“What stays with you leaving We Out Here isn’t any single set, amazing as plenty of them are. It’s the crowd. People of every age and background, united by little more than a love of music, of life, and of each other.”
We Out Here has never really needed to tell people what it is. The crowd does that for you, over and over across four days. There’s a looseness to the whole place, an unhurried energy that’s rare for a festival this size. Nobody’s sprinting for a stage, because there’s a quiet trust that everyone here is after the same thing. What actually ties it together is harder to put on a poster: a crowd that’s kind, open, and there for the right reasons, whatever that means to each of them. Despite the 2023 move from its original Cambridgeshire home to Wimborne St Giles, Dorset, that crowd has stayed fiercely loyal, fully signed up to the ethos Gilles Peterson set out from the start. It’s proof, if it were needed, that We Out Here is beyond just a festival. It’s a community, with Peterson still very much at the helm, and rightly so.
Thursday doesn’t so much open as unfurl. Powder gets there first, hypnotic dub-focused techno folded into wonky disco cuts, slow-building enough that you barely notice the dancefloor filling out beneath you, sunlight refracting through the trees behind the decks like the site is putting on its own light show to match. By the time Digable Planets take the Main Stage, that quiet build has tipped into something looser and louder: one of hip hop’s most colourful, playful collectives back together and bouncing off a crowd only too happy to lap up their call-and-response. Actress drags things somewhere stranger again on Lush Life, glitchy and broken sounds, tempo switch-ups, vocals that feel beamed in from another frequency entirely. It’s dancefloor experimentalism that challenges as much as it moves you, and somehow keeps a crowd locked in regardless. HVYWT Orchestra trade abstraction for education, a live history lesson in dubstep that runs from origins through to modern classics (Midnight Request Line into Pangaea, Eva808), bass rumbling through your chest with the steady insistence of a massage chair that won’t switch off. Barker gets the last word, though, easing the crowd at The Grove into transcendental, icy anthems as the venue’s wooden framework lights up around him. There’s real tension in his tracks but no need for a big club kick to land the euphoria: trancey melodies, ambient air, techno energy; a blissful way to put the first night to bed.
Friday belongs to Gilles Peterson before it belongs to anyone else. He opens the Bowl, built around a sunken pit that might be the most perfect dancefloor on site, warm and colourful in the morning sun, a set that quietly sets up the whole day’s swing from deep and dubby into dark and heavy come nightfall. That swing plays out in miniature at Lemon Lounge, which has quickly earned a reputation as one of the festival’s most fun stages: sparkly lemon disco balls, a properly weighty system, and once you’ve fought your way into the packed crowd, no real desire to leave. Kay Suzuki is the reason why. Deep dubby house gives way to Japanese dub, which gives way to 70s blues, an eclecticism matched only by how readily the crowd follows him wherever he goes next. Over at Love Dancing, Mr Scruff, DJ Spinna and Vanessa Freeman stretch a similar openness across six hours, moving through genre after genre with joy as the only constant. Glitter and bubble guns turn the dancefloor as colourful and free as the music demands. Corto Alto offers a different strain of eclecticism on the Main Stage that afternoon: Liam Shortall’s live band folding bleeps and bloops into modern jazz, somewhere between The Comet Is Coming and Kokoroko, delivered with enough showmanship that even a joke about his own mother lands like a punchline built for the whole crowd. “My mum would love this,” he says, “she hates jazz, but she loves me.”
It’s worth stepping away from the stages for a moment, because what happens between them is just as much the story. There’s a football pitch running organised kids’ tournaments, an internet café, a lost kids’ tent, and a restaurant rotating in guest chefs across the weekend: infrastructure that quietly signals a festival built for everyone, not just those who’ll be up till 4am.
Further out, the Sanctuary slows the whole festival down a gear. Yoga and life drawing sessions run through the day, massages and a sauna and hot tub wait for anyone whose legs have given out, and the lake is there for swimming and paddleboarding. For those who need to properly switch off, there’s a quiet tent for napping and finding calm. Tucked inside the Sanctuary is the Clearing, where swans drift past in unison and every shade of green, canopy, reeds, the algae skinning the water, blurs into one calm scene, the sort of place you find yourself lingering longer than planned before heading back in. It’s less a bolt-on wellness tent, more proof the festival’s actually built around the idea that four days of dancing needs somewhere to come down too.
