Rumble In The Barn - Underestimating artist demand and a main stage bias overshadows one of Europe's typically most fulfilling festivals
By Tom Adams 4th July 2023
Having had a few days to process Alex Turner closing the fourth and final night at 1am with ‘R U Mine?’, it felt surreal to have seen so many leading indie-rock names all in one place. But for Rock Werchter this is nothing new. Once again enticing some of the biggest names to Belgium since 1976, one of Europe’s biggest music festivals was back for another year; however this time things didn’t run quite as smoothly as years prior. Albeit an environment embracing world-class names from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Muse, Liam Gallagher to the Arctic Monkeys, the festival planners had repeatedly shot themselves in the foot when it came to a gender-bias on the main stage along with frankly absurd underestimating of certain artist demand leaving not just the line-up to feel madly jampacked at the best of times.
Kickstarting the opening day off in style, the 1975 boys warmed up for their headline show at London’s Finsbury Park by bravely switching out cult favourites ‘Robbers’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy’ for the ‘The Ballad Of Me And My Brain’ and ‘People’. Despite slightly alienating a European audience expecting their greatest hits, Sam Fender restored familiarity with his tireless indie anthems shortly after. Late headline replacement Mumford & Sons (who stepped in for Stromae amid health concerns) were a hit as they closed night one with ‘I Will Wait’ and a firework display before Stromae’s ‘Tous les Mêmes’ was blasted across the festival site in a fitting tribute to the Belgian’s absence.
Much of this feelgood energy continued throughout the weekend and became blended with the added chaos of an old school rock festival. From Queens of the Stone Age welcoming back on stage the same man who dressed up as Spiderman five years prior during ‘Make It Wit Chu’ to fellow American Machine Gun Kelly climbing to the top of a stage structure before punching a fan in the face at their request - bizarrely none of these actions seemed too far out of place. But what did soon become clearly improper was the scarcity of female artists playing the festival’s main stage this year. All of Rosalía, Aurora, RAYE, Christine and the Queens and Charlotte de Witte played only to the haphazard environment of the Barn or the KluB c tent whilst a majority of the solo male artists (in addition to each of the four male headliners) were presented with playing the main stage - an alarming actuality in comparison.
Welcoming music royalty and 150,000 people through its turnstiles across the collective four days, it was inevitable that the site’s Festivalpark was never going to be fully exempt from potentially unsafe circumstances from unfolding. Much to the frustration of many festival attendees, not everyone actually got the chance to watch their favourite artists perform to justify their £250 ticket each. Night one saw Aurora and Iggy Pop play to roughly half the eager crowd that was originally waiting outside each of the respective max capacity venues in place: the KluB c tent and The Barn. However it was the latter venue that continued to cause collective frustration.
Following many more once again missing out on seeing the artists they were there to see (this time being Editors the day later) Rock Werchter tweeted an official statement addressing the safety concerns surrounding the 20,000 maximum capacity Barn. Unsurprisingly the situation was far from smooth when the inescapable Fred again… was left to play his Saturday night set to around a third of people who had hoped to see him perform, whilst he was seemingly unaware of the tens of thousands left to watch from a merely comparable TV screen just metres outside.
It appears blatantly clear to anyone who was in attendance that a festival of Rock Werchter’s size requires a second main stage to avoid recurring issues this time next year, whilst also attempting to maintain its reputation as one of Europe’s most enticing music festivals for at least another year.
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