‘And Ticketmaster crashed!” Stuart Maconie kicks off the in-demand Supersonic pub quiz on Sunday with a riff on the festival’s entirely unintentional namesake, who a day prior broke the internet with demand for their upcoming reunion shows and spurred talks of government action on the ticketing market. At the risk of stating the extremely obvious, the name is where any comparisons end: held in two venues in Digbeth, Supersonic festival doesn’t trade in crowdpleasing anthems but noise from the fringes, serving a 1,200-strong clientele whose loyalty to the festival is evident in the prevalence of merch from artists who played last year (primarily US doom metal act Divide and Dissolve). Nor does it have anything to do with reductive Britpop nostalgia, with elements of this year’s programme reflecting and deepening recent fringe interrogations into British identity and folk tradition.

Partially that focus is the unintentional result of a lineup that feels quite a bit less international than last year’s: maybe that was intentional programming; maybe it’s indicative of the financial situation...
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