Hideout Festival

Nothing about the road to Zrce prepares first-time visitors for what waits at the end of it. Pag Island greets travellers with bare limestone hills scoured by wind, a landscape so stripped of vegetation that locals have long compared it to the surface of the moon, before the road drops down toward a narrow gravel beach lined with beach clubs. Hideout claimed that beach in 2011 and never left it, building an entire festival not around purpose-built stages but around the clubs already standing on the sand — a decision that shaped everything about how the event would look, sound and feel for the following years.

Two Leeds promoters, Mark Newton and Dan Blackledge, running the agency Sound Channel, launched the festival together with co-founder Steven Allison. All three came out of the north of England's club scene and wanted to move that culture somewhere warmer without softening its edges. The name itself came from Sam Kandel, then associated with Manchester's The Warehouse Project, who suggested «Hideout» as a description of Zrce: a beach hidden away from conventional Adriatic tourism, built for people who wanted house and techno rather than package-holiday nightlife.

The first party drew roughly three and a half thousand people, a modest number set against what followed. Attendance nearly doubled the following year to around five thousand, and by the fifth edition the festival was pulling close to seventeen thousand people a day, figures Dan Blackledge later shared when discussing how quickly the project had scaled. That growth never came with a change of location — Hideout stayed on the same stretch of Zrce, absorbing more people into the same physical footprint year after year rather than expanding elsewhere on the island.

Rather than build stages from scratch, Hideout took over the beach clubs already lining Zrce — Papaya, Aquarius, Kalypso and Noa among them — and turned each into a stage with its own sound and character, unified under a single festival wristband. Walking between them during the day means crossing pool decks, bar terraces and patches of improvised shade; after dark, the same strip becomes one continuous circuit where the crowd decides which club to settle into based purely on what is playing at that moment, with little physical separation between one party and the next.

House, garage, techno and drum & bass form the musical backbone of the festival, a combination that mirrors almost exactly what northern English clubbers were listening to in the early 2010s. Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool supplied the bulk of the crowd for years, travellers who recognised in Zrce a summer extension of their usual club nights back home. That regional identity shaped the festival's tone far more than any marketing strategy: Hideout grew by word of mouth among students and electronic music fans who already knew each other from nightlife back in the UK, long before it became known outside Britain.

The historic lineup shows the split between hard-edged techno and more accessible club sounds that Hideout has always balanced. Sven Väth and Marco Carola represent the tougher, more minimal side of European techno; Loco Dice and Solomun embody the melodic sound that dominates much of Mediterranean festival techno; 2manyDJs, Annie Mac and Jamie xx bring the crossover between indie, electronic and radio that reaches a wider crowd; Chase & Status, Disclosure and Rudimental represent the wave of British bass and garage that defined UK charts during those years. Sasha, with roots in Manchester's club scene, closes the loop between the culture that started the festival and the one that ended up booking it.

Living Hideout means accepting that the beach is simultaneously dancefloor, bar terrace and rest area. Days start late, sun hitting the gravel of Zrce directly while the crowd splits between the water, club pools and the gentler early sets; intensity climbs through the afternoon until the whole strip is lit up and the sound from one club bleeds into the next. Accommodation is mostly sorted through Novalja, the nearest town, or through campsites and apartments elsewhere on the island, with shuttle buses running to the beach through the night — logistics that are not especially sophisticated but suit a festival built around not sleeping much.

By 2017 the festival's growth had attracted attention beyond independent promoters: Global, one of the largest media and radio groups in the UK, bought a majority stake in the project. The deal professionalised production and widened the festival's ability to negotiate with international artists, but it changed neither the location nor the beach-club format that had defined Hideout since its first edition. Mark Newton and Dan Blackledge kept creative roles afterwards, a continuity that is unusual for festivals going through similar ownership changes.

Hideout remains, above everything else, a festival that understood Zrce did not need new stages so much as a different way of looking at the ones already there. Its path from a three-and-a-half-thousand-person party organised by Leeds promoters to an event capable of moving an entire island for several days at a time sums up a very specific corner of northern English club culture that decided to export itself to the Croatian coast without losing the rawness of the dancefloor that started it all.