Festival Love: The Garden Site @ Tisno, Croatia

Image: Heather Shuker

The first time I went to Tisno I had no idea what to expect - my preparation was so poor that I rocked up with a wad full of Euros, failing to remember the harrowing experience I had on Championship Manager 97/98 when I broke the bank to buy Croatia legend Davor Suker, only to be unable to pick him as he ensured I'd exceeded my non-European Union player limit... schoolboy error. But to be honest, I could have gone there with no money at all and still been blown away.

Tisno itself is only a small place (approximately a population of a thousand), just a pretty fishing village with nice restaurants and is tourist-friendly without being overt, located about a mile away from the main festival site for the Garden Festival, Electric Elephant (watch below), Suncebeat, Soundwave and Stop Making Sense.

I cannot tell you what an utter pleasure it is to be able to indulge in a fish platter in a serene setting as the sun goes down, before proceeding to the festival afterwards. It kinda makes you feel less guilty and all together more civilised - it succeeds where Ibiza fails in the sense that you always seem to feel like you're on a nice holiday, irrespective of how you choose to behave in the evenings.

And despite the line ups at all the Tisno festivals, no one really dances that much on site until it gets dark. You can have a well known DJ playing during the day and most people are lounging about supping cocktails, but it just all seems to make sense. 

It doesn't feel like a 'festival' as such when you're out there, and it is all the better for it. There simply isn't the urgency to be anywhere at a particular time, almost no queues for anything, and there's so much more space which means you get time to absorb the sounds at a much gentler pace.

Then there's the crowd. My experience of the Tisno festivals were that the people, albeit mostly Brits, were exactly the kind of people you would want to be partying with: good looking without being dicks about it. Inevitably, as the popularity of the Croatia festival tourism increases, the crowd will get younger and younger; but as long as the original loyalists are still going, you won't go far wrong.

The boat parties however are where the daytime partying rule gets tossed aside, with majestic voyages soundtracked by the same genres that dominate the festival, only on a boat and with everyone, and I mean everyone, smiling. I saw Swedish DJ Axel Boman deliver a show stopping spectacle, quality disco and house was the grin-inducing theme for him.

Music tends to stop on the festival site at quite humane hours, but it is highly advisable to party on across the bay at open-air club Barbarella's. It's what I imagine Ibiza was like in the early days before we all turned up.

I saw Kenny Dope playing funk, soul and disco, and when Phat Phil Cooper dropped Rickster 'Night Moves' and Larry Levan's epic rework of the Joubert Singers' 'Stand On The Word' (above), I began to kid myself that I was actually there in '88 after all. I was envisaging having the right to bore people at parties telling them how it was better in the good old days 'before it all went commercial'.

The fact I was able to the arrive at the Barbarella's after party on a speedboat also spoke volumes about how this is not your average clubbing or festival experience - my advice is to get to Tisno at the earliest opportunity, so you too can bore people with how good Tisno was before it all went commercial. You won't be disappointed.

For more info on the festivals at the Garden site head here.

Like this? Try Garden Festival Review 2013. And Eddie O'Callaghan (Garden festival) Interview.