KELBURN GARDEN PARTY 2026: THE MOST MAGICAL ESCAPE OF THE YEAR
FESTIVAL REVIEW | KELBURN GARDEN PARTY 2026 | 2nd – 5th July 2026 by Bryden Churchmichael
FEATURING INTERVIEWS W/ INDOOR FOXES & KAI REESU
We got the Kelburn bus from Edinburgh, packed in with other campers, and arrived into the evening at the grounds of a 13th century castle on Scotland’s west coast, known around the world for the Graffiti Project that turned it into an international street art icon. The festival that happens here every summer is something else entirely.
Kelburn Garden Party is not just a music festival. You know that before you’ve heard a note. Spiral patterns mowed into the hillside grass. Painted wooden figures in waterproofs standing by a pond like they’ve been there for years. A Love Music Hate Racism stall tucked under the trees, zines, badges, “Migration Is Not A Crime” in big pink letters, sitting there like it’s the most natural thing in the world to find at a festival, which at Kelburn it is. You walk past Gaelic lessons happening in a tent. Past a sauna. Past stone painting. Past the kind of food that makes you feel like someone actually thought about this: Jamaican food, incredible pizzas, mac and cheese eaten standing in the rain with a Kelburn wristband and mud up your ankles. You hear accents from across the world. Folk have come a long way for this.
And there is a lot of mud. More than you can really prepare for. The kind that swallows your shoes and makes every path between stages its own problem. Quad bikes haul people and equipment through it. You pass folk in full waterproofs, folk in monster costumes, carnival parades of people playing instruments while they walk. On the beach plateau, people are dancing. It is absolutely bucketing it down and nobody has stopped.
That’s the thing about Kelburn Garden Party that’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there. The rain never stopped. The mud never dried. And it didn’t matter at all.
I’m not going to sit here and describe how every act sounded. That’s not what Kelburn is and it’s not what this is. This is a review of an experience.
On the Skinny-hosted Pyramid Stage I find Indoor Foxes: pink hair, Hello Kitty guitar, Leith girl-rock that she’s described as Courtney Love meets Paris Hilton. From the stage she’s laughing, grateful, clearly loving every second of it. Then she gets on with it. The set is fast and loud and genuinely messy in the way that means something’s actually happening. The crowd is a proper Kelburn mix: people who know the songs, people who stumbled in looking for somewhere dry, and somewhere in the middle they’ve all started moshing together.
She told me afterwards she’d never encouraged a mosh pit before, just did it on the day because the crowd showed up and something clicked.“I’m just very bad at being organised in any way and that comes across on stage so much,” she said. “There’s a real roughness to my relationship with my band that makes our sets really goofy and wild. But my band are so amazing and pro that they can just respond really well when I throw a huge mosh-pit shaped spanner in the works.” Nobody planned that. That’s the point.
I asked her afterwards if it felt different playing Kelburn having been there before as a punter. I’d got it wrong, she’d never been. All her friends went in high school but she was never allowed, could never afford it. “The rain was just so unbelievably fitting,” she told me. She’d had a whole outfit planned. Too cold. Ended up playing the whole set in basically her pyjamas. “I always thought of Kelburn as a predominantly EDM/DJ based festival, so to be a pretty ‘bread-and-butter rock band’ and have that much engagement and that many people dance and show up was just something so special.”
The Courtney Love x Paris Hilton thing, she told me, started as a joke, she just said it once, people laughed, she committed. “I hope people know it’s more of an aesthetic reference rather than a character description.” But she means it too. “I’ve got so much emotion in me and a lot of it is really hard to deal with, but I love pink, I love sparkles, I love the 2000s aesthetic.” New music is coming in August, she’s been working on it since September. “I’m genuinely so beyond buzzing to get all this music out into the world, so for it to be a matter of weeks away is very exciting. Maybe it’s a song we played about having your feet on the dash? Who knows.” Shows in the works too. There’s a whole new Indoor Foxes vibe coming. Currently writing with Ross Leighton of Fatherson, 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for Indoor Foxes, real name Martha Barr.
Somewhere between stages I walk into a set I wasn’t expecting. Sarah/Shaun.
