All Together Now 2024: A top contender for best weekend of the year

Making the pilgrimage from carpark to campsite—laden down with tents, sleeping bags, and a selection of miscellaneous cans—is a necessary struggle for the life affirming experience of a festival weekender. Spending those three nights within the real-world-adjacent festival realm is a strange little pseudo reality. You forge your little villages with your neighbouring campers, quickly familiarise yourself with your new local amenities (portaloos here, breakfast baps there), and put your body through a strangely enjoyable endurance test, all in the name of music and community spirit.

Last weekend, a 25,000-strong crowd descended on the grounds of Curraghmore House for the fifth chapter of All Together Now, a music, arts, food and wellness festival that has claimed the August bank holiday weekend as its own. It’s become an annual tradition for many, and each instalment sees improvements and progressions so that it could reach the level of polish it exhibited this year.

In 2023, ATN took some heat for their not-so-rapid response to the deluge of rain that turned the campsite to slush, an issue which was largely resolved this time around in a bid to improve accessibility site-wide. Similarly, there were some sound issues on the main stage last year that were thankfully rectified this time around, and prospective festival goers will be glad to find that the crew were fastidious in keeping the portaloos flush with toilet roll.

The standout mainstage performance of the weekend has got to go to one Ms Natasha Beddingfield. A woman who has a clear affinity with Ireland (turns out we were the first country to send her to number one), she spoke about her love for The Cranberries and Sinéad O’Connor, playing a mix of covers including Coldplay’s ‘The Scientist’ and The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’, and ended her set with ‘Unwritten’, which the crowd boomed back to her word for word. Plus, the sun was beaming down with full force, so it was a very heartening moment, the kind where you feel very very happy to be alive.

The main stage was once again packed out for The Mary Wallopers, who managed to turn the field into a céilí dancing session as the crowd linked arms and thrashed around to their heart’s content. Palestinian flags were flown high, and the band managed to use their time on stage to voice their distaste for the far-right demonstrations in Dundalk, give the finger to landlords, and generally endorse decency without quelling the momentum of the trad divilment.

More personal highlights included hedonistic Aussie party people, Confidence Man, and the mesmerising Glass Beams, who made their Irish debut at the Lovely Days stage. Though I narrowly avoided tinnitus during Just Mustard’s set and had to hastily move far away from the speakers, the Dundalk shoegazers whet our appetites for more live shows and new music to come. Honourable mentions also to Slowdive and Beach Fossils, who each built up walls of sound that crashed over the crowd with expert precision. Gentle swaying was essential.

The most surprising standout of the weekend was, in my opinion, Playback’s tribute to Talking Heads as they performed their Stop Making Sense set song for song on the intimate Last City stage. Their frontman quite literally embodied David Byrne, and they get major cool points for hitting the mark with all the original stage antics, including running on the spot while keeping perfect tune, dancing with a lampstand, and donning an oversized suit. No notes.

As was well documented, and is sadly to be expected with festival lineups as stacked as this one, Róisín Murphy had to bow out last minute, and there was quite a bit of speculation as to who would close out the mainstage on Saturday night. That honour went to local Waterford lads, King Kong Company, who were joined by Bobby Fingers, who managed to blow the proverbial roof off of Curraghmore regardless of having to perform with a broken foot.

Aside from the music offering—which made a concerted effort to spotlight the wealth of homegrown talent we’re blessed with this year—All Together Now’s range of experiences surpass just music. There’s a whole Theatre of Food, a wellness area for yoga and even saunas, a craft village, live podcasts, comedians, storytelling and conversations that engage the mind from early morning into the night.

The age demographic is: everyone. As I mentioned, it’s a family-friendly festival, so you’ll see whole families wandering around all wholesome, plenty of twenty-somethings buzzing to be free from the working world for a weekend, and those in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s having a boogie into the early hours.

Yes, the weather was hormonal. Yes, by Monday I was carefully balancing on bootfulls of blisters. But would I do it all over again this weekend? Absolutely.

All Together Now announces 2025 takes place from 31 July to 3 August, and they’ve just introduced the ATN Ticket Loyalty Scheme, so if it’s been tradition for you and your mates, now it’s going to start paying off — literally. Same time next year?

Imagery provided by All Together Now, via Aiesha Wong