Homelands 1999 The First Festival

Homelands did not appear from nowhere. The Matterley Bowl had already hosted the first Creamfields in May 1998, when Cream and Mean Fiddler took a superclub-scale audience into an outdoor multi-arena format. By the end of that year, former Cream director Darren Hughes was working with Mean Fiddler on a new festival at the same site. NME followed the split as it happened: Creamfields would continue elsewhere, while Homelands took the Winchester date and venue.

The first Homelands pushed the format wider. Its early announcement described nine themed arenas and a bill that crossed live electronic music, house, trance, drum & bass and club-hosted spaces. The Home Arena included The Chemical Brothers, Asian Dub Foundation, Fatboy Slim, DJ Shadow and Paul Oakenfold. Mixmag’s arena carried Underworld, Faithless, Carl Cox, Deep Dish and Gilles Peterson. The End ran separate deep-house and drum & bass spaces, with names including Darren Emerson, Laurent Garnier, DJ Hype, Andy C, Krust, Bryan Gee, Fabio and Grooverider.

The BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix arena made the broadcast part of the event itself. Pete Tong, Paul Oakenfold, Sasha and John Digweed were billed into a space that also carried live Radio 1 coverage. The surviving 30 May broadcast preserves Sasha, Pete Tong and Oakenfold from Homelands.

This is where the late-1990s dance festival looks visibly different from the early mega-rave. The scale remains, but the structure is more formal: branded arenas, media partners, live acts, superclub hosts and national-radio broadcasting all operating as part of one carefully segmented site.

The surviving paper trail also shows why festival statistics need treating carefully. The November 1998 launch announcement called Homelands a 30,000-capacity event; NME’s post-event report said organisers had sold out a 20,000 ticket allocation. Those figures describe different things at different stages, so this archive does not turn either into an unsupported final attendance figure.

• The original advert and 1999 reporting give the date, location, hours and major arena structure.
• The names on the page are the advertised festival bill, not reconstructed set times.
• The BBC recordings below come from the overnight festival broadcast.
• Some listings use 30 May because the event ran into Sunday morning.
• The tape and broadcast order is not presented as the timetable on site.

The same bowl near Winchester links two important chapters. Creamfields 1998 proved a 25,000-scale club festival could work there; Homelands 1999 returned with a new brand, nine arenas and a line-up built around both live electronic acts and club culture. Creamfields, meanwhile, moved north to Liverpool later in 1999.

That makes Matterley a useful geographical marker in the archive. The venue is the continuity; the promoters, brands and festival strategies around it are what changed.