Summer Camp Brings Old School Joy To A Modern Audience

Kieran Webber

Director and Founder of CLUNK Magazine, CLUNK Events, and other CLUNK affiliate businesses. You’ll probably find me tucked away somewhere sending emails, listening to music, and creating content.

Summer Camp festival is a place brimming with creativity, good vibes, and of course, stellar music

Throughout the world, there are festivals taking place on a scale perhaps never seen before. Many of which, have been corpertised and perhaps lost exactly what makes festivals so special. They are a place to gather, share ideas, talk, love, take in the natural surroundings, form closer ties to strangers, and of course, enjoy a bountiful amount of live music. The Cornish Bank’s Summer Camp does just this, in a way that reminded me of the old super 8 footage you see of festivals back in the 60’s and 70’s. It has an old school hippie vibe that is nothing short of alluring and frankly, wonderful. This sentiment, matched with an incredible location of Trefusis Estate makes for arguably one of the best small festivals in Cornwall, if not the entire U.K. There are few festivals where you can be in the woods, listening to French psych-rock followed by a swim in the sea at the nearby Flushing beach. Not to mention, a place where you walk into the resident bar The Touc Inn, and find a folk gathering forming up and playing impromptu jams. It’s truly wonderful.

The Cornish Bank have long been carving out their space in Falmouth, and the wider Cornwall scene with their Minack Theatre shows, in fact, it could be argued they’ve managed to carve out a space and built a scene in the county that was desperate for it. The Summer Camp festival is a celebration of everything the venue does so well. Bringing together not just great artists from the wider world to tickle our ears with their music, but a place that finally binds the wider Cornish music scene, it’s a celebration of what’s been built, a blossming music scene finding its feet and demanding attention, yet remaining very much independent. Seeing so many local bands play was a true delight further proving that the local scene has never been stronger, all thanks to this wonderful Cornish Bank. Summer Camp is their magnum opus and we cannot wait to see where they take the festival and long may it continue.