Live Review

Relentless Freeze Festival – Battersea Power Station

• 2nd Nov 2012

I woke up on Saturday to a bright blue cloudless sky. Ideal weather to go and watch some maniacs, I mean very courageous, highly trained athletes, fling themselves off a ramp a gagillion feet high* in order to throw some incredible shapes and that is exactly what I did.

Battersea Power Station was the home to 2012’s Relentless Freeze Festival on Friday 27th and Saturday 28th October. It is two days of world class skiing and snowboarding combined with live music across 5 stages making it the ideal winter festival!

I dressed a little optimistically for the temperatures in Battersea but with the biggest shopping village I’ve ever seen at festival I was able to remedy this pretty quickly, well, after a bit of a shop and few mulled wines that is! The Whitelines Battle Of Britain Snowboard Competition was just starting as I arrived and I was quickly blown away at how incredible these athletes are. These guys really are the crème de la crème of British Snowboarding and they’ll be flying the flag for us Brits in the years to come.

Maybe it’s the reputation or just my general lack of knowledge in this area but I always thought I’d be more impressed with the snowboarding than the skiing. Boy, was I wrong! Seeing Gus Kenworth win the Freeze Style Ski Competition was amazing! I’m sure these guys have absolutely no thought for their safety when they’re chucking themselves off the top of Mount Battersea but I have to say they’re incredible to watch. I would throw around some of the odd names that the tricks they pulled have at this point but I don’t really know what they mean and I’d only make a bigger fool of myself.

After being shamed by the brilliantness of the athletes and my general ineptness at any sport you may care to even consider I thought I’d go and investigate something that is much more my area of expertise, and no, I don’t mean the bar! Well, not completely.

In the short gap between the snowboarding and skiing competitions I watched I managed to catch some of The Asteroid Boys set. My, oh my. These boys definitely live up to their “dance or die” style and at 3pm on a cold Saturday afternoon I was not prepared for them. After regrouping and a bit more mulled wine I returned to the Main Stage for Stanton Warriors. It was chart smash after chart smash, followed by Grandmaster Flash and a setlist of absolute classics. The crowd lapped up every last beat. The excitement was building and the atmosphere was so electric you could practically taste it. Then it happened, the sirens started and Public Enemy hit the stage. What a performance! Words fail me when it comes to describing this spectacle but I can assure you fist were in the air and Freeze loved it!

*This may be a slight exaggeration.

Venue: Battersea Power Station
Support Band: