Review: Convenanza 2026 – Back To The Castle

Vladimir Ivkovic opened Thursday at Bar à Vins, fully disciplined, tempo nailed to the floor for hours while the room slowly gave in.

After that much restraint, only one cure: water. So on Friday we ran to a lake. The wrong lake, obviously. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, sun blazing, no cab in sight, one of the new recruits announced he was about to die of dehydration on a French roadside. Ten minutes later in the dusty car park the cab turned up, we found the right lake, stumbled into a beach bar and stayed until the sun began to dip. It turned out to be the legendary owner Clément’s last day of the season, and everything behind the counter had to go. We did our bit to make sure it did.

Up at the castle, the drink tokens, the Château’s own currency for the weekend, still demand more arithmetic than anyone can manage after dark. Pints are four (a tenner). The rosé cocktails three (7.50) went down like squash in that heat. New this year was a VIP pen at the back, which, in a castle that already sits inside a walled city, makes it walls within walls within walls. We kept wandering in, getting politely ejected, and wandering in again.

The best view in the Cité is from the toilet queue. The battlements give way to the shimmering city below, and at certain hours the queue was more for the view than the loos. One of ‘our lot’ came back swearing the walls were breathing.

The crowd was noticeably younger again this year, too. At a guess, a fifth of the courtyard felt fresher than last time. Tim Murray once reassured Ransom Note readers that this was “no mere fat, old bloke shangri-la”, and a decade on the courtyard keeps proving him right. For a festival that runs on memory, new faces are how it stays alive.

A few weeks earlier, when we sat Tia Cousins and Princess P down to interview each other, Tia admitted she had never seen Andrew perform Music’s Not For Everyone. All she had were Lena’s and Vladimir’s versions and a plan: ignore the burden of it, play the music she plays at home, and hope everybody would simply listen.

She got her wish. Friday was the oddball stuff – when is it ever not? – and we all listened, intently. Saturday went further into post-punk and outsider guitar territory that “hardly ever goes near a club”. Plenty of people were dancing by the end, so perhaps you’ve been in the wrong clubs. 

She closed on two ambient pieces – shout out Planetary Peaceand Ben Bertrand

…so quiet and ethereal the courtyard seemed to lift a few inches off the flagstones.  When Jeanie and the White Boys came on after, it felt like someone had kicked the door off its hinges. We’re biased, obviously, but we’d call this a masterclass, both nights.

Jeanie was amazing… go watch.

Sean Johnston was on Friday too. We’ve been following him since the first ALFOS nights at The Drop, back when he and Andrew were still working out what slow could sound like, and it’s still emotional seeing him in this courtyard without his partner alongside him. These days he’s as likely to be six hours deep in a back-to-back with Tia, which, given how this weekend went, feels about right. He told me over the summer that the room tells you everything if you’re prepared to listen. The castle was telling him plenty by the time he dropped the Aeroplane mix of Love Love, and the whole place lifted.

In all the years I’ve heard Jonnie Wilkes play, I’d never heard him speak on a mic. This time he did, to point out that the last time he played here, Andrew and Keith McIvor, his partner in Optimo, were both still with us. Taking over the closing of Saturday night, it was a short and emotional speech, and a courtyard full of people who’d come to dance stood still and wept.

Then he played four hours that rank with the best I’ve heard from him: tempo held steady, tension wound tighter by the hour, and nothing resembling a ‘hit’ all night bar Robotiko Rejekto.

Somewhere in the middle of it we all found ourselves on the dancefloor video calling one of last year’s ‘kids’ (Archie), who couldn’t make it this time, just so they could hear and see it. It seemed essential at the time. Masterclass number two from Jonnie.

Afters means the Hôtel du Château, whether anyone planned it or not. The photos online make it look lovely. At 4am, drink in a plastic glass, ramparts still trailing behind your eyes, what you mostly notice are the giant wicker mosquitoes on the lawn, and how much closer they seem each time you look up. Half the bar is still talking about Jonnie.

Sunday brought a different kind of sermon. Zofia Page was due to interview Michael Smith at the White Rabbit Literary Salon, and nobody had seen or heard from him since 6am. He doesn’t own a phone. An hour before the talk he wandered in, cheerful and ready for a glass of wine.

First came Stranger on the Shore, the film he made with his friend Maxy Bianco about the eccentric, marginal side of Hastings and St Leonards: post-industrial history, local myth, and the curse Aleister Crowley is said to have left on the town. Andrew and Nina Walsh made the music, and a local banjo player who lives on the streets of Hastings contributes songs of his own. Michael read from his new book, Strangers on the Shore, and from an old fanzine piece about his friendship with Andrew, before Zofia steered him through those years and on into Crowley’s world. Crowley saw out his days on hard-boiled eggs and heroin, and Michael would rather not end up the same way. The old occultist also wrote a Gnostic Mass of his own, which made him fitting company in the Temple of Gnostic Sonics.

They ended on magic, mysticism and the best part of a decade spent on one book, long enough, Michael said, that it ends up writing you. After four days of debauchery, his dulcet tones were exactly the antidote the room needed.

Then back to Bar à Vins, where the pints are also a tenner but so is an Aperol spritz. Decision made, and we spent the afternoon turning steadily orange. The line-up ran Princess P, Tia and Rosie Ama back to back, three women with three very different ideas of what a Sunday should sound like. Muriel opened. For us she’s basically family, one of the only DJs to have played every Watching Trees. Her set, running from afternoon into early evening, went everywhere: IDM, oddities, you name it. It was her birthday and she deserved all the dancers by the end. 

Muriel’s also the only one of the three who knew Andrew, once driving him from Bern to Zürich while he sat in the back demolishing a bag of chips. Her favourite Convenanza memory is still him welcoming the crowd with two hours at sunset. Ten years on, a few streets down from the same castle, there she was doing the welcoming.

Then Tia. Again. That’s three sets in four nights, if you’re counting, and at this rate someone should cut her a set of keys to the castle. We did say we were biased. Back at Bar à Vins, where she closed last year, she was in dance mode, but never quite gave in to it. She wound the room tight, leaving it for Rosie Ama to snap.

Rosie is family round here too. For the uninitiated amongst you, was Ransom Note’s deputy editor before she started Human Endeavour, the R$N sub-label for the deep, dark and hypnotic end of things. She’s also warmed up for Jonnie on more than one occasion, so there was a line running straight from her set back to Jonnie’s the night before. Her monthly Melodic Odds show, runs on sleazy, low-slung chuggers and leftfield acid, and that’s what she brought to Bar à Vins.
She dropped James and Tia’s mega new collab Messin’ with the Wrong Guy and it sounded ace.

By the end and Leftside Wobble Edit of Tomorrow Never Knows drops the house was down.

Later, a long way from plastic glasses, we ended up at the Hôtel de la Cité, tucked inside the walls, serving the most expensive negronis in the world. Three of them came to €57. The downside is that they were worth every cent.

At some point during all that we ate cassoulet, such a large portion that it would hold anyone still reeling from the night before. By Sunday that was all of us.

I spotted the new recruits at the base of the ramparts, right where I’d been a year before, laughing at the lit-up walls like they’d just been let in on a secret. They had. The festival takes its name from the Convenenza, the pact a Cathar believer made to be taken in at the end. Andrew gone, Keith gone, most of the DJs playing had never seen them live, and the pact still holds. The castle teaches you, if you show up.

Same time next year. We’ll bring more.

www.convenanzafestival.com