Also

ALSO Festival is one of those festivals that understands that music can sit perfectly beside a good conversation, a long meal, an intelligent laugh, a swim in the lake and an idea that keeps returning to you for weeks. At Park Farm, Compton Verney, in Warwickshire, the festival does not try to imitate the huge mass events of the British summer. Its personality follows another path: more intimate, more curious, more sensory, more interested in mixing pleasure, thought and nature into one weekend.

Its name, ALSO, works almost like an editorial statement. Not only music; also ideas. Not only partying; also rest. Not only stages; also landscape. Not only entertainment; also conversation, food, wellbeing, science, literature, humour, workshops and unusual experiences. That accumulation of “also” is the essence of the festival. In a world where many events define themselves through one genre or one tribe, ALSO defines itself through curiosity. It is a festival for people who want to dance, yes, but also to hear someone speak about philosophy, try something new, swim, laugh, eat well and go home feeling they have used more parts of themselves than only their ears.

The setting is essential. Park Farm, beside Compton Verney, is not a neutral venue. It is a Warwickshire landscape of lakes, trees, paths, open countryside and that particular English beauty that changes the rhythm of the body before the programme even begins. The festival uses that environment not as decoration, but as part of the experience. Nature is not in the background; it is integrated. You can move from a talk to a walk, from a set to a dinner, from comedy to silence by the water. That soft circulation between stimuli is what makes ALSO feel more like a temporary small community than a simple schedule of acts.

Musically, ALSO is not trying to compete with festivals built around enormous headline posters. Its strength lies in curation and mixture. Afriquoi brings global club energy, afrobeat, house and organic electronics that can turn a boutique night into a luminous dancefloor. Sheep, Dog & Wolf carries a more experimental, chamber art-pop sensibility, full of layers, arrangements and a more intimate way of building emotion. PVA connects electronic music, post-punk, club tension and modern edge. Tribo adds Brazilian carnival percussion, Steve Pretty can turn cinema and music into a live experience, and projects such as Shellectronica show the festival’s more eccentric, sensory and adventurous side.

But ALSO cannot be understood only through its musicians. Comedy and talks are just as important to its DNA. A programme that includes Mark Thomas, Luke Wright, Elf Lyons, Robin Ince and Marcel Lucont points to a festival that does not separate intelligence from fun. Here, laughter can be political, poetic, absurd, elegant or uncomfortable. Ideas do not appear as cold lectures forced into a music festival; they appear as a natural part of the weekend. People are not only consuming content. They are allowing themselves to be stimulated by different kinds of thought.

The 2026 edition, with the theme “Oh Fortuna!”, fits that personality especially well. Talking about luck, chance, encounters and destiny makes sense at a festival, because the best festival moments are almost never the ones you plan perfectly. They are the artist you discover by accident, the conversation that begins in a queue, the workshop you enter without expectations, the song you hear from a distance while walking, the meal shared with someone you just met or the moment when you decide to stay somewhere instead of rushing to the next thing. ALSO seems designed to let those accidents happen.

The real experience probably feels calmer and more adult than a typical festival of alcohol, queues and hurry. That does not mean boring; it means more aware of its own rhythm. You can wake early, swim, drink coffee, enter a talk, eat something carefully prepared, see comedy, discover a musician you did not know, dance at night and sleep with the feeling that the day had several layers. This kind of festival works very well for audiences who no longer want to sacrifice comfort, quality or conversation in order to experience live music. ALSO understands that growing up does not mean stopping going to festivals; it means asking more of them.

It also has strong appeal for families and mixed groups. It is not built exclusively for people in their twenties or for obsessive music fans. It can welcome couples, friends, parents with children, readers, food lovers, science-curious minds, wellbeing people, comedy fans, soft-electronic listeners, people wanting to escape the city and anyone who enjoys a programme where the strange and the welcoming can coexist. That breadth does not make it generic. On the contrary, it gives it a very specific identity: a festival for curious people.

ALSO Festival matters because it represents a different version of festival luxury. Not the luxury of VIP zones or enormous names, but the luxury of time, landscape, good ideas, well-chosen music, food, humour and mental space. Its strongest image is not a crowd crushed in front of a stage, but a group of people moving through a beautiful field, entering and leaving talks, laughing under a tent, dancing to Afriquoi, listening to strange sounds at sunset and understanding that a festival can also be a way to think better, rest better and live with more curiosity.