They call Tomorrowland the "Greatest Show on Snow". I went to decide for myself
Active Traveller
There’s an unremarkable shopping centre outside Birmingham called Merry Hill. In 1998, it was the nearest place 14-year-old me could buy cool clothes. So I would safari alone on two trains and a bus to reach hallowed JJB Sports within. The now defunct store was a teenager peacocker’s dream: lime-green Kappa trackies, fluoro Airmaxes…
On my first visit, I spent £40 on a cherry-red Ellesse jumper. Vast, vast sums of money, but it didn’t matter: this dangerously cool, deeply sensual sweater was my best chance of getting girls’ attention at the upcoming school Christmas party.
Compliments flew in from both sexes as I arrived at the low-lit sports hall a week later. The Ellesse-effect was working a charm. But the dance floor was soon a sizzle of sweat and hormones, so I left my prized pullover on the back of a chair. When I returned it had, of course, gone – and with it any chance of snogging Lauren Harrison. Worst party ever.
Fast forward 26 years and Ellesse was back from the dead (in my world at least) as the main sponsor of Tomorrowland Winter, a high-concept dance music festival in dreamy Alpe d’Huez. Knowing very little about the event, I decided to scratch my itch for cherry-red redemption and agreed to go.
Tomorrowland is, by sheer numbers, the world’s biggest music festival. Its summer edition in Belgium draws 400,000 people from more than 200 countries. This, its snowy counterpart, is a more intimate affair at 22,000, but still feels like the most ambitious event in the Alps. A total of eight stages, up and down the mountain, all lean heavily into high-fidelity fantasy.
My year’s theme was “Amicorum Spectaculum” – a kind of vintage-circus-via-Roman-forum concept. It sounds like nonsense because it is, but that doesn’t detract from the spectacle. Watching the show from the mezzanine level in the main-stage super tent was tantamount to looking through a kaleidoscope on psychedelics.
The production is, suffice it say, staggering. Intergalactic light shows, gargantuan mechanical props and the cutting edge of projection tech collide to create a Vegas-esque dopamine fever theatre the likes of which your eyes have never been force fed.
As for your ears, Armin van Buuren, Afrojack and Steve Aoki were the big hitters, with the latter pumping a relentless confetti of beats that made me down my Tuborg and smilingly snow plough into the bedizen crowd below. The real fans. The slightly toe-curling “People of Tomorrow”.
Any pre-event predictions of superciliousness, though, were quickly bedded. As a demographic, I found the POTs a bit older, a bit more enthusiastic and – because they’re from a broad smattering of nationalities – a bit nicer. That is to stay, a bit nicer than if it was an exclusively British affair, with privately educated cliques sousing the mountain in Whispering Angel.
Sure, this is skiing in the Alps – so a fairly bougie endeavour – but the crowd feels more or less inclusive. I’ve never really felt welcome on a slope before and so we were off to a good start. My beloved, who’s never been skiing, felt that too.
At night, in the festival village, we particularly enjoyed the festooned chalet-style bars away from the stages, still popping, but at a volume that made chatting to strangers unstrained. And when an EDM remix of Back Street Boys’ “Everbody” came on we all knew what to sing.
Around us, at a stage crowned with an enormous tilting head, flags from Colombia, Japan, Belgium and Brazil flapped in the wind. It was cold enough to see your breath, but hot enough – after a few Jäger bombs – to unzip your ski jacket.
Debby Wilmsen, Tomorrowland’s media mogul, told me that a number of festival goers come alone, so giving people a “warm, welcoming feeling” is a priority.
“Especially today, with so much conflict and division, it’s important for a festival to show that people can still come together – to enjoy themselves, to care for one another, and to look out for each other.” The People of Tomorrow, indeed.
Debbie admits, too, that guests are here for skiing first – with the added bonus of a festival.
“They stay for four or seven days in lodges or hotels, enjoying skiing by day and the festival by night, often combining it with a city trip to Paris, Nice, Lyon or Bordeaux,” she said, “so it becomes a proper holiday.”
I don’t think I’ve ever preferred the daytime at a festival before, so the novelty kept coming. On day 2, we woke late, skipped breakfast, and headed for the slopes. Instead of skiing, we ordered a takeaway pizza, bought some plonk, borrowed a beanbag by the nursery runs and chain-smoked while watching the POTs slide past. Peak living, if you’ll pardon the pun.
As my gal went off for a skiing lesson, I took the opportunity to jump off the side of a mountain and paraglide down. James Bond-style fantasy nearly fulfilled, were it not for the instructor big-spooning me from behind. The slopes, when I eventually went skiing, were busy and, lower down, a bit slushy, so I went as high as possible and found empty powdery pistes.
There are very few things more enjoyable than carving down a mountain to meet your waiting partner at a bar converted into its own festival stage. A Macbook-crisp cerulean sky backdropped a bamboo mis-en-scène, with its dreamcatcher centre piece. Not sure how the Crystal Garden stage fits the roman theme, but it looked pretty.
Concerned with set-building wastage, I was comforted when Debby told me that reusing, recycling and retelling the respective concept’s story across its various sites was an important part of Tomorrowland’s MO.
We and a goldilocks-number of revellers beamed while dancing a jaunty daft-punk-style jig in our awkward ski boots. I even did a Michael Jackson toe stand before pirouetting on my heel. Then a Slovakian woman, in a vintage one-piece, gave me her last Haribo.
Everyone knows that skiing tipsy is another of life’s great pleasures and I delighted in very slowly pizza ploughing down the mountain as golden hour haloed the town below.
Nature’s superlative good looks are the other production highlight here. At dusk, we both got dressed in silly outfits and took posterity snaps together on a hill behind the hotel. There’s nothing like a sky of bleeding lilac, peach and raspberry sorbet hues to crank the romance.
For tonight’s action, I put on a box-fresh snow-white Ellesse beanie, the half-tennis ball logo pointing head on like a glowing third-eye chakra. We slipped into a corporate VIP bar on the belle etage and necked a few free rosés before getting caught and heading down to the d-floor for the Euro-cheese euphonia of Van Buuren’s “This is What it Feels Like”.
I held my gal tight and kissed her like we were teenagers again. The Ellesse-effect, doing its thing. Best party ever. Looking her deeply in the eyes, I asked: “Have you ever been to Merry Hill? …I’ll take you some time.”