The Three Wheel Drive 2024
One of the best festivals of the season took place under the radar in a small copse of trees in a field in Hampshire.
One of the overriding themes of festival discourse this summer has been one of survival. Established and startup events alike have cancelled due to poor ticket sales and hostile financial burdens in the wake of COVID. Even so, it’s still felt like the 2024 season has been bustling with the deeper-pocketed heavy hitters and a criss-crossing network of smaller endeavours catering to niche scenes. Somewhere in between, it’s the mid-sized gatherings which seem to have suffered the most — as a case in point, Field Maneuvers is gearing up for the final weekend in its current form, as the organisers of the intimate DJ-oriented event in Norfolk realise the party they set out to make has been overridden by the complexities of an ambitious international line-up and the eye-watering budgets that go with it. Unless you’re big enough to find the space to eke out a profit, you might as well be working tirelessly to create something you actually enjoy rather than treading water and tempting bankruptcy in the hope you can one day leap to the top tier.
Arriving at The Three Wheel Drive midway through Friday, it’s immediately apparent this is a festival by and for friends. The signpost off the B-road pointing the way is low-key enough to miss on the first pass, and even with the music in full swing it’s hard to tell there’s a festival taking place. Five minutes later I’m amongst the trees in a hay bale amphitheatre basking in the sort of perfectly tuned soundsystem which doesn’t make you reach for the ear plugs — warm and responsive, physical without being annihilating. It’s the sort of detail it’s easy to miss on a first pass of the site, but it has a huge impact on the mood of the party.
Someone tells me some of the founding crew are architects. The structures housing the DJ booth, front of house and a towering disco ball are all curious wood-cut forms, and they’d have a ramshackle feel if they didn’t look so robust. Some people sit on the various layers of the hay bales and some are dancing on them as DJ ojo and Oli K work their way through an extended suite of deeply dug house. Ahead of coming to The Three Wheel Drive I expected it to be a headsy affair — that suspicion is confirmed by the ecstatic crowd reaction to the very first beats of cult late 80s joint ‘It’s You’ by Mr. & Mrs. Dale, a record I own and love dearly and yet still didn’t clock until the vocal kicked in. Under the gently rustling canopy of leaves in the mid-summer heat, it’s an intoxicating atmosphere defined by the strong sense that most people present are already dear friends, or at the very least soon will be.
Capped around the 500 mark, The Three Wheel Drive is a quintessential small festival, and if that brings with it a stripping down of some of the trimmings of the modern festival experience then it’s all the better for them. It’s absolutely fine if some folk prefer being able to shower and freshen themselves up every day of a long weekend sesh, but I think there’s something more meaningful about everyone having to live a bit more back to basics with each other. It may be catering to a sub-sect of modern leftfield-electronic music which could be misconstrued as cliquey from the outside, but there’s an earnest, mellow demeanour amongst everyone involved which feels refreshingly unpretentious when so many music experiences have been co-opted by hype and self-serious scenesters. It’s a spirit which extends to the DJing overall — by the Saturday morning I feel as though absolutely anything could be dropped at any time by the revolving cast of lesser-spotted internet radio champions, label bods and word-of-mouth legends.
It’s absolutely not just a DJ gathering though. The Three Wheel Drive places great emphasis on its live offerings, and they veer from an incendiary industrial eruption from Spanish duo Dame Area through to the impossibly gorgeous, one-man-band-goes-fourth-world undulations of Bristol-based Memotone. Jack Dove’s pyro-acoustic fusion of fireworks and light-sensitive modular patches on the Thursday night is spoken about in hushed, reverential tones.
Elsewhere, the cluster of food tents offer up tacos, focaccias, Argentinian barbecue and Thai curries, while the adjoining chill-out tent houses a pop-up record stall from Bury St-Edmunds’ Vinyl Hunter during the day. It’s just enough to round off the festival experience, but it’s also refreshing to have the measure of the whole site and its charms within a couple of hours of arriving. It takes away the edge of impatience and the sense you might be missing something better elsewhere.
Of all the performances I catch on a whirlwind 24 hours at the festival, it’s i-sha’s midnight set which feels the most monumental. There are certain DJs who transcend the trappings of simply playing tracks in sequence to deliver something more profound, weaving a narrative and following a line unbound by the sometimes reductive constraints of the dancefloor. For the very best of them, once the word is out about their gifts, they’re free to take a crowd wherever they choose. The swelling ranks of dancers amongst the hay bales feels like a sure sign she’s no longer a best-kept secret of events like Accidental Meetings. There’s a conviction required to play the kind of sparse soundsystem gear she reaches for, but every single move feels poised and poetic, and the crowd stays close to each subtle twist with the same attentive patience they’d hold for a live act. The magic of a set like hers is how unplaceable it all feels, as though she alone has access to an alternate dimension of sonics she carries back over the cosmic threshold to present to us.
Having seen i-sha play other settings, I know her style has the weight to command any audience however daring or delicate she wants to be, but to hear her stretching out at a festival like The Three Wheel Drive is something special. There’s a particularly open-hearted, open-eared yet razor-sharp taste that roundly defines the vibe here, fuelled by communal spirit amongst an incredibly intimate, creative cluster of misfits from the UK underground. It’s places like this that remind you the underground does still exist, thriving whilst surviving safely out of sight of the business-techno-mega-festival industrial complex, running on shoestring budgets with hearts overflowing.
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