Butlin’s Holiday Park, Bognor Regis

Last weekend some friends and I travelled south to attend the Bugged Out weekender. A dance music festival that I am in no way qualified to attend. I knew very little on the bill but the promise of dancing badly for three days in a family resort had too much potential hilarity to resist.

The whole of Butlins was full of 16-36 year olds from all different walks of life. I say all different walks of life. Not even nearly that. I reckon we can break down the crowd into, let’s say, 20% geezer boy Hackett wearing chavvies and their female accomplices gun fingering and brap brap brapping the night away. Another 20% London east-y kids, fresh from the dance grottoes of Shoreditch and Dalston. Gurning just as hard as their hair gelled council estate counterparts but not sharing half their enthusiasm for shouting obscenities at the ceiling. 10% or so were from up north. I don’t really know anything about the snow leopard filled tundra these ice folk come from but they wore so few clothes that clearly the comparably warm climate of Bognor Regis must have seemed like Marrakech to them. I tell no lie when I say that we saw a bird sporting pink bra and pants, heels and naffink else. Casually having a fag. These are battle hardened warrior people for sure. It is they that won us the empire back in the day. I was proud to be sharing a dancefloor with them but I didn’t want to talk to any of them. Plus I don’t speak Scottish so wouldn’t have been able to anyway. The remaining festival goers were fucking freshers. New eras on all the boys, glowstick necklaces on all the girls. Kigus on all the fuckers. Faces that had not yet been ravaged by years of partying. Bodies rippling with a dangerous concotion of naivety, mephedrone and Smirnoff Ice. They are harmless cannon fodder for the most part, but they don’t seem to understand that no matter how hard you have come up, chatting to somebody at the urinal is still not on.

Whilst there were no pubs on site in the strictest sense, all the bars that showcased music had their own vibe and I’m going to pass judgement on each. It’s either this poor excuse for a pub review or nothing because there is no way I am drinking again this week.

‘Reds’

I assume during high season ‘Reds’ is the main arena in which you can see some sort of soul crushing family entertainment. I have never witnessed a red coat show but in my head it’s an awful hybrid of a pantomime, CBBC style child patronising and a Hear’Say concert. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong and they do something artistically challenging yet socially uplifting every night but I have this sneaking suspicion that what usually goes on inside this windowless carpeted warehouse is pretty gay. 

What was going on during the nights we attended was a far cry from the red coated bellendery of the summer. The biggest acts were put on at Reds, and as such the biggest crowds could be found here, which meant the biggest queues at the bars, which meant the grumpiest bar staff. The bar staff here were clearly used to having to be super nice to all the families who are the usual crowd, trying to drink themselves into such a stupor that the forced jollity of the show they are watching is just about bearable. However, the people I jostled at the bar with were never going to come to Butlins again and probably weren’t going to remember the service they received so could be treated with as much disdain as the staff could feasibly get away with. Plus everyone was asking for water, which can be done completely po faced and the 18 year old dressed as a fucking racoon with glitter on his face you have just served is still going to treat you as the messiah. There were two of these long bars lining either wall to the side of the stage at Reds, with a big curtain surrounding them and a few chairs scattered here and there, presumably so that if you were pranging out hard you could pretend you were just in a particularly noisy bar.

I would also like to quickly mention how weird it is dancing on hotel calibre carpeting. Whilst usually one will drop a bottle/glass of alcoholic whatever after consuming it and feel little to no remorse but still realise it wouldn’t be on in your own home, there is something about doing the same on reasonably plush carpeting that seems even more hedonistic. You don’t stop dropping stuff on the floor. You just feel a little bit more like a rock star for doing so. I imagine Jay Z is dropping full bottles of merlot on sheepskin rugs as we speak.

Rendezvous/Butlin’s Conference Centre/Bognor Bussey Building

The reason for the many slashed name is that there were different names for this second largest party room depending on who you spoke to. The security guards we asked for listings from referred to it as ‘Rendezvous’, which baffled us because there was no mention of it being called this anywhere but as this information came from people in luminous jackets we were prone to take it as gospel. Actually written on the building you entered was ‘Butlin’s Conference Centre’ though, and this written accusation of being a conference centre was backed up by the overwhelming conference centre-y vibe you got upon entry. I could definitely imagine if I were to hold a conference at Butlin’s I would be alloting the responsibility of ‘centre’ to this particular point.

However we had our own nickname for it. It may be a bit of a South London in joke, and if this alienates you I apologise, but if you are to ever go to/have already been to a night at the Bussey Building in Peckham then this place was laid out exactly the same, but was carpeted and not falling down. After going up a staircase you entered through a set of double doors in the back left corner into a long and rectangular room with DJs down one end and a hastily constructed bar at the other end. Ring any bells?

