Small Stages, Big Finds: Five NOW Fest 2026 Side-Stage Sets Worth Catching Up On
Photo: Jason M. C., Han, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Every festival has a hierarchy, and at NOW Fest 2026 it looked roughly as expected: the big field, the big screens, the big noise. But dig through the rewatched clips and a different picture emerges. The sets that travelled furthest — the ones people were still dropping into group chats days afterwards — mostly came from the smaller stages, at hours when the main field was half empty and the cameras had room to actually look at what was happening.
Here are five of them, with a note on the moment that did the work and why each act belongs on your radar before the next festival season.
1. Hattie Lune — The Nook, Saturday afternoon
Bristol-based, low-slung and unhurried, Lune writes soul songs with trip-hop bones — the kind of thing that sounds like it was recorded in a stairwell on purpose. On record she is all restraint; live, she has a habit of leaning into the quiet bits until the field has to be quiet with her.
The moment: midway through the set the mic cut out. Rather than wait, she stepped back from it and sang a full verse unamplified. The crowd mics caught it, the chat went still, and the clip of that verse ended up as one of the weekend's most-shared thirty seconds.
Why now: a debut EP that undersells the live show, and a run of small rooms coming up where you can still stand near the front. Cheaper than it will be this time next year.
2. Static Orchard — Kiln Stage, Friday evening
A Sheffield four-piece who treat feedback as a rhythm instrument and seem to find their own songs funny. Loud, chaotic on paper, and far tighter than the racket suggests.
The moment: closing number, the guitarist handed her instrument to a kid from the barrier to hold against the amp while she climbed down and sang from the crowd. Nobody in the production team appeared to have agreed to this. It was brilliant.
Why now: underneath the noise there are proper pop songs with proper choruses. The sort of band that plays a 200-cap room in February and a festival tent in August, and the February one is the better night.
3. Mòran — Canal Side, Saturday night
Glasgow duo building Gaelic vocal loops over modular synths and a drum machine that sounds like it's sulking. Striking, strange and completely unbothered about being either.
The moment: they taught the crowd a Gaelic chorus line by line, then stepped back and let them sing it back. A field of people phonetically nailing a language most of them don't speak is the sort of thing that only works in real time — and the stream caught every second of it.
Why now: the duo have talked about an album and a run of Scottish dates. Go early, before the rooms get bigger than the songs deserve.
4. Carys Pell — The Nook, Sunday afternoon
A Cardiff songwriter moving between Welsh and English mid-song as though the two were always meant to sit together. Indie-folk at the edges, closer to a good kitchen-table conversation at the centre.
The moment: she asked for the stage rig to be dimmed and sang a verse in Welsh by phone light. The chat filled with people asking what it meant, and then with people answering. Quiet, communal, and a reminder of how good the crowd mics can be when the sound desk is paying attention.
Why now: a spring tour of small venues and a growing body of bilingual material that reads even better in a room than on a stream.
5. Rowan Kade — Kiln Stage, Sunday closing
Manchester spoken word over drum and bass, delivered at a pace that shouldn't work in a field and does. Blunt, funny, occasionally bruising.
The moment: over the last track, Kade freestyled about the weekend itself — the queue for the chippy, the tent that flooded, the mate who vanished on Friday and turned up Sunday — and the tent lost it. The best bits of that verse will never be repeated.
Why now: a debut mixtape is supposedly on the way, and the live show is the thing that sells it. Not a photo-friendly act. Get in the room.
How to Catch Up Properly
All five sets sit in the NOW Fest Live archive, and they reward watching in order rather than in clips — especially Mòran and Pell, whose sets build slowly and badly in isolation. If you only have twenty minutes, take the Lune verse and the Kade freestyle and accept that you'll end up watching both sets in full anyway.
The wider point is worth holding onto. Side stages at NOW Fest 2026 were where the surprise was, and the livestream is the only reason most of us found out in time to care. Bookmark the names, set a reminder for the next announcement, and buy the cheap ticket before the clip goes round again.
