This weekend, I will attend Infest for the twenty-sixth time (the twenty-fourth time in person, as well as two virtually). I’ve not missed an Infest since I began attending in 2000, and after writing about nineteen of them, the twentieth Infest that I’ll cover on /amodelofcontrol.com will be my last.

I’ll still be attending Infest as long as it continues, but as /amodelofcontrol.com winds down over the next six months or so, from next year I’ll be able to attend the festival without the pressure of writing about bands, or photographing whatever I can. It’s time to take a step back, frankly.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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So before I conclude this long run, I wanted to get a feel for the memories of everyone else around the festival as well as my own. I’ll cover various things in this post, but a number of things stood out. Obviously, the music – and there were a good number of specific performances that we all agreed on, that’s for sure – but as with all festivals where there are regular attendees, other stuff has sprung up over the years that takes in community, charity, friendship and a whole world of shenanigans that go on. Mostly, though, it’s fun and a joy to attend every year.

Time and space has meant I couldn’t include everything (including photos in the end – see the Flickr link above for the whole gallery). But everyone’s comments triggered some thought or memory, and it was a joy to revisit it all.

See many of you in just a few days time.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details above).

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/Bands

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“There are bands?”

Despite what some may have you believe, the majority are there for the bands. Or, at least, some bands. Some were perfect, some were very good, some were ok, some were disappointing, some were outright terrible or worse still, totally forgotten.

No less than 76 bands were mentioned in the recollections, but one stood head and shoulders above everyone else, and that was Mind.In.A.Box. Their 2011 show has gone down in legend for the fact that it was a perfect show, but also that it was so unexpected. On record the cyberpunk electronic band only offer tinges of emotion, masked by vocal effects and dense, elegantly produced electronics: but live, they completely reinvented themselves into an electronic prog band with spectacular results. That said, I saw the live incarnation of the band four times, and the other three times they were beset with frequent technical issues – most often the multiple vocal treatments not behaving as they should. But at that Infest show, everything worked perfectly, to the extent that songs like Change and Fear became these devastating epics that left us in tears. Fifteen years later, and I’ve still never seen anything like it, and I suspect I never will.

Other artists are fondly remembered: the early days saw Alien Sex Fiend headline the first festival in 1998, and some frantic ringing around by Infest Chris saw Apoptygma Berzerk play in 1999, and perhaps was the point where the festival began to be taken seriously in Europe (certainly the headliners got bigger and bigger in subsequent years).

My now wife joined me at Infest in the first year of our relationship in 2005, and that year she witnessed what appeared to be the whole venue come up as one when We Stand Alone kicked in during the Covenant set. A later VNV Nation show was fondly remembered for the emotional impact of Illusion being dedicated to Sophie Lancaster, and the one appearance by Juno Reactor was made a must-see by none other than Budgie joining the band on drums.

In 2019, Nitzer Ebb finally played Infest, and closed out the festival in possibly the hottest environment I’ve ever experienced in that venue. When they finished, a friend turned to me and quipped “isn’t it great to go to church on a Sunday?”. It was that kind of night.

There was similar reverence for Test Dept. in 2023, where we got the full percussive power of their show in the palatial surroundings of St. Georges Hall. The South London industrial provocateurs are not for everyone, but their unique sound certainly stuck in the memory for many.

For a long time, the festival opener, too, was a bit of a joke: a forgettable or downright awful band that would see me back at the bar in minutes. Coreline changed all of that, with cardboard robots, children’s choirs and rickrolling the entire festival. Ten times. Mandr01d then took it further two years later, with their inch-perfect pisstake of industrial tropes that was so on the money that some po-faced goths at the back took it seriously. “Hello Bradfield!” entered our vocabulary for evermore.

Back in 2018, though, Mesh provided a singular moment: asking for photos of our memories and friends at Infest, which they collated in a collage displayed on-screen during a mighty Friends Like These.

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/Crew

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I’ve long got the impression that the crew – many of whom have been involved since the early days – love it as much as the punters, even if things like fire alarms, broken kit and drunken people (among many other bumps in the road) make things a whole lot more stressful along the way.

There were tales of washing Bill Leeb’s pants in a local laundrette, dealing with an obliterated Wulfband backstage, fashioning mobile disco units for the Doof Wagon, even “holding VNV Nation’s minidisc player aloft during their set because the backing track skipped every time Ronan jumped on stage”. Or, reminders of the nurses dishing out “tixylix”.

Remember, be nice to the crew. They are helping to put on this event, often in stressful circumstances, and a little bit of kindness goes a long way.

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/DJs

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I DJed Infest three times – twice in-person, and once on the Stay-Infest streams, and all were a joy. The first, in 2008, remains etched in the memory: I got three days notice that I was doing so, filling in for a co-DJ at Autonomy in Leicester who couldn’t make it, and I was DJing right after my heroes in Front 242. I think I did it justice – certainly the packed dancefloor seemed to suggest so.

Everyone who has DJed the festival, though, seems to have fond memories too. Like Richard Dove, who “[turned] back the clock with Mark to bring the Underworld back for one night, which we’ve done 3 times now, closing the festival last year. It means so much to re-live DJing those nights which were my world when I was younger”. Or Peter Sawyer, one half of Karkasaurus, who saw their lunatic Sunday night slot – complete with about six or seven people in dinosaur suits invading the dancefloor – as a stand out highlight.

Nolli and Kynon had great fun with their DJing, too, as Nolli says: “StayInfest where the different Covid restrictions for Ireland meant that I could stuff my kitchen with friendly lunatics and somehow play a DJ set around them and stream the madness that ensued. The Sunday drag show/inflatable crow costume/alternative adjacent DJ set with Graeme McKinnon and Ken Duffy at the next full in-person Infest inspired by Owen. I distinctly remember giving out props for people to play with, and they all got given back in perfect nick. Infest fans are the best!”

