Bestival 08

This was Bestival’s fifth birthday, and never before had there been any rain. What with friday’s forecast being for “a month’s worth of rain in a day” 30,000 odd people set out for the Isle of Wight with trepidation. Well it did rain. The word torrential has rarely been more apt. The mud was predictably about 8 to 10 inches thick across the entire site. Yet people still dressed up and the atmosphere was quite nice, especially on the Saturday afternoon when the sky became a slightly lighter shade of gray. The rain did get very wearing what with the effort to walk anywhere, the indoor stages being rammed and the large number of acts who had to cancel. Yet Bestival had various problems entirely separate to the rain. The sound systems were almost all very weak. Even if the systems had been better, the levels were often very badly judged. For example, when CSS were playing you could barely hear Lovefoxxx singing, which is madness because she’s the whole point of the band. When Aphex Twin was playing no one could tell he was actually on, the sound was so quiet everyone assumed it was just an in-between DJ. Also, the headliners were universally shit, apart from My Bloody Valentine. In addition, someone had the audacity to try and sell me Canderel, while claiming they were tablets of something considerably more exciting.
That said, Mary Anne Hobbs was brilliant and Jon Hopkins played an incredible set on the best system at the festival, until it broke, for the fourth time that weekend.
So in summary, it was quite fun. If you’re more a fan of the gleeful silliness and dressing up than quality sound systems or quality drugs, then next year head to Bestival, I won’t be there.