Edward Sharpe
There's really only one word to describe this past weekend at the Escape to New York music festival in Southampton, and that would be CRAZY. As the first go-around of Fred Fellows' American answer to London's famous Secret Garden Party, a bit of chaos was to be expected – but we didn't let that or the rain ruin our fun. We split our time hanging out in the glamping area (that's code for "glamorous camping") with cool kids like Ben Towill and Phil Winser of The Fat Radish, Coco Rocha, Alexander Skarsgård, Chelsea Leyland and Waris Ahuwalia, and at the actual festival grounds on the Shinnecock Reservation a few miles away. And we have to give credit to Fred Fellows, the brains behind the entire festival – the things we saw and experienced (like techno-spewing toads on wheels and panda pits for example) were unlike anything we've ever witnessed. "It’s the theory that the most fun thing you can do when you bring together 5,000 people is not put them in a position of being spectators, but get them involved," Fellows told us backstage about the concepts behind the festival. "It's the stuff that I’ve done and people I’ve met [that are most memorable] and so it's really the underlying ethos."
Au Revoir Simone pretty much summed up the experience when they told us what their Escape weekend had been like thus far: "Super fun, magical, energetic and yummy. Lots of eye candy and sparkly people." We couldn't have said it better.
Every other band that we saw play on Friday and Saturday (Sunday's lineup was sadly cancelled due to weather conditions)– were hitting their stride, and nothing seemed to go awry. Even when The Vaccines kicked over a drumset on stage, we didn't even notice that it wasn't all part of the act. "Its been a long two days," the band told us after their show. "We’re in trouble now because we’ve trashed the drum kit. It wasn’t ours…it was $5,000 or something." Hopefully not too much trouble, because after watching the British band perform live for the first time, we're hoping to see a lot more of them in the future. So what was their most memorable Escape to New York moment? "Apparently, one of the guys in the band before us was sitting in the taxi on stage watching the gig. I thought that was pretty cool."
Our ultimate highlights of the weekend, though, had to be seeing the legendary Patti Smith play and watching Edward Sharpe perform "Home" to a massive crowd of people, many of which were shooting bubble guns into the air. It wasn't until the last few minutes of Edward Sharpe's set that the storm clouds released, acting as a very wet punctuation mark to an incredibly memorable weekend.
Check out a bunch of our favorite photos from the festival courtesy of Milk Studios and help us relive our very first Escape to New York. And stay tuned for more images from our Bloody Mary brunch with The Fat Radish.
Photos courtesy of Brian DePinto.
