Bangface, A Collective Memory

Our intrepid explorer of the Hardcore Continuum, Ummer Mayat, makes the case for how the greatest festival on the planet does something new by going back to how Brits used to have fun. 

For most of the 20th century, coastal towns like Skegness and Blackpool were the beating heart of working-class leisure. Entire mining communities, factory floors, steelworks and rail depots would shut down for ‘Wakes Weeks’. An en masse migration to the seaside. A temporary reassembling of industrial communities on new terrain. 

But when British industry collapsed, so did the culture that sustained these towns. The crowds stopped coming, leaving behind empty ballrooms, chalets, promenades. Many British seaside towns have an unmistakable feeling of suspension, of being frozen in amber. Into this vacuum arrives Bang Face. A place for collective escape, maintaining the memory of communal working-class joy even as the society that built it has changed beyond recognition. 

Bang Face Weekender is a neo-rave music festival that invades the otherwise unsuspecting Butlins complex in Skegness. ‘Festival’ barely describes it. What happens here feels more like a pilgrimage. Many revellers I spoke to are visiting the UK for the first time purely for this holy weekend. They skip Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and elect instead for a blurry photo of themselves with a half-inflated sex doll in a swimming pool. 

They made the right choice. Bang Face is a portal into a different time and space. An alternate Britain where everything is louder, stranger and somehow more sincere than real life. Neo-rave sits on the harder, faster end of the dance-music spectrum. Bridging Acid, Jungle, Techno, Drum & Bass, Breakcore and beyond. Listing genres feels inadequate to capture what erupts across three days. Crowds crave new sounds and artists oblige with dubplates and deep crate digs. 

“Nothing can prepare you for it, so don’t even bother. Just freestyle it.” – Samurai Breaks 

This auditory pick-and-mix is unlike anything you hear elsewhere. Sets weave their cross-hatched journeys with abstract sample layering, a refusal to let the familiar feel familiar. 

This twisting of familiarity into something new and fresh starts with the setting. Butlins is a normal, family holiday resort. But Bang Face morphs it into a commune dedicated to shaking booty. There’s an arcade, a pool hall, a shopping centre, laser quest, go-karting, a waterpark, a welfare takeover of Papa John’s, and two pubs. There’s even a 24-hour rolling news channel of nonsense: Bang Face TV, playing quizzes, movies, and Beyblade battles soundtracked to industrial techno. 

The Butlins waterpark comes into action for a spectacle of floating heads and spiralling bodies: three progressively more chaotic pool parties with a free signup and fast sell-out. Hardcore in a chlorinated vortex is a ludicrous form of liberation much cheaper than therapy. Inflatables roam like migrating fauna, redirected by the leaps of determined bass driven ravers. 

Friday and Saturday hit the hardest, with stages open until 4am. This year's special nod goes to DJ Scotch Egg, a man who produces tracks on a Game Boy. His set rejected presumption entirely, bringing high-energy chaos to the Hard Crew stage. Fitting for a room you can’t hear until the doors fling open and the bass tries to send you back down the stairs. Sherelle, Special Request, and Sully delivered a punishing run in the Face Room. By the end, my knees felt like they had run a marathon, my soul like it had won one. Max Cooper’s set was celestial audiovisual chaos, an immersive gallery piece masquerading as a rave that filled the gigantic Bang Room. 

The star of the weekend was BRAVA, a set that had it all. As the stage was being reconfigured for the next act, she continued to play flawlessly as the crew moved her decks around. She demonstrated the true essence of BF, allowing your passion to shine regardless of what’s around you. 

Butlins works for Bang Face because it was built for collective life. Post-war Britain needed places for thousands of people to holiday together affordably. The architecture remains perfect for modern reoccupation and reinterpretation. Chalets become micro-rave communes. Walkways become parade routes. Dining halls morph into welfare hubs. 

Our chalet was at the furthest point of the commune, a ten-minute walk through a maze of identical buildings. Having a bed, shower and kitchen at a festival is a game-changer. Each stage had toilets, space to dance without emptiness, and at least one bar. These luxuries are a far cry from BF’s early days of free parties and club nights. But this is not a posh glamping experience; it’s an evolution of the spirit and values of Bang Face. Revellers get to create a community that they can only feel for the rest of the year. For a brief, beautiful time the society of their dreams becomes a reality. 