I liked this room the most out of the three, the lighting and decoration and budget stage gave off a real wedding disco vibe. Fuck knows whose wedding though, some prolific drug dealer with heinous amounts of friends I suppose. On our last night me and a friend decided to embrace our inner New Era cap and go see Chase and Status powered only by beerz. In this example beerz also means shots and mojito flavoured VKs. Whilst our many VKs and pre-packaged foil topped shots cost many, many dollars, our literal beers for the evening were free courtesy of Diplo. My pal had managed to make ‘laying down friends’ with the world reknowned DJ on the first night and now that she was in possession of his all areas pass, the mystical world of backstage and the beer shaped treasure that it concealed could be plundered at our leisure.

Aside from the free beer and that it looked a bit like a room I had been in before in Peckham I think that I liked this room the most because everyone was having the most fun here. There was a mosh pit and everything. Mosh pits being nature’s way of guaging human approval.

‘Jaks’

This place’s high season purpose was to provide the adults who had taken their screaming brats to this glorified seaside arcade with a way to escape the drudgery of parenthood. It was actually a carbon copy of an awful, awful nightclub that I grew up occasionally attending in my home town (it even had the same name). This club, whilst being the only actual room at the festival designed to have DJs play in it, seemed to also be the least prepared. The dance floor was too small for the amount of people who wanted to stand in front of the DJ booth. I suppose usually the holidayers WKD-ing the night away here don’t give a rats arse about who is spinning the tunes unless they are clambering over sound equipment to request a birthday shout out.

I am having real trouble saying anything else about this room. It was always the last room we went into and always the room in which I threw in the towel and meandered home from. It did always seem to have the highest concentration of the chavvy 20% I mentioned earlier, but maybe that was just because it is they that have the most endurance. By 5 in the morning all the freshers had passed out, the east kids had gone back to their rooms to listen to something cooler and the northerners had stormed down to the beach to stand in the sea naked and scream “BRING IT ON” into the sky.

Hipst-o-meter 2/10

Well this isn’t hard, as I have previously mathematically explained; two in ten people here were of an east London vibe. Although obviously this changed depending on what act you were seeing/what time it was. For reasons I am unsure of, the most hipster types I saw the whole weekend was on the Monday morning whilst my friend and I were stressing the fuck out about a set of lost car keys and calling every auto locksmith on the south coast trying to get back into my brother’s car. There were Barbours and Supreme hats dripping off every hungover cunt we passed. You had to strictly be out of your room by 10am that morning and I was clocking all these eastern folk around midday, so my only theory for why there were so many of them was that Dalston kids have such a disregard for ‘the rules’ that they deliberately slept in just to show the establishment how fucking rock and roll they are. Or they’re just the laziest of all the tribes that turned up to the festival. (Btw somebody handed in the car keys. Thank holy fuck.)

Location 8/10

There aren’t many places where you can go out all night listening to world class electronic music then embark on a 5 minute stroll back to a warm and comfy bed, wake up and go on water slides to cure your hangover. Admittedly, during our escapades in the water park the swimsuit sporting young ladies I went with did encounter a couple of apparent rape enthusiasts. “Did I shag you last night, sweetheart?” Bleak. However, Butlins is not to blame for the people let through its doors. Everything there did make me want to never come in the summer, when the currently dark and dingy adventure playground standing empty in the middle of the main tent would be filled with rabid five year olds screaming demands for smarties and blood. But filled with slightly spaced out post-teens the whole place became some sort of comedown cure centre by day and comedown cause centre by night. I liked it. Also according to the new Mrs Diplo the English channel was just over the hill next to us the whole time (the things you find out chilling on the balcony of the biggest penthouse in Butlins, eh?) so I’m sure the sea air did us wonders too.

Price ?/10

Honestly the only drink I bought that I was ‘with it’ enough to mentally record the price of was a double Southern Comfort and diet coke for £4.55. Absolutely fuck knows why I made that particular beverage decision. I remember walking away with my mind completely blown by my incompetence at choosing a drink. I hate Southern Comfort. However I do think £4.55 is very reasonable considering that they could have charged whatever the fuck they liked. I paid for every other drink on card and never looked at how much I was being charged though so I guess the real damage will be learnt the next time I look at my account.

Atmosphere 8/10

Minus the pack of nightmare fresher girls next door to us who cranked the dubstep up to eleven the moment they woke up every morning and apparently only communicated with each other via the long lost art of air horn morse code, everybody was very amicable. I saw no fights. I got patted on the back by many people and patted many people on the back. Chatted to more strangers about nonsense than I am genuinely comfortable with and generally gurned loudly at anything that moved. There are none of the “Jesus Christ why is that man covered in blood?” or “Fuck, all our stuff has been stolen and our tent is on fire” moments that make up one of the bigger, muddier, horrider summer festivals like Reading or Download. But at the same time, it being this easy means that you don’t go away with the festival feeling of “That weekend will define the way I feel about two thousand and *place number here.*” But this is a small price to pay for having a pretty fucking rad three days with little to no repercussions.

Words:

Jack Stones

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This entry was tagged as beer and loathing, bugged out, butlins, jack stones, pub.