I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Flamjangled Tea Party, held over the March long weekend at Contermanskloof Wine Estate in Durbanville.
The website had this to say: ‘The Flamjangled Tea Party is a party within a party within a party within a party within a party within a party … It is: a festival, outdoors, different, eclectic, artistic, humorous, glittering, freaky, funky, jiving, up-beat, jazzy, swinging, sizzling, folksy, rock n rollin’, wonderful, gentle, silly, naughty and great.’
Um … ok. That didn’t help me out with working out what the festival was going to be like, except that I suspected it would be attended by a large number of hippies. Turns out I was right. It also turns out that Flamjangled was by far the best music festival I’ve ever been to. I didn’t want to leave at the end of the weekend, which is unlike other festivals where I’m rather keen to get home and back to normalcy and my porcelain toilet not shared by 5000 other festival-goers.
Here are 10 reasons why the Flamjangled Tea Party ranks number one in my list of awesome music festivals:
1. The anything-goes vibe
You’re encouraged to dress up for the festival, and boy do people dress up. There was a guy in a purple unitard, a fawn, Bo Peep and her sheep, two people inside an elephant, a deep-sea fish, a unicorn, countless masked gents and ladies, Shrek, and lots of people covered in glitter and feathers. There were also people who didn’t dress up at all, and weren’t judged for it. Dave the naked botanist, a regular at hippie festivals, made an appearance on Friday night behind the film projector (you could see his naked outline through the film), and no one seemed to mind. There were people dancing like crazed shamans, hippie children running around wearing extravagant outfits (mermaid, dalmation, wizard come to mind), people sleeping on their colourful woven picnic blankets on the dance floor while drunk dancers moved around them, dreadlocked Israeli hippies playing guitar at the campsite ALL weekend, the ‘Green Police’: a group of green-clad hippies cleaning up rubbish who blew their whistles at green offenders, and children who’d covered themselves entirely in black mud wandering around. If this makes the festival sound kind of crazy – it was. It was also incredibly chillled, and everyone seemed completely accepting of everyone else’s strangeness.
On Sunday afternoon the generator conked out, so there wasn’t any music for a while. Rob van Vuuren, the festival’s MC, stepped in and started an impromptu talent show. A tiny girl got up in front of everyone and sang ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’, a talented singer called Lebo played a cool song on her guitar, and a dreadlocked dude roused the crowd to sing an acoustic version of ‘Hit me baby one more time’. It was yet another example of how chilled and accepting the Flamjangled festival-goers were.
2. The music
Unlike other music festivals around Cape Town, Flamjangled doesn’t feature massive mainstream bands. Instead there are funky DJs, who play everything from balkan beats to dub step and Django Reinhardt, and fabulous musicians and bands. My favourites were Guy Buttery, who played some beautiful guitar ballads (which I fell asleep to while lying on a picnic blanket under the red-and-white floaty tent), and Jeremy Loops, who, as his name indicates, did some funky looping stuff and added in tinges of hip hop, which got the crowd on their feet, stomping wildly. Then there was Hot Water, whose performances of Afro-rock-folk I always enjoy, and a whole bunch of other bands whose names I didn’t know but totally rocked. I liked how, during the day (Saturday), there were lots of mellow bands whose chilled music suited the relaxed day-time festival vibes, and more dance-inducing bands playing on Saturday night. The bands on Sunday also started out chilled, and built up to the awesome beats of Jeremy Loops by late afternoon.
3. The gourmet vegetarian food
I’m a vegetarian and I like gourmet food. There, I’ve said it. Is it too much to expect both from a weekend music festival? In the case of Synergy, it seems so (the only vegetarian option was greasy margherita pizza, which I ended up eating ALL weekend). Flamjangled scored top points on both the gourmet and vegetarian-friendly scorecards. There were delicious samoosas (potato and coriander; spinach and ricotta), veg curry roti, chocolate brownies and cupcakes, spirulina date balls and veggie wraps at Portobello, life-saving pizzas made in a real pizza oven, sweet (marshmallows, Nutella, honey and nuts) and savoury (feta, scrambled eggs, tomato relish, olives) crepes, and falafel from my favourite falafel joint – Shawarma Express.
