Here’s the wording direct from the festival on the areas along with the lineups.
Spike Island
Spike Island is an elevated swamp-hut squatting in the marshlands – driftwood construction, a defensive shell of hedgehog spines camouflaged in pond-weed, ditch-vines, elephant grass and leech-sludge, reachable only via a raised walkway across the bog.
Dublin’s Cobblestone Pub brings the best of folk, trad and roots music to the space, along with the Mulligan family’s trademark hospitality. Inside: folk, trad, a little Americana, slip-jigs, Delta blues chants, beardy men playing paradiddle on piccolo snare, and the odd stray bit of electronica. Jig if you’re so inclined, or just lean in closer to the smell of the mandolin man.
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Daytime lineup:
Ispíní na hÉireann, Megatrad, Caoimhín, Ciarán Moran, KK Lewis, Burnchurch, The Labourers, Saltaire, Al Baker, The Len Collective, FADA, Friends of the Relics, Hello Len, Ispíní agus Cáis, Kettleboilers, Laura Jo, Méabh and Eva, Nóiníní, Shrunk Jumper, The Lines, The Spudguns, Trad Folkin Raps, Tulua.
After dark, Old Boy Meaney sets a match to the barrel-fires outside and starts a bit of a song. Inside, Irish trad musicians drop in for a proper seisiún, anchored by a handful of players with a fondness for spontaneity.
After-dark sessions:
The Cobblestone Session, The Dudley’s Pub Session, The Darkey Kellys Session.
Spike Island: escape from all the bleeping noise, back to a time when wonky-eyed neighbours chicken-danced across old floorboards.
BerlinHaus
Only a few hundred people ever gain access to the most secret venue in the whole festival. Its location is never fully revealed and no footage has ever surfaced – but it’ll be there again this year.
For German techno aficionados, gaining access down a steep, dark tunnel into a clandestine subterranean club, where only DJs doing incognito nixers from Berlin’s Berghain or Tresor take to the decks, is the kind of bucket-list small-hours moment Electric Picnic does better than most.
So if you’re wandering the forest and suddenly feel the ground vibrate with a hypnotic kick drum, catch a flicker of strobe escaping an access cavity in the ground, or glimpse the dim neon spelling out its name over a mossy abandoned bunker entrance – and you manage to slither past the selective Deutsche bouncer – you might find yourself inside a below-ground East German safe-house that’s been quietly commandeered for the night.
Sometimes 4am is not bedtime.
Hier gibt es nichts zu sehen! All photography, video recording and phone use is forbidden.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
