SIMONE UBALDI travelled halfway around the world to find a music festival –Best Kept Secret in the Netherlands — that feels just like home, if everyone at home happened to be Dutch.

No one is raving around the food trucks.

It’s past midnight at Best Kept Secret (BKS) festival and I am sitting on a bench beside a still, black lake watching Dutch music fans queue in an orderly fashion for worstenbrood. Beats are thudding optimistically from the worstenbrood truck, which sells some doughy Dutch iteration of a sausage roll, but no one is doing the tell tale two-step shuffle that indicates they’re off-chops. No one is raving around the food trucks, which tells you a lot about the Dutch.

I’m at this mid-sized summer festival in a woodland safari park in the Netherlands because Radiohead and Arcade Fire are headlining, because I was going to be in Europe anyway, and because my Dutch friends love it. This is their Splendour, their three-day Laneway, and my friends have that giddy, twitchy energy kids get when the circus comes to town.

I have something like déjà vu — this is all pretty familiar. Stages dotted around here and there, a main stage hulking in the distance. A music festival is a music festival, if it’s done right. But in the subtle detail, this one is kind of strange.

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Make Tokyo City Great Again

The upper echelon of boutique festivals around the world include quality food and novel distractions, which often but not always includes a karaoke bar. At BKS, the karaoke is presented as part of a nested entertainment complex including a series of gaming consoles and a ping pong table, which altogether is labelled ‘Tokyo City’. Ping pong, karaoke — Japanese, get it? I still can’t decide if this is racist.

“There are virtually no drugs around, weed included”

Beyond Tokyo City stretches a forest lane filled with coves and crannies, artfully decorated iced coffee stalls, a small cluster of hammocks labelled ‘Chill Hill’, a not-so-secret garden and a little glade decked out for late-night dancing.

Beyond that, there is a whisky bar where you cannot buy straight whisky. This turns out to be a little curio of Dutch festivals in general: you can’t buy a drink stronger than 15% alcohol. There are virtually no drugs around, weed included.

There is, however, a fresh oyster bar. There is a whole alley down by the lake devoted to barbecued meats where a heavily tattooed BBQ crew bump and grind to west coast hip-hop — hands down the best party vibes of BKS — and around the corner another food area called ‘Make Portland Great Again’. Name aside, it has no discernible relationship to Portland.

A Lake Full Of Semi-Cool Dads

The four minor stages of BKS are big top tents, the same tents you get at multi-stage festivals everywhere, but the main stage is set beside a huge summer lake on what the Dutch optimistically refer to as a “beach”.

The “beach” is a baked field of dust that kicks off in miserable clouds throughout the festival, but the lake is a genuinely lovely feature, a vast pond in which festival goers wade, swim and very occasionally float. It must look amazing from the stage, because the bands keep commenting on it. When the unusually hot summer sun peaks, I take my shoes off and stand knee-deep in the water, sipping a responsible light alcoholic beverage, and think about how self-contained the Dutch people are.

“the Dutch don’t fall around late at night like foul, leery arseholes. They don’t piss in the bushes by the side of the road as they stumble towards their tents”

A musical festival is a music festival if it’s done right, but the Dutch don’t fall around late at night like foul, leery arseholes. They don’t piss in the bushes by the side of the road as they stumble towards their tents.

They don’t stumble at all, in fact. There are no football chants or fights, but the Dutch don’t dance, either, and this turns out to be a bummer. Metronomy slay on the first night of the festival, but they are eight songs in before anyone around me dares to jiggle.

I witness my first ever King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard set sans circle pit, though the tent is overflowing with fans and Stu McKenzie is backlit like a demon, sweating bullets. I don’t personally want to be in a circle pit, but somebody’s got to do it, right?

On Friday night, for Run the Jewels, the general air of sexless music appreciation is stifling. It’s like everyone at the festival is your semi-cool dad who goes to music festivals with you sometimes but acts like a regular adult person and goes to bed early. The Dutch kids are all semi-cool dads. There isn’t enough bottom end in the sound system for Run the Jewels and the lack of bootie in the Dutch bootie bounce is all too apparent, and I realise suddenly that no one is hitting on anyone anywhere at this festival. El-P’s poem about oral sex is met with confused silence.

“El-P’s poem about oral sex is met with confused silence”

I am torn between respect and admiration for these music fans, and a twitchy urge to stick a fork in their collective arses. BKS is an easy place to be, easy to navigate, totally non-threatening, but a little edge makes life entertaining sometimes. It sharpens up the joy. Where’s the fun in all this dignity and order? How are the barbecue chefs having the best time at this festival? It’s weird.

Not Touching Is The Best

On the other hand, when Arcade Fire hits the stage the following night, I find myself in a sweet little dance pocket right under the stage surrounded by Dutch folks too polite to shove and cluster, who kept a wholesome distance from each other while squat bouncing enthusiastically to one hell of an epic set. The space is amazing. The Dutch are giant people but generally pretty accommodating, and they actually seem to be there for the music.

When Radiohead close out the festival on the Sunday night, no one is watching the set through the screen of their iPhone for instant Instagram cred. No teenage girl mounts the shoulders of a teenage boy who thinks he might get lucky if he acts as a human ladder, and no one tries to sing over the band. The vibe is mild, sure, and the Dutch don’t seem all that familiar with ‘Paranoid Android’, but maaan am I comfortable. God bless the civilised, sexless Dutch.

I’m a semi-cool dad in a field of semi-cool dads with a clear view of Thom Yorke’s spazz dance moves, and there are certainly worse ways to spend an evening.

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Simone Ubaldi is a ghostwriter, music journalist, film critic and frequent flyer. 

All photos via Best Kept Secret Facebook page