Bacardi Holiday Club music festival (BHCMF) took place this past weekend at Welgelegen Manor in Balfour. A 5 star rated English residential style estate tucked away in Balfour, 45minutes drive from OR Tambo International Airport. The property is nestled amongst a field of thriving sunflower plantation, greenery, and a lush well-manicured landscape.
BHCMF is an all-inclusive music festival, what that means is that the cost of the festival tickets includes open bar, food bar and camping spot for the weekend. You can eat, drink all you want and party, Until Until, well in theory. For those not into pitching their own tent, the festival had three camping options at an extra cost, luxury, comfy and budget. This was the second instalment of the festival which was themed the ‘beach edition’ which was prevalent in the colourful and dwarfing installation around the festival grounds.
BHCMF is organised by Ten Media Group (TMG) in partnership with Bacardi rum as the principal sponsor with naming rights for an undisclosed period of time – hopefully much longer. TMG is a Johannesburg based event, promotions, and marketing agency that owns the party event Until Until and other themed parties that fall under that stable such as; Genesis All Black, Fake Fridays, Sunday Roast and Pajama Party.
I wrote a detailed review of the festival where I dived deep into performances, stage, logistics and so forth. However, Eskom tripped the power and my working document vanished. No trace of the auto-saved version of it nor could the deep hard drive scan software help to retrieve it. I suppose the never-ending power outages is one of the realities one must now fully accept from Johannesburg, ‘a world-class African city’, the city of gold sans the gold. I digress.
As expected there were lots of yellows, pinks, and reds. Co-ords sets, below-the-nose-bridge-eyes-over-the-top-rim micro matrix shades, socks-cords, kidney bags, and micro and macro slings. From the socio-cultural and consumerism perspective, you could explicitly see what was moving the needle. A mashup of the Tumblr tribe, vagina art of fingering and hypersexualising fruits and vegetables, Soundcloud fusion aesthetic with an overlay of the nineties dzad and mom fits. Vulgar designer garms’ for all the hypebeasts, hypebabes and the conceptual fits mods archetypes.
So herewith the BHCMF 2019 synopsis: The festival is a three days’ event with three stages, four camping options, it billed 30 local music performances of which refreshingly, 9 were all cis-female DJs who played on Saturday from 10am – 5pm. One of the musical acts I was looking forward to seeing the first time was Kabza De Small because midst conversation with a few people he came highly recommended as the ‘it’ Amapiano DJ. It is always refreshing to be introduced to some new artists. More especially at music festivals that is one of the primary reasons I cover festivals. They are real-life, real-time live music shuffle player. Unfortunately, it was announced that he was running late for his 1 am set. Granted, getting a drink on Saturday night was demanding and the bar was out of flat water. I took that as a sign to retire.