The Beat Hotel We Out Here partnership arrived, by most accounts, at precisely the right moment. On the closing night of We Out Here Festival 2024, which ran from 15 to 18 August at Wimborne St Giles, while the rest of Dorset presumably surrendered to sleep, the rectangular structure on the right-hand side of the site was producing something rather more ungovernable. People spilled from every edge of it. A man dressed head-to-toe in gold spandex swished multicoloured laser beams from his gloved fingertips until the air resembled, in the writer’s own words, Mission: Impossible if it were sponsored by Pride Month. This is the kind of detail that tells you everything.
A roaming party finds its festival match
The Beat Hotel was founded in 2011 and has since been responsible for dancefloors across the UK, Morocco and Spain. This year marked the first time the roaming party joined forces with the We Out Here team, and the fit, as these things occasionally but rarely are, was genuinely glove-like. Where We Out Here’s other stages (Rhythm Corner, Lush Life, the cavernous Bowl) are woven into the festival’s existing fabric, The Beat Hotel wove its own tapestry alongside them. It embraced the event’s core ethos of community, culture and celebration while remaining, quite deliberately, a world apart.
The lineup across the weekend leaned into that distinctness. Alex Kassian, DJ Subaru, Ruf Dug and Al Wootton each took to the stage behind the decks, working the crowd into their own particular versions of joyful disorder. The closing two hours fell to house aficionado Prosumer, whose set provided the spiritual finale to what had already been a weekend of considerable depth: Anz on Thursday, Wookie on Friday, Re:ni on Saturday, Joy Crookes, Arthur Verocai and K-Lone woven through the broader programme alongside countless others.
Illegal Mezcal and the Latin American atmosphere
The Beat Hotel’s collaboration with Illegal Mezcal, a producer of artisanal spirits made in the villages of Oaxaca, gave the space its palette. The smoky and sweet Reposado and Joven became the backbone of the drinks menu: the Mezcalita, built with fresh lime, agave and crushed ice; the Rhubarb Paloma, mixed with fresh lime, Kazimo rhubarb and grapefruit soda. Both are the kind of drinks that make you forget you are standing in a field in Dorset, which is precisely the point.
The décor reinforced the displacement. Lush vegetation filled the corners. Tapestries and photographs of vivid flora and fauna hung from wooden walls. Behind the bar, vintage posters advertising Ilegal sat alongside grainy film photographs of agave farmers. The same visual collage extended to the stage area, so that the whole space cohered as something considered rather than assembled. Bathed in the scarlet glow of neon signs, the venue took on the colours, warmth and energy of Latin America with an assurance that most festival pop-ups, for all their good intentions, do not quite manage.
During the day, the tables to one side of the stage served as a station for the Acme Tacos team, cooking sweet and spicy food over a live fire. By the closing hours of Sunday evening, those same tables had become makeshift platforms, peppered with friends and strangers soaking up whatever time remained. Roach Motel’s Happy Bizzness poured from the speakers (‘I party to Sunday, don’t go to work on Monday, ain’t nobody’s business if I do’) with the conviction of a sermon.
Beat Hotel We Out Here: what comes next
For a first collaboration, the Beat Hotel We Out Here partnership produced something that felt, by the final hour, entirely established. The scarlet neon, the mezcal, the laser gloves, the Prosumer set: the whole thing existed on its own terms within a festival that already sets a high bar for curation and atmosphere.
Whether the partnership continues, the festival itself returns to Wimborne St Giles. According to Resident Advisor, We Out Here Festival 2025 is scheduled for 14 to 17 August, giving anyone who missed the Beat Hotel’s debut a fixed date to work towards. On the evidence of a closing-night dancefloor that nobody, it seems, wanted to leave, that date is worth marking early.
Photography by Sandra Nagel and Marc Sethi, courtesy of The Beat Hotel.
