Festival has basked in baking sunshine for the past four years in spite of some of those summers being cloud-filled, chilly and, well, traditional English-style. Have those nice Big Chill bosses Pete Lawrence and Katrina Larkin done a devilish deal with the dark side to guarantee perfect weather? Nah, it’s simply that the first week in August is, on average, the warmest in the summer.

Roughly 20,000 Londoners will head off to the Big Chill at Eastnor Castle this weekend praying that it won’t be hotter than July. ‘Sunny, a bit cloudy at times and cooler,’ reported Lawrence last Thursday, having just checked the long-range forecast, but don’t throw away your hats and sunscreen just yet.There’s plenty apart from the weather to give you a healthy glow at the Big Chill and, unusually, there should still be some tickets available by the time you’re reading this, partly because the site capacity was increased to 30,000 this year. The likes of Lily Allen, X-Press 2, Amadou and Mariam, Coldcut and Norman Jay, the Heritage Orchestra and Deodato, François K and Mr Scruff, Ojos de Brujo and Bugz In The Attic, Gilles Peterson and Rob Da Bank are some of the reasons that those tickets will sell out but, like Glastonbury, it’s the overall festival experience that people really relish. Feature continues

The Big Chill may have started out as, arguably, the original boutique festival, but its expansion has enabled it to showcase a whole range of elements that excite Big Chillers, from live comedy to film screenings and performance (The Blue Man Group will present their first UK festival show), from the huge Body and Soul therapy area to burlesque and pole-dancing capers, from the ever-expanding children’s arenas to the equally playful and conceptual installations on the Art Trail, from the folktronica acts on the Sanctuary Stage to the 24-hour café…

Of course, all this would be largely irrelevant to most readers if the Big Chill didn’t already have a permanent presence in London. The Big Chill Bar on Dray Walk always aimed to present many of these festival elements, but there’s a limit to what can be done in a one-room venue. On August 17, though, The Big Chill House opens in the lovely Georgian building (formerly The Cross Bar and, most recently, Sahara Nights) next to the Thameslink station in Kings Cross. The start of the Pentonville Road doesn’t compare favourably in the beauty stakes with the grounds of Eastnor Castle, but BC’s Katrina Larkin fell in love with the house which reminded her of the Union Chapel, the lovely Islington venue where the BC began on Sunday afternoons back in 1994, because ‘there are so many rooms for manoeuvre.’ The opportunities offered by three floors, not to mention a huge outdoor terrace, rapidly overcame any misgivings she may have had about Kings Cross, which anyway offers brilliant transport links (it’s only one hour to Brighton, two hours to Leeds).

Way back in 1999 when the Scala re-opened, Kings Cross was said to be on the up but I remember wondering then when the neglected, dilapidated streets nearby would be rejuvenated. The imminent arrival of the Eurostar link next year has finally prompted a revamp of those buildings and it’s not hard to imagine the area feeling a whole lot safer and more sociable, even salubrious. The opening of the Big Chill House will only accelerate the improvement, as they team up with many of the people with whom they’ve worked with for years on the festivals and the BC Bar (including the experienced Cantaloupe bar crew) to create a curvaceous interior with plenty of natural finishes, alongside ‘proper screens around the main rooms for the VJs, with the walls covered with classic Big Chill images like Talvin Singh in ’97 and Matthew Herbert in ’95 by photographers like Alexander Brattell, Stephen Cork and Ulf Pedersen.’

‘I really love running the bar which is why we were looking for another site,’ adds Larkin, ‘though we never intended to buy anywhere this big. The Big Chill Bar will continue and we’ve got a brilliant team there but now we’ve also got an exciting future in a venue that should feel like a member’s club – without the membership fee. We don’t want to charge because then it can become event-led rather than venue-led. We want people to come to here because it’s special all the time, and free to get in. The festival is amazing but it takes a whole year to plan and then, boom, suddenly it’s over. This,’ she says, looking around the ground floor as the builders hammer and saw, ‘will be an ongoing adventure.’

The Big Chill Festival is at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshsire from Friday to Sunday. See www.bigchill.net for the full line-up.

The Big Chill House opens at 257 Pentonville Rd opens on August 17.