Back at the Bowl, Beatrice M. and AliA, two queens of 140, lure the crowd down off the grassy bank and into flowy, bouncy sets that move easily between dub, techno and breaks, similar to the sounds of Facta & K-Lone who play the penultimate set here on the Friday. Across the site at Rhythm Corner, a stage that’s never easy to own between its towering LED frame and huge sound desks, Tama Sumo and Lakuti make it look effortless: the silkiest of vocal house and disco stompers, delivered with all the assurance you’d expect from two Panorama Bar residents. Four Tet is the not-so-secret special guest there later in the weekend, and if there’s anyone who can command a crowd en masse, it’s him.
Alex Kassian follows into Friday night proper, a man rightly given his flowers in recent years, steering the first big session of the weekend through to 2am. The setting matters here almost as much as the music. Beat Hotel, legendary at Glastonbury and now retired from it, relocated for the weekend with a curved wooden roof, a terrace and a Mescal-diner theme of saloon booths, properly pulls you into its own world. So does Lemon Lounge, in its own lemon-soaked way. It only sharpens the contrast with Tomorrow’s Warriors’ Big Top, a tent that, bright lights by the bar aside, could belong to any festival, saved mainly by the strength of its programming. If any set claims the weekend outright, though, it’s Yu Su’s. Unpredictable by design, capable of slow and chuggy or slamming and epic in equal measure, she opts firmly for the latter on this night, pacing through hypnotic sounds and wigginess before tipping into straight-up hands-in-the-air euphoria with tracks like Erol Alkan’s Rework of ‘I Feel Speed’ by Dubfire. It’s the sort of control that makes the cliché about DJs taking you on a journey feel, for once, entirely earned. Tasha takes the Bowl on into deep, rolling, heads-down techno afterwards, tightly mixed, the arching dancefloor lit up by rows of doof sticks.
Saturday needs an easier landing, and Shy One provides it: silky dub and UK street soul, eclectic enough to keep you guessing, gentle enough to shake off the hangover. That gentleness doesn’t last. Alicia’s deep, weighty dubby techno and 140 in the Lemon Lounge cranks the temperature back up before handing the reins to the self-styled godfather of Memphis rap, DJ Spanish Fly, who delivers bass-heavy hip hop delivered with real tongue-in-cheek energy. Rhythm Corner spends the evening on drum & bass and jungle, Alix Perez gliding between liquid and filthy basslines to a crowd that never stops bouncing, but it’s Blawan who supplies the day’s genuine outlier. Where so much of We Out Here’s programming leans into soul and warmth, his live set is its shadow twin: crunchy, twisted, disconcerting soundscapes, haunted-fairground textures, metal crashes and commanding voices pulling the crowd somewhere closer to the underworld than the dancefloor. It’s slower and wonkier than his usual DJ sets, but more inspired for it, the groove holding it together like a spine, guiding the crowd through a haunted house entirely of his own making. Tomorrow’s Warriors’ Big Top turns the temperature back up again with a takeover from one of Leeds’ leading queer parties, its founders bringing together a crowd unafraid to shake a limb. All smiles, right up until Rroxymore closes the night with pumping house and techno.
Sunday, inevitably, asks for something softer. Shabaka’s flute playing opens the day like a slow exhale, the crowd variously absorbed and peacefully asleep in the same patch of grass. James K, riding high off last year’s success of ‘Friend’, matches that hype with angelic vocals gliding over deep, purring trip-hop and downtempo alt-indie textures: a genuinely beautiful, patient performance. The Grove finds its energy again by evening with another jungle takeover, this time courtesy of Rupture. Josey Rebelle, Bryan G, Mantra and D Bridge unload filthy jungle and bass as lasers cut through the stage’s wooden framework and slice across the crowd behind. And then, fittingly, Prosumer closes the whole weekend down, sending Beat Hotel into house and disco heaven as booths and tables fill with dancers and four days’ worth of collective energy gets released in one long final session. Somewhere in the middle of it, a young boy throws down the funkiest of moves, a circle forming around him to clap him on, while a man with lasers shooting from his wrists lights the beams for him to dance through: a perfect, unplanned snapshot of everything this festival is about. There isn’t a face without a smile as Prosumer, fittingly German, closes it all out with Freez’s 1983 anthem ‘I.O.U.’
What stays with you leaving We Out Here isn’t any single set, amazing as plenty of them are. It’s the crowd. People of every age and background, united by little more than a love of music, of life, and of each other. That so many different versions of a good weekend can coexist here, without ever getting in each other’s way, says everything about the thought that goes into it. Plenty of festivals call themselves a family. Few actually build a site where an eight-year-old and an eighty-year-old can be having exactly the same good time, three feet apart, each one clearly delighted the other’s there too. That’s the real trick Gilles Peterson has pulled off. Four days on, walking out with sore feet and a stupid grin, it’s already impossible not to think about next August.