As the rain poured, and Optimo’s home-grown brand of electronic music echoed around the Melting Pot festival tent, the Glasgow crowd took a collective breath, let out a sigh of relief and at once embraced and revelled in the revitalised Glaswegian spirit captured perfectly within the Queen’s Park festival.
A true festival experience in Scotland isn’t typically peak-sun and sunburn, it’s grassy fields, and broken clouds, a musical spirit built in defiance of the elements, in defiance of those who doubt musical loyalty. A Glasgow festival is a hands in the air, rave in the rain, unforgettable experience.
It’s quite lucky that Melting Pot 2022, had a couple of marquee tents to hide from the elements, however, the passion of those in attendance made it clear that regardless of temperature, the Glasgow crowd embraces Scotland’s four seasons in one day.
Celebrating 25 years as a musical duo, Saturday night saw Optimo duo JD Twitch & JG Wilkes create musical energy that only comes with playing in synchronicity for more than two decades, tracks and energy bouncing from one another and amongst the crowd.
Clubbers and festival crowds will struggle to experience a similar vibe at any other festival this upcoming summer season.
With dancers throwing flowers, and Free Love playing an excellent live set, it created an almost circus-like level of excitement to match the hypnotic disco beats pumping from the speakers.
The crowd’s receptive reaction to the unfolding entertainment suggests the festival has the potential to evolve into one of Scotland’s biggest and best events.
In what felt both international and yet local, the festival was a boisterous event, was considerably well organised, drink queues moved efficiently, toilets were well structured and the substantial crowd in attendance upon leaving were only minutes away from Glasgow’s major traffic routes.
Mark Mackechnie, Festival Director, said: ’It’s been an amazing weekend at our new venue Queen’s Park Recreation Ground. Our new house has really allowed us to develop what we do with Heverlee, and the new Heverlee Village tent was a firm favourite of the weekend. It was a special one as we helped Optimo celebrate 25 amazing years with top-class music from some of the best artists also playing all weekend. We can’t wait to return next year.’
Melting Pot x Heverlee Presents – Roll on 2023.
Photo credits: Cameron Brisbane
