Feature:: Serpentine Sessions Overview
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Serpentine Sessions Overview Band: Serpentine Sessions Thu Jul 2 19:04:46 2009 |
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| by Jo Vallance | |
The Serpentine Sessions are a new festival in Hyde Park offering intimate shows with some top acts. The shows are fantastic but it would be unfair to neglect the fact that the series is sold as taking place in a pleasant garden with lovely surroundings, which is in fact the cider garden used for the majority of the summer’s festivals in the park with a bandstand featuring smaller acts, while the headliner plays in a large tent. The shows are still intimate and it’s nice enough to lounge around in the cider garden as the music wafts over you but the claim of “stunning” surroundings is a bit far-fetched. Still, it’s all about the music and on this front the sessions are doing well with some fantastic headliners and great warm-up acts, although more information about the latter would also be very useful in the future as the online stage times seem somewhat inaccurate and there’s no information outside the stages. This is the perfect festival for people too busy for large events like Glastonbury who want to pop down for a lazy evening and enjoy themselves outdoors without the stress of surging crowds or mile-long toilet queues.
As this is the Serpentine Session series’ first year there are naturally going to be minor teething problems like the vague stage times but these are kept to a minimum and I very much hope that the sessions bring us more of the same next year.