Review: Tartan Heart Festival - A magical mix in heart of the Highlands

HAVING just lowered the curtain on its eighth annual outing - and grown in that time from its one-day debut, which pulled a crowd of 2,000, to this past Friday and Saturday's record 14,000-odd sellout - Belladrum feels, in the best possible sense, like an amazingly established institution. Its infrastructure and operational logistics have that tried-and-tested efficacy about them, enhancing everyone's relaxation, while a core, cross-generational audience of regulars lead the way in making themselves thoroughly at home on the scenically wooded, gently undulating site.

Belladrum has become a flagship of Scotland's thriving independent festival sector, carefully cultivating both a customer-centred, non-corporate ethos and a very distinctively Highland character. Thus the usual stalls peddling hippy tat and Chinese noodles were complemented by others representing the Lovat Shinty Club, or serving cream teas home-baked by the Kiltarlity Hall Association.

Highlanders' peculiar appetite for a party, too, was colourfully evinced in many of their sartorial choices, an array of outlandish costumes and wigs that often rendered the wearers indistinguishable from the various street-theatre troupes strolling about.

2011's festivities also included three weddings - the estate being blessed with an idyllic wee chapel for the purpose - one of the grooms having proposed between bands at the main stage last year. Belladrum-goers, in short, are well up for a good time.

Absolutely central to the quality of their hedonism, though, is a strikingly acute and enthusiastic appreciation of the myriad music on offer.

Take Teddy Thompson, for instance - Richard and Linda's singer-songwriter son - performing on his lonesome in an unenviable clash with Friday headliners Texas, but being visibly and audibly bowled over by his listeners' attentive fervour, which inspired him to an incandescently soulful four-song encore.

Then there were the contrastingly but equally spine-tingling moments in overlapping sets by the Dangleberries - joined on the main stage by a posse of pipers, and delivering a splendidly souped-up version of Burns's A Man's A Man before closing with their signature hit Valerie - and English duo the Webb Sisters, whose exquisite vocal harmonies attained a truly exultant radiance.

Shuttling around the arena catching bits of overlapping sets is the only way to optimise one's musical delectation, thanks to Belladrum's positively profligate programming: with over a dozen stages in play, punters really are spoilt for choice.The estate's terraced Italian Garden has to be one of the best accidental or adapted main stages anywhere, while for sheer character it'd be hard to beat Jock the Reaper: a mobile DJ platform converted from a vintage combine harvester, unearthed in Cromarty and refashioned to resemble a giant set of bagpipes, which earned this year's festival a write-up in Classic Tractor Monthly, no less.

While the aforementioned Texas - contrary to widespread expectations - gave a performance as magical as the setting, a flaccid, preening Deacon Blue proved to be the dampest of squibs the following night. But by that stage it was no matter, really; their loss more than anything, sated as we already were by such diverse delights as Guillemots' anthemic, off- kilter intensity, Raghu Dixit's vibrantly melodic folk/Bollywood blend, Scottish Opera's half-hour Rigoletto excerpt, and the gypsyish, Clash-meets-mariachi exuberance of Woodenbox With a Fistful of Fivers.

And so as the rain, having hitherto held off in favour of sunshine, finally tipped down on the authors of Raintown, it seemed no more than poetic justice.