Acid Horse, the Wiltshire festival co-organised by tQ’s own John Doran, is back for its fourth outing this May, with a wide-ranging lineup set to be split across three days and two stages.
Taking place at its usual home of The Barge Inn in Honeystreet, this year’s festival will take in live sets from Matmos, The Utopia Strong, Scotch Rolex, Rattle, Milkweed and Haress, while there will be DJ sets from Regis, Dyslecta and Slav To The Rhythm. William Doyle will also play his album Total Life Forever live in full, while there will be additional sets from Sealionwoman and Teleplasmiste, among many others.
Tickets for the festival, including camping, are priced at £150 per adult with accompanied kids of 15 and under able to attend for £10 each. There are some limited provisions for glamping and other concessions. The festival is family-friendly with a small play area for children, flint napping workshops and Warhammer figure painting activities. There will be a number of independent food vendors on site for the weekend also.
Acid Horse started life in 2021 as a joint 50th birthday party for tQ editor John Doran and two pals, thrown with the essential guidance of Mark Pilkington from Strange Attractor Press, held just up the road from where the two of them live, in the “wilds” of Neolithic Wiltshire. The real purpose of the event was an excuse for people to get together after the dislocating effects of three successive COVID-19 lockdowns, with many attendees not having seen live music for over a year (or having seen people outside of their bubble or household for the same amount of time or more).
The event was so special – featuring live music from Sex Swing, Sly and the Family Drone, UKAEA, Hawthonn and Ashtray Navigation – that Doran and Pilkington decided to turn it into a micro-festival to support psychedelic, avant-garde and oddball culture from the West Country and elsewhere. Now entering its fourth year, it has grown into a two-stage, three-day festival, and previous bills have included Surgeon, Shovel Dance Collective, Alison Cotton, Ex-Easter Island Head, Justin Robertson, Wacław Zimpel, John Francis Flynn, Lias Saoudi, Secluded Bronte, Proteus, Hey Colossus, Bulbils, Kavus Torabi, Eric Chenaux, Mohammad Syfkhan, Teeth Of The Sea, Sophie Coletta, Xylitol, Sculpture and many more.
The Barge Inn, which hosts the festival, is a longstanding countercultural nexus in Wiltshire, having deep connections to free festivals, as well as off-grid rave and crop circle culture of the late 20th Century, reflected in its proximity to the earthworks, hill forts and long barrows of the Ridgeway and the modern Alton Barnes chalk horse after which the festival is named (alongside the short lived Ministry/Cabaret Voltaire side project with the same name, of course). The Kennet and Avon Canal runs straight past the pub making a houseboat or peddalo or windsurf board notionally ideal modes of transport (as well as walking or cycling along the towpath) unless you have a tendency to drink then fall into canals. Otherwise people can either drive or get the train from London, Bristol or the West Country.
Acid Horse will take place from May 23 to 25, 2025. Find more information here.