4. The tea
While my friends were going mad for the organic Fairtrade coffee on sale at the festival, I was after tea. I’ve never seen so much tea on offer outside a tea house. There was everything from chai lattes, rooibos cappuccinos and orange darjeeling to mint, peach and earl grey on sale from a cute pastel-painted caravan. You could have a proper tea party sitting in the colourful cushions outside the caravan while tucking into one of the tea stall’s mint-and-chocolate cupcakes and drinking your tea.
5. The hippies
I’ve never been a huge fan of the whole hippie vibe, but this festival changed my attitude completely. I returned to Cape Town and put on all of my jangly bracelets and heart-adorned necklaces at once, in an attempt to retain some of the beautiful hippie-love I experienced over the weekend. The Flamjangled hippies were colourful, photogenic and friendly.
6. BOS Ice Tea
Just for the record, I am in no way sponsored by or affiliated to BOS Ice Tea. On Sunday afternoon, when all the partying of the weekend was starting to catch up to us, BOS Ice Tea was just the ticket. Whisky and lime and ginger iced tea with lots of ice was a life-saver, as was the apple flavour.
7. The dam
We hoped for warm, sunny weather for the weekend, and we got it. Big time. We were roused from our tents early on Saturday morning by the intense sun turning them into mini saunas. The day only got hotter, culminating in a peak of about 40 °C by lunchtime. Heat and serious hangovers don’t mix well, and so it was with intense relief when we discovered the icy-cold dam on the estate, just a few steps away from the main stage.
8. The electro tent
Every good music festival has to have a throbbing electro tent in addition to the rock stage. Late on Saturday night, when the bands had finished, a whole new section of the festival opened up (we’d heard rumours that this was going to happen, but we weren’t sure). A section past the dam that was previously closed off suddenly opened up, as DJs let loose in what I think was supposed to be a giant pyschedelic shower.
9. Cleanliness
You know that from the outset, you’re not ever going to feel very clean at a festival. You know the porta-potties are going to be gross and that your feet will be the colour of chocolate cake by the time you get in your car and make the journey home for the best shower of your life. So, it was with surprise that I felt reasonably presentable by the end of the Flamjangled weekend. The porta-potties scored a high 9 out of 10 for cleanliness and TP availability, and I was super impressed by the sinks with soap outside the toilets. There were guys with bags picking up rubbish all weekend, so we’d wake up in the morning, having gone to sleep with our rubble strewn around our tents, to find the campsite spotless. I also loved that there were recycling bins (with cute handmade signs) everywhere.
10. Spreading the love vibe, man
Unlike other festivals I’ve been to, where by Saturday night there are a large number of inebriated, slightly ominous people walking about (and in the case of Synergy, causing fights with the security guards), there seemed to be no aggressive, unfriendly people at Flamjangled. The general vibe of the festival was one of friendly inclusiveness, and although people did get crazy (this is a music festival – most people are not sober), they got crazy in a friendly, chilled kind of way. This probably has something to do with the fact that Flamjangled is a lot smaller than most music festivals around Cape Town (I reckon there were about 2000 people), and also because of the large proportion of peaceful hippies.
If you’re in Cape Town next March, and you’re into festivals, there’s no way you can miss the Flamjangled Tea Party.
What you need to know:
It’s a camping festival, so if you’re coming for more than a day, bring your tent, sleeping bag and toothbrush. Don’t forget your swimming cossie – dips in the dam are the best hangover cures.
Flamjangled Tea Party was held on Contermanskloof Wine Farm in Durbanville this year (not sure where they’re having it next year), which was a 30-minute drive from Cape Town.
Tickets this year ranged from R150 to R330.
Website: www.theteaparty.co.za
