Festival Preview: Red Sun Festival, Cardiff, South Wales July 29 - 31

By: Chris Bull

Last year, in May, three venues in Cardiff's most musical street prepared themselves for something heavy. Sure, Womanby Street is used to lots of bands and human traffic; Glasnost and HUB festival bring in so many musical acts...but this was to be an entirely different beast.

The brain child of several Cardiff based promoters, musicians, organisers, designers and radical thinkers, the idea for Red Sun was for the city to write it's name into heavy music folklore with a festival that would resonate with the heshers and lowlifes, the freaks and weirdos, the riff aficionados and the meatheads of this land. Cardiff had been no stranger to heavy music, many a travelling band had passed through, laid waste and left but what was lacking was the reverberation that only a festival would bring.

The 2015 line up was a veritable smorgasbord of heavy hitters from the UK; Bong Cauldron, Bast, Human Cull, Thought Forms, The Admiral Sir Cloudsely Shovel, Opium Lord, Ten Foot Wizard, Towers Of Flesh, Bismuth, Desert Storm, Boss Keloid, Pist, Diesel King, Atomçk and The Art of Burning Water sat alongside South Wales' own Spider Kitten, Hogslayer, Thorun, Suns Of Thunder, V A I L S, Haast's Eagled, Lacertilia, Tides Of Sulfur, The Judas Cradle and Pizzatramp. Each night was a success, now 2016 seems likely to top it!

The delightful Honky will headline the Saturday night at the Moon Club while Hark and Slabdragger headline the Friday and Sunday respectively. Also playing will be acts such as Gurt, Iron Witch, Old Man Lizard, Semen, XII Boar, Jøtnarr, Elephant Tree and two of the best band names in existence; Chubby Thunderous Bad Kush Masters and Anal Floss Is Boss. A pile of bands who played last year will be making an appearance this year too and promoters from far and wide (Snuff Lane, Cosmic Carnage, Hibernacula Records etc) helping to make 2016's impossible dream become a reality.

With the...ahem...difficulties faced by other festivals this year, Red Sun proves that small festivals can achieve something worthwhile when people put the work in. If you haven't bought a ticket yet, do it now!

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