A fantastical Mediterranean village bizarrely located on the north Wales coast, Portmeirion is essentially a magnificent folly. It is thus entirely fitting that Festival No 6, now in its fourth year in this engagingly surreal home of cult 60s TV show The Prisoner, is becoming a celebration of British popular culture’s mavericks, eccentrics and outsiders.
It’s a theme that ran through the musical offerings on this long, sunny weekend, from Friday-night headliners Metronomy’s angular quirk-pop, to British Sea Power’s left-handed tics and foibles, to the uniform-clad, none-more-arty Everything Everything. Belle and Sebastian’s Saturday-night headline set of lovelorn, lopsided pop climaxed in a joyous stage invasion.
But music is only part of the Festival No 6 package. Why endure the witless stadium indie of Catfish and the Bottlemen when you could be learning Welsh or northern-soul dancing in Tim Burgess’s Tim Peaks Diner? And in the village’s Palladian central piazza, Steve Coogan was magisterially scornful on the return of Rebekah Brooks to the News UK fold: “I’m delighted she has been rehabilitated so quickly. That’s called sarcasm, by the way.”
The celestial voices of Festival No 6 stalwarts the Brythoniaid Male Voice Choir made repeat appearances, including soundtracking a production of Under Milk Wood and, on Sunday, dedicating You’ll Never Walk Alone to the Welsh football team. Meanwhile, the eternally giddy and delirious James played a set that pulsed with ferocious emotional intelligence.
After an inventive Martin Ware-scored dramatisation of The Prisoner in the piazza, a drumming band and scores of revellers in illuminated Grace Jones-themed millinery marched to the main stage to see the indefatigably spectacular Jones, topless in body paint, play three-decades-old material that somehow still sounds futuristic. It was a perfect end to a festival where the incongruous is very much the norm.
