So our third in the trilogy of Kendal Calling previews, firstly we gave you an overview of the festival, then we examined the line-up with our ten top bands (again link if possible). Now we take a look beyond the music at a festival that is often dubbed as the Glastonbury of the North and rightly so.

As if music spread across eight stages wasn’t enough, there is a plethora of other attractions to keep the whole family entertained throughout the weekend. First up the all important real ale festival, dubbed the festival within a festival, with five breweries including Lancaster and Coniston, eight ales including the return of Kendals’ own ale Oh Deer. There are also a couple of ciders thrown in for good measure, we can’t wait to try them all.

So moving from drink through to some awesome food, the growth of street food has benefited festivals up and down the country. Kendal Calling though have been promoting fantastic food for a number a years, this year being no different. The return of festival goers favourite Ghandi’s Flip Flop bring their vegetarian Indian cuisine, you’ll catch us in there long after the music’s ended, chowing down on an awesome feast.

Two new outlets that we can’t wait for are the phenomenal Red’s True BBQ, if you’ve not been to their restaurants in Leeds or Manchester you’ve truly missed out on a treat. Finally another new addition - the Pizza Peddlers, with a selection of great pizzas cooked in a wood fired oven, these are sure to go down a treat.

In addition to food and drink there are also a whole bunch of activities for kids, from the Early Risers Club to the Toddlers Tent. There’s also a Family Workshop area where all of the family can get involved, creating that brilliant family vibe that runs throughout the Kendal Calling sight. There is one special area though and it's just for kids and that’s the Ladybird’s Children’s Area. Every year they all look like they’re having a great time; with workshops throughout the weekend and an awesome parade on Sunday, it’s a great way to relax knowing that the children are having a great time.

There’s also a late night cinema for those who aren’t bothered about raving until the early hours, the Calling Out tent is transformed into a huge cinema so you can while away the hours watching a variety of films. There is also a roller disco, with the ever-brilliant genre hopping DJ Yoda headlining the Friday night. This is a first for us we can’t wait to put strap our skates on for a one off experience.

Kendal Calling is shaping up to be the biggest and best yet and we cannot wait to head over to Lowther Deer Park this weekend. We’ll be tweeting throughout the weekend so follow us for an exclusive insight into this awesome festival.

The British summer is truly in full swing, it’s a balmy Summer's evening in Newcastle as we head to tonight's show. The tiny Cluny Two is sweltering as tonight’s support act, the ever-brilliant Barry Hyde of The Futureheads, takes to the stage.

Playing tracks off his debut solo album, he delivers these with his usual Mackem twang. His dry wit fills the gaps in between songs with various odd stories around how the songs were written about. ‘My Sugar’ is a particular highlight, written about that person who takes away all of your attention and saps all of your energy.

There are also some great covers of Tom Waits and Prince, we cannot help but grin from ear to ear throughout this set. We’re left waiting with baited breath for the release of Barry’s aforementioned solo album. We take a quick breather to catch some fresh air as the heat continues to rise.

As Hyde and Beast take to the stage the packed venue's temperature is off the scale, this shows on the band's faces from the off. Dave Hyde (Barry’s brother and fellow Futurehead) looks particularly warm at the helm of his side project. It's safe to say though that within moments of taking to the stage the whole crowd have forgotten about the heat and are fixated on the brilliant band in front of them.

Premièring tracks for their new LP Keep Moving, opening with new track ‘Blue’ it sees them picking up where their debut, Slow Down, left off. ‘Blue’ has a hefty paisley influence to it, a great way to kick proceedings off. ‘Pictures in the Sky’ sounds great, sparking a crowd sing-along whilst with the addition of extra layers of instrumentation, the old songs sound even better than ever.

‘You Will Be Lonely’ receives a similar transformation to ‘Pictures in the Sky'; there seems to have been a huge evolving of the Hyde and Beast sound in the time they’ve been away. Slow Down almost seemed to be them finding their feet in comparson. The tracks off Keep Moving see them now honing that sound and subsequently building on it. ‘A Dark Mistake’ really does stand out as being a highlight of the band's new output, exactly what we expect from a track with a title like that.

However, the only issue we take with this evening is the short set, we would have liked to hear everything that band had, despite that being rather greedy of us, but we were having such a great time and it was just a shame it had to end. We’re left waiting with baited breath as to what the new album will bring but on this first listen, Hyde and Beast are back with a truly awesome record that sees them building upon their previous success.

Julia Holter writes music out of joint, a mixture of times, genres and styles as unsettling as it is beautiful. St. John’s church in Hackney seems like a fairly fitting setting for a woman and a band intent on channelling choral music as much as operatic post-rock and trad-jazz. The five take the stage to perversely open with the closing song from last year’s full length, Bright City Song - ‘City Appearing’. “Bright blue flames under my fingers” sets the tone for the night, as Holter closes her eyes and stares into the lights, her keyboard strokes dancing around the nodding and bouncing of the various string players in her band.

