More than the Pyramid: A trip through Somerset’s most important music

Posted On June 5, 2025June 5, 2025

I grew up in such a small village that whenever I meet new people, the answer to where I’m from becomes a slow process of elimination. I start with the closest small town, before moving on to the most appropriate big one nearby, before resorting to my county name when all of that inevitably fails. “Basically, I’m from Somerset”, I tell them, before squashing any final expressions of confusion by informing them it’s where Glastonbury is based. Finally, I get a widened eye of enlightenment before an apathetic “that’s cool” in response.

Rightly or wrongly, the festival has become the representative beacon of our humble county, just above cider and The Wurzels on the leaderboard. But I’m certainly proud of our green fields playing host to the world’s biggest party once a year, for, despite the festival’s size, there are important nuggets that feel innately West Country to me. Like everyone, I feel a sort of indescribable connection to the landscape upon which I grew up. While my view of the Glastonbury Tor may be impeded by a sea of festival stages, echoes of the breeze that runs through the festival still take me back to my formative years. Years spent yomping farmers’ fields just like the one at Worthy, with a Bluetooth speaker under my arm, making sense of whatever classic rock album I had decided to obsess over then.

But like all swells of cultural trends, the fascination for obscure corners of the country began to grow. Places were regarded as ‘having their moment’ on the simple basis that an ex-Michelin-star chef just opened a small plates restaurant there. And it’s certainly happened with Somerset. In and around the months of Glastonbury, culture vultures flock to The Newt, Bruton, Frome and marvel at the charm these pokey West Country spots hold, in some hope it might give them a more transcendental understanding of the festival. I’ve even heard excited conversations about what town might become the next destination of a yuppie takeover.

Look, I live in Bristol and am no stranger to gentrification. But I feel at odds with the idea of the rhotic Somerset accent being unpalletable for the pop-ups that emerge in its landscape. Through music, we have so proudly celebrated our diversity, our accents, our communities in a joyously unashamed manner. And elsewhere in the country, it seems celebrated as well, particularly in the likes of Yorkshire, Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool.

So as the fertile South Western soil gears up to be trampled on by music fans all over, it feels like high time to shed light on the riches of songs and sounds that have emerged from a county that many don’t realise they consider the home of music. The harsh R’s and dodgy colloquialisms have been injected into some fine songs over the years, while it’s also fostered an unlikely subculture of trip-hop that eventually bled into the city that sits proudly on its border: Bristol.

In fact, after crafting the songs that would make their seminal debut album Dummy, Portishead felt it would be only right to wear their roots on their sleeves. With their band name being a direct derision from the sleepy town nestled at the foot of the Avon river, the band were proudly stamping the footprint of the Southwest onto the global music scene.

Their groundbreaking use of sampling, atmospheric textures and production helped develop a healthy and diverse scene of experimental music that made inroads into the county’s overlooking city. Massive Attack would pave the way for trip-hop to flourish and for a burgeoning scene of electronic music that today dominates a wave of subcultures existing in the UK.

It was traditional West Country sensibitlies that were being modernised for a future context. The experimental layering of brass textures in the area’s trip-hop scene could ultimately be traced back to legendary Clarinettist Acker Bilk. The Somerset native helped leverage a traditional jazz revival in Britain during the mid-century. While the title largely fits the bill in terms of his impact on music in the Southwest, I would hasten to label him an unsung hero because his name became the title of a song on the aptly named album West Country.

Langkamer’s album was a bundle of soft-rock fun that drew upon punk, indie, and Americana influences to weld together a record that perfectly captured the landscape of the British countryside. Folky harmonies spoke of times of old, while sporadic ad-libs and screeching guitar descends chimed into a sense of communal chaos that forms the heart of this very area. While this album doesn’t reinvent the wheel quite as much as the likes of Portishead, it’s an unashamed celebration of the landscape it was born from, modernising the folky roots upon which so much of our music can be traced.

It’s no surprise that community sits at the very heart of the West Country record because Langkamer have made it a very part of West Country, the place. The band are also the brains behind Breakfast Records, who power the storytelling of some of Somerset’s sharpest contemporary minds, Getdown Services. The humour so many dedicated fans have lapped up upon recent releases is all steeped in the colloquialisms and attitudes of West Country living, fronted by a deep sarcasm and confrontational wit that hides a strong undercurrent of sentimentality, empathy and community.

You’re unlikely to find any of these albums or musicians playing in the dimly lit halls of Somerset’s next roadshow concept restaurant, but they are steeped in a historic appreciation of authentic music performance. It’s what made the wild idea of hosting a farm-based festival so feasible in the first place, and its growth into an absolute mammoth of live music stands on the shoulders of generations of open-minded music fans. Somerset’s cultural contribution might be celebrated on the Pyramid, but what remains when it’s brought down every year provides so much more.

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