Ally Pally's one-day Kaleidoscope festival brings top class music, comedy and family fun to the Muswell Hill landmark.
Headliners The Happy Mondays are backed by Orbital, David Rodigan and Charlotte Church, with DJ sets from Craig Charles, DJ Yoda, and Zero 7.
Words and comedy are supplied by Dom Joly, Ed Byrne, Sindhu Vee and Creation Records legend Alan McGee, and the family area is filled with arts and crafts, magic, fire truck raves and a mini Landrover adventure.
Meanwhile The Victorian Basement Hideaway is a site-specific immersive adventure in the bowels of the palace with visitors invited to check in to the debauched and fantastical Midnight Moon Hotel populated by eternal souls and agitators. For those who just want to grab a pint and food from the many stalls, and enjoy some music there's also a Bandstand line-up that includes The Dimmocks and New Car Smell.
Paul Hartnoll, one half of electronic music duo Orbital says: "I love festival season. It's one thing doing your own gigs to an audience who have come to see you, but at festivals that's not always the case and it's like making new friends. There's a kind of excitement even if you have been playing a song for 30 years, those people might not have heard it.
"I like walking around the festival seeing other bands and the craic backstage, it's nice to interact with other musicians."
The head-torched brothers famously improvise during sets, keeping the tempo going if a song is going down well.
"Improvisation is the key element," says Paul. "The Saturday night crowd is different to a slightly hungover crowd. I watch to see how things play, I can let it run or move it on. It keeps it alive for me, I have to keep thinking about it and can't go on auto pilot. The difference between Chime as it was and Chime as I play it now, it doesn't feel like an old track, I'm always tweaking it, making it fresh."
Originally hailing from a Kent village, Hartnoll's entry into music came through 2 Tone records: "Growing up with two older brothers I heard their music, but 2 Tone was the first that was my discovery. When I was 12 The Beat's version of Tears of A Clown was like a call to adulthood. My life seemed to change from buying Airfix models to dressing sharp and going out to get girls. I thought 'I want to do this'."
Marking their 30th year, Orbital have released 30 Something featuring remixes and reworkings of classic tracks like Chime and Halcyon based on their live shows. The opening track Smiley samples Hartnoll's teenage self interviewed for a World In Action documentary about acid house parties.
The voiceover intones: "Saturday night in South London, hundreds of young people are gathering for the latest craze; an acid house party in a disused warehouse the location has been kept deliberately secret to evade the police," before a teen offers, "it's acid man".
Hartnoll had often thought about sampling himself and says the clip offered "a lovely time twist, a new track tipping its hat to the past."
"That was the year before Chime came out, when everything happened and I started that journey."
The band takes its name from the M25, the route which took urban and suburban youth to all night raves. The scene sprang up in1988 towards the end of a decade of Tory rule - followed by legislation giving Police powers to shut down parties “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.
"Any youth movement is a rebellion in its own way," says Hartnoll. "Acid House and rave music were anti-establishment without making a political statement. It was 'we are not even going to argue with you we are going to stick two fingers up and just do it' which was quite powerful and frustrating for them."
Of the scene he says: "Oh yeah, it was great fun. I used to go to nightclubs and functions around Sevenoaks before rave music and they were violent and scary with lots of fights. Local youths would run the gauntlet of being beaten up so we always left five minutes before the end. With dance music all those people were suddenly dancing and being friendly to each other. I remember one underneath the M25 in the farmers' tunnels. Inside was like a Stephen Spielberg movie with speakers and lights, and a London bouncer taking £10 off people at a stile. This thing had transported itself from an urban environment to the peaceful countryside and there was no trouble, just a bit of litter."
Although the Eavises were unsure about dance music at Glastonbury when they played in 1994, they went down a storm. And they were among the first dance acts to play Top of The Pops.
"They didn't have a clue what to do with us - they had a bloody dancer on! Going on Jools Holland there was no way he was going to play boogie woogie piano with us. It was like stepping into the old world, but I don't regret it, the only way to change the old world into the new is do these things."
Tickets are available for Kaleidoscope Festival at https://kaleidoscope-festival.com/
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