Her set tonight is a combination of her two previous albums and her latest, recorded not in a studio but in her bedroom. As vocoders double and triple her voice, and she switches from quiet, Badalamenti free-jazz breakdown, and literal breakdown, horns, drums and strings batter against each other like the interlude in a David Lynch film. The screams of the saxophone in the crowded church at St. John’s make this more of an operatic experience than your standard gig. The horns of ‘Horns Surrounding Me’ mimic the experience of being aggressively surrounded, in Holter’s world, by photographers, in our world, LITERALLY BY HORNS.

It’s not difficult to tell that Julia Holter writes her lyrics before she writes her songs. The music is a brush stroke around a story, but at the same time the music seems to mimic the story. As Holter sings ‘In The Green Wild’, a song about escaping the city, the instruments cool and soften as Holter walks towards the sea. There are no choruses here, and operatic jazz parts mesh with delicate, choral verses. The majority of Holter’s work begins with a story that gradually morphs into discordant jazz, vocals and piano that ramp up into a Thelonius Monk-style freak out. The band plays ‘Marienbad’ (tentatively introduced by Holter with “There is a garden here [outside the venue]… and this song is about a garden”), which employs all the devices of so-called ‘post-rock’, vocal-less-ly folding in on itself and becoming (appropriately, as it refers to Alain Resnais’ film rather than the place), a kind of jazz-drone.

There are times during the gig when all the reverb and cello make you think Holter might be about to launch into the Titanic theme tune, but then the keys drop, the drums start and things become a fair bit darker. Julia Holter is all about time slippage. Just as her entire first album (like the nouveau roman, post-war) re-appropriates ancient Greek myth to become the story of a woman living in New York (“this one is a really new one and a really old one at the same time”, she quips), last year’s Loud City Song was a re-telling of Minnelli’s 1958 musical comedy, Gigi. Her first LP re-appropriated the classics - specifically Euripides’ Hippolytus - to make them say something new. Gigi does the same, but with a post-war musical rather than a Greek tragedy. Holter’s songs are also based around “trying to make yourself a work of art”, and watching her live, one is struck with the idea that Julia Holter is actually descending into her texts, speaking to her audience “whether it’s my voice or someone else’s” (as she told Quietus last year). Her second album was called Ekstasis, Greek for ‘ecstasy’, which although colloquially means ‘happiness’, literally (in Greek) means ‘outside of your own body’. Holter has apparently written an album around Gigi because she was fascinated with it as a child. This is nostalgia, which in Greek means ‘the pain of coming home’. That sums up the experience of watching Julia Holter pretty well.

Double headers don’t come much more impressive than this. It’s safe to say that the Sage have assembled some phenomenal line-ups as part of this years Summertyne festival, but this is up there with the best. It's an early show, taking to the stage promptly at 2:00pm Ethan Johns brings has band on for their final show for some time.

Whilst it is rather early and it feels extremely odd being indoors in a dark room, we’re quick to forget the rest of the world as Ethan Johns serenades us with his awesome catalogue of tracks. As Ethan is currently in the process of recording a new record, there are a number of new additions to his repertoire on display this afternoon.

Both ‘Judgement Time’ and ‘ Twenty First Century Paranoid Blues’ sound absolutely fantastic. Both have a stereotypically bluesy feel, yet it's hard to put into words how great Ethan Johns truly is anyway; a legendary producer now making some really great music. New tracks may shine, the brilliant ‘Black Heart’ rings out, its hefty bluesy riffs kicking up a storm in hall two this afternoon.

Similarly ‘Talking Talking Blues’ brings down the pace a little, yet it still possesses that awesome blues sensibility. The crunching of the guitar, the hefty reverb, this is truly one of the stand out tracks of this afternoon's set. Its easy to see why Ethan closes with ‘Twenty First Century Paranoid Blues’ though as it’s a huge number with some awesome riffs and it leaves us breathless with more yet to come.

Hot on the heels of Ethan Johns is the equally exciting Cass Mccombs with his own brand of Americana, Cass is here to rock out. He seems in particularly high spirits, and again has a huge collection of songs which he can choose from. This afternoon sees him picking from across the board, the down tempo ‘Home on the Range’ is a beautiful track. The touching lyrics delivered in such a sweet manner that we can’t help but be mesmerised by Cass.

‘Home on the Range’ is a stark contrast to ‘Prima Donna’ which today feels grittier. The benefit of a full backing band really sets this track alight. ‘Big Wheel’ has a similar effect it stands almost head and shoulders above the rest of the set, with such a great feel to it. Throughout the afternoon, Cass’ delivery reminds us of the likes of Conor Oberst.

A true master of his craft with today being nothing short of exceptional, ‘County Line’ gives us with goose bumps. Its phenomenal lyrics leaving us almost floating on air as we exit the venue.

We leave completely filled with adoration for the amazing artists that we’ve seen; men very much on top of their game at the moment. We feel truly privileged to have been able to experience this today, and must thank The Sage for their immense programming and bringing such phenomenal acts to the region.