“At Bangface, everyone is solely there for the love of music. I have never danced as hard as I have at Bangface. It is something that should be cherished, it’s honestly a very healing place. It gives everyone a weekend to get into their grooves, release what’s been building up.” – Peppa, Jungyalsandgays. 

Whilst the music dominates, it’s the interactions that become cemented. I met a guy walking around with a squeezy bag of cold spaghetti, a woman firing lasers across the room from her outfit, and found countless placards of genius phrases scattered across the grounds. 

And in all the chaos, there’s a sense of something older re-emerging, seaside towns were always surreal. End-of-the-pier humour, neon absurdity, a loosening of responsibility. Bang Face simply accelerates this into warp-speed. 

Bang Face is more than a rave. It is the inheritor of a deep cultural pattern. Britain goes to the seaside when it needs to reinvent itself. The working-class holidays of the post-war decades were acts of collective affirmation. When industry died, that culture dispersed. What remained were towns built for shared joy, waiting for new forms of belonging to fill them. 

Bang Face does exactly that. It returns people to the periphery in new configurations, offering escape not from repetitive labour but from the neoliberal condition that erodes community, public space, and free collective expression. 

Strangely, Skegness, through Bang Face, becomes a site of futurity. A place where alternative values are incubated. A counter-intuitive island of coherence. A place where, for three days (with a petition to bring back the fourth), people practise relations that feel more honest, more chaotic, more caring, more communal than anything offered in the cities that dominate cultural attention. BF teaches us to give time and space to strangers, engaging with a genuine openness, bringing back the excitement of random interaction and hopes of opportunity. 

Bang Face’s success has set a tone. The forthcoming Blackpool festival The Black Lights, assembled by Salford’s White Hotel and showcasing Northern Gothic trailblazers such as Blackhaine and Rainy Miller suggests a shifting of focus away from the city as the cultural heartbeat of dance music back into the fringes. Post-industrial seaside towns are, slowly, being reclaimed as sites of identity-making for a new generation. If post-war holiday camps gave the working class a place to breathe. Bang Face, gives 21st-century Britain a place to dream that another life is possible. 

Artist Perspectives on Bang Face 

I asked a few Bang Face performers 4 quick questions; here’s what they had to say. 

1. What conspiracies did you hear over the weekend? 

2. How would you describe a Hard Crew member? 

3. What is the best thing about Bang Face? 

4. How do you prepare for a set at Bang Face? 

BRAVA, My favourite artist of the weekend, Spanish Icon. 

1. Fuck Burger King 

2. 

A. The Hard Crew member never speaks; they only communicate by holding a sign with a unique phrase on it. 

B. Eats dinner in the Nisa Local. 

C. Doesn’t need the schedule. 

D. Is 24/7 ready to push any inflatable flying toward them. 

3. The public 

4. I had 1 hour, so I prepared a collage of wtf I love as I knew the people would be welcoming it with a lot of energy, love and madness. 

Hixxy, Bang Face Legend, Rig Destroyer: 

1. I didn’t hear any but the one I did get told recently which is either genius or not true was that Starbucks have intentionally been spelling names incorrectly or as wrong as possible to get social media posts from people afterwards. 

2. This is easy, you literally can’t pinpoint any - I’ve always said the BFC are the most individually unique, diverse, wide ranged crew you’ll ever meet and party with. 

3. The party people. 

4. I’m a bit of a believer in never preparing or pre-planning a set in any way. I like to see how it goes and work it out as I go. This time I did get a bit anxious because it was my first one back after a few years and wanted more than anything for it to work out and get a good response. 

Breakforce One, Mind Melter, Relentless Energy: 

1. Breakforce One does not concern himself with engaging in the annual "theme" tradition. He wants it on the record that he is perfectly able to come up with original jokes that are just as good. 

2. Breakforce One loves every person attending his set unconditionally - any and all comments on their traits would be presumptuous. Gun to the chest, he would probably say that a unifying trait is the flawless taste in music; however, Hard Crew not attending Breakforce One Sets are exempt from this and are terrible people. 

3. Bang Face Weekender and its associates have always been supporters and friends of Breakforce One and are therefore, good people. For the record, we want to point out that Breakforce One is willing to play for any occasion, preferably on a bigger stage than before. 

4. Breakforce One puts great care into crafting the perfect hour and judging by this years feedback metrics he has successfully done so again.” 

Written by Umma

Edited by Joe Hurdman