Tracy also didn’t take things too seriously either, “seeing Mark Guy’s horrified face when I had a full dancefloor to Don’t Stop Believin'”…

Finally, transatlantic DJs love it, too, like Marc Church: who I first met when he came over all those years ago: “Infest remains amongst my favorite DJing experiences in my long career behind the decks.”

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/Friends

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Entire friendship networks have been built up thanks to this festival. I cannot be the only one who would never have met a good proportion of my friends were it not for Infest, and I cherish those longstanding friendships, even if in some cases we no longer see each other too much these days. Indeed a good number of the attendees at our wedding a decade ago we met at Infest (or another festival).

There is also what has affectionally become known as Industrial Summer Camp – and the related Transatlantic Exchange Programme. Industrial Summer Camp is, these days, both Terminus in Calgary, Canada, and Infest – depending on which side of the pond you are on, and thanks to an increasing amount of transatlantic festival travel, there’s usually someone from over the Atlantic at each festival – indeed we welcome a good number of Americans and Canadians once again this year.

Otherwise, though, my friend Nick’s comment about Infest and friendships sums the whole thing up.

“It’s not a specific single moment but the complete cheerful lack of self-consciousness about it all from many there, basically from the moment I walked into the student union for my first Infest in 2001 (back when those of us who were there then were young) through to today (when many of us are very definitely not).

So whether it’s people going all-in on being a better/wilder/freer version of themselves (and in some cases, enacting those changes outside of Infest over time as well), just letting go of everything for a few days, or being able to just be silly when no-one cares. Sure, wear something utterly ridiculous. Join a venue-spanning conga line. Sing musical theatre numbers to a sweaty karaoke room full of goths when you could be seeing a band playing right now next door. Keep doing the thing you’ve been doing for 5, 10 or 25 years now even if everything else has changed. It’s all of that, unselfconsciously, and that Infest as a festival welcomes it.”

Then again, as my friend Amanda reminds me, at least one marriage has resulted from a meeting at Infest, as she and her now wife Elli met at Infest in 2010, and have now been married nearly thirteen years. And while not marriage, Josie added “…like 10 years ago I met this boy in the halls and to cut a veryyyyyy long story short he now lives in my house and eats all my chocolate digestives. Not a euphemism, he’s a menace.”

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/Shenanigans

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The various shenanigans that went on away from the bands were for many years led by or inspired by Tails (of which more in a moment), and the Doof Wagon, introduced in 2015 if I recall correctly, took things further.

Particularly that first year, with the Mad Max: Fury Road inspired apocalyptic Sunday that resulted in “VALHALLA” echoing across the venue and all kinds of madness. Lee Chaos and Duracell Bunny joined forces and began playing tunes from various incarnations of the Doof Wagon between bands – and outside – that meant short bursts of crazy busy raves.

Then there the ball pits (including tales of throwing balls into the face of a certain, disliked lead singer) and the bouncy castles (complete with dinosaurs on them that broke my wife and various others). Who says goths/rivetheads don’t have a good time?

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/Hotels and After Parties

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Stories of After Parties are legion at Infest – and most of this will come from others as Daisy and I long-since chose to stay in hotels and avoided the late-night partying for the most part, mostly as both us turn into angry monsters if we don’t get enough sleep.

While most stories are probably best not published here, I was reminded of Kevin.in.a.hedge (IYKYK), “dancing to the Chaos Mobile Disco outside the halls – “Disco On!” “Disco Off!” to allow for passing traffic, until we realised that the taxi drivers were doing laps to see what was going on…”, “‘Someone’ riding an abandoned floor polisher around hall floors at 4am (and I won’t even mention some of the other adventuring)”, someone being shot point blank in the forehead with a BB gun at an afterparty, then one friend “kidnapped Mind.in.a.box’s guitarist to the halls kitchen party then threw him back to the band in the morning (they were waiting in the hotel lobby to leave for the airport…)”, and the same person “sharing my rum with Bradley at a similar party the night of his CHANT set”.

The hotel bar – we stayed at the Midland in Bradford for many years – often saw quite a few late nights, most notably the year Republica played *that* set. The rest of the band were there, and seemed to be drinking as much as we did…

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/Absent Friends

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Oh boy. The Infest community has had to deal with loss over the time we’ve been a community, that’s for sure. So each year, we seem to be remembering more absent friends.

It’s coming up to ten years since we lost Tails – festival compère and ringleader of so much nonsense for many, many years. There were a whole bunch of stories (re)told by friends, many of whom were roped in to performing with Tails as part of a band intro. There was SpongeBob SquarePants, Rave Nannas, a Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla fight on stage in a cardboard city, Death to False EBM shirts and masks (the latter involving me), and Christ only knows what else. You never knew quite what Tails was going to do, as he seemed to think differently to the rest of us. I miss him so much.

In addition, we lost Sam nearly twenty years ago now, gone far too soon, as was Paul Bramall, who we lost nearly fifteen years ago.

More recently, we lost Paddy (Je$us Loves Amerika), who graced the stage at Infest many, many years ago and was always, to put it mildly, a force of nature whenever I saw him (if he gave you a hug, there was often a worry my ribs were going to crack), and then just earlier this year, Fitz (another to have played Infest, with his band Skinjob) passed away after being diagnosed with MND, and there will be a tribute to him this weekend to follow Fitzfest the Saturday just gone.

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/I’m Sorry, You Did What?

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The most remarkable story I got, though – from Elise – can have the final word.

“…I think my finest hour was meeting Andrew Eldritch and getting him to walk around the festival all night wearing a hen-do sticker from Anne Summers saying, “Are you a parking ticket because you’ve got fine written all over you?”.”