I recognised them straight away from seeing them support Logan’s Close in Leith back in May, and I catch them mid-song. I don’t know how to explain what happened except that it felt like the song was directed at me and my mate specifically, which is probably what good music does but felt impossible to be rational about at the time. That’s the Kelburn thing, you end up somewhere you weren’t planning to be and something gets you.
Somewhere in between it all there are drag shows. Fruit Salad Queer Cabaret, residents at Edinburgh’s Paradise Palms, hosted by Kat Amongst the Pidgeons and Pat Riarchy, deliver lip syncs to ScotRail service announcements and storytelling that makes you laugh and then, before you’ve clocked what’s happening, makes you want to cry. That’s the range. That’s Kelburn.
Sunday arrives wetter than Saturday. On the Viewpoint Stage, Bemz is playing to a couple of hundred people with a full band behind him, grinning. He does a wee dance at some point. He gives a speech, this is for anyone struggling, for anyone going through it, and then plays something quieter and closer, separate from the new unreleased material he also brings out. The crowd gives it back. He looks like he can’t quite believe the turnout the whole set.
I’d followed Bemz before Kelburn, knew the music, knew he was a Celtic man. There’s something different about watching someone whose work you’ve followed from a distance actually do it in front of you. I didn’t manage to say hi on the day. So Bemz, if you’re reading this, hi.
Chef the Rapper is from Aberdeen, based in Edinburgh now, and hasn’t released an album in five years. He says so from the stage. He says he’s back.
He’s on the Skinny-hosted Pyramid Stage playing in the rain on a Sunday afternoon and he is absolutely beaming, the kind of smiley, warm presence that makes a crowd root for someone immediately. He brings friends up to collaborate, including Nat Cartier on sax. Chef plays tracks from his upcoming debut solo album, material that hasn’t been heard before, and the crowd is completely with him. Five years is a long time to be away. He doesn’t look like someone who’s been away. He looks like someone who’s been waiting for exactly this.
I spoke to Kai Reesu after the festival. They won the SAY Award 2025 with Kompromat Vol. I, Scottish Album of the Year, and they’re headlining the Skinny-hosted Pyramid Stage this time.
Last year’s lesson was straightforward, they told me: “Ballads and more chilled out songs were not going to work at 11pm on the Pyramid Stage, so we played mostly raucous bangers this time around. Get the people jumpin’.”
They did. They also played new material, including ‘Eskhatos‘, and the crowd took to it immediately. Then midway through the set they announce a new summer single coming soon, and Rebekah Naomi walks out. The track is old school swing hip-hop, p-funk in its bones, and she opens with “the way you make me feel got me falling in love with you”, recorded with producer and engineer Paul McInally at 45aside Recording Studio in Glasgow, and the whole thing lands like a surprise even though you can feel it coming. “We played material that people might not necessarily expect from us,” they told me after, “and the crowd were extremely receptive.”
The rain, for what it’s worth, was on their side. “The rain maybe even added to it, it made it dramatic and played beautifully with the stage design.” They called it their most rewarding show of the year. For a band currently finishing the follow-up to Kompromat Vol. I, denser, longer, more ambitious, heading towards a UK tour and bigger shows in 2027, Kelburn felt like a “rehearsal for what comes next. Recording and releasing music is central to our modus operandi,” they told me,“as well as the live show.”
What the Kelburn crowd got was both at once. New songs road-tested in a glen in the rain in front of people who were dancing because they wanted to, not because the conditions were right for it.
The conditions were never right for it. That’s the point. From the Never Ending Glen to the Viewpoint Stage to Hometown Corner to the Saloon, across three days of rain and mud, unique costumes, Scottish Gaelic lessons and mac and cheese eaten standing up, Kelburn Garden Party 2026 worked because of everyone who made it work. The crew, the artists, the folk who kept dancing in the rain. Every corner of the site told you how much had gone into it, the installations, the stages, the scenery across the whole glen. Someone cared deeply about every bit of this. It shows.
The layout does something clever too. Music, adventure, rest, all balanced in a way that lets you move through the weekend at your own pace. There was so much I didn’t get to. That’s not a complaint. That’s the point of Kelburn. I could go back next year and have a completely different experience and I probably will.
I’m not sure there’s anywhere else in Scotland that puts on a weekend quite like this. I don’t think there’s meant to be.
Kelburn Garden Party will return in 2027, taking place between 1st and 5th July. Tickets are on sale NOW.
