PACKET reporter Ryan Morwood has been on the ground at Boardmasters 2023 and his report from ground zero on the first day of the festival features below:
WE were somewhere around Newquay, on the edge of Watergate Bay, when the music began to take hold.
I remember thinking something like, “Blimey, the sun is actually shining,” as we made our way toward the Boardmasters site.
This wasn’t our first time here, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t that same sense of optimistic anticipation as we approached the entrance to the festival.
Who would we see this year? What kinds of festival shenanigans would we get up to? Would the brief glimpse of summer that had evaded us for months hold out? These were the questions I found myself pondering as we made our way forward to the press accreditation hut.
Once we were confirmed as being on “the list,” we collected our wristbands and headed onward into the sights and sounds of the festival.
After a brief visit to the press area to say hello and gather the information we would need we headed out into the arena.
We were instantly taken aback by the sheer number of festivalgoers in attendance. Huge swathes of people young and old, although mostly young, flowed from one stage to another. As someone on the older side of the age scale, it brought back memories of being in my late teens and early twenties and attending festivals armed with nothing but youth and hubris (and whatever else we managed to sneak inside with.)
The first act we saw were The Vaccines, who were mostly likely playing some of those same festivals I had been reminiscing over upon our arrival.
Having first come across the band in the early 2010s, it was nice to see them still playing to larger crowds on the festival scene, particularly when their set list eventually led them to what is arguably their biggest hit, “If you wanna.”
Having moved on, we ventured to some of the other stages on offer at Boardmasters, most notably the Land of Saints stage where we saw a band I had never heard of before, but will certainly be listening to in the future.
Warmduscher came on at around 7pm and I was instantly engaged. The energetic performance and a sound that seems to amalgamate Queens of the Stone Age with Gary Numan and Electric Six meant that, up to that point, Warmduscher were the highlight of that evening’s entertainment.
Things took a slower turn on the mainstage for the rest of the evening, with Ben Howard lulling the crowd into chill-mode before Lorde took to the stage for her Boardmasters debut and entertained with her ethereal brand of pop music.
However, chilled was not the mood we would be ending the night on.
As someone with a fairly eclectic taste in music, it was no surprised that I would be interested in seeing Cypress Hill. However, despite my personal playlists tending to lean towards the more guitar-driven side of things, there was no mistaking how thoroughly enjoyable watching a hip-hop group who had mastered their craft over 30 years perform what could be argued is their best album.
‘Black Sunday’ was released in 1993 and features some of Cypress Hill’s most-loved tunes. When performed on Friday at the Land of Saints stage, ‘Hit from the bong’ and ‘Insane in the brain’ were the perfect way to end the first night of Boardmasters 2023.
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