Camp Bestivalling 2010

EARLIES...I've never seen so many munkins... children everywhere... the place looks like a multi-coloured Slaine battleground...we took 3 little Lokis, one unborn and, yeah, Camp Bestival is the ideal family Festival... adults are incidental, are baggage handlers, workhorses... some of them are dressed like children but... this place is like a tidy Glasonbury, one without the flayed and the straggled, a Festival almost without litter, which is an odd site as evening approaches (think Green Man without the beards and with fairy costumes)...

PHILOSOPHY...Bad Science has made a definite impression on this place. there's a very systematic (i think) pro-science, pro evidentialist, anti-Glastonbury stance seamed throughout: in the acts (lots of children's science), the messages, the lack of spiritual and holistic guff... there's the trappings of the Festival circuit: flower powers, dayglo, flags (though no ones waving them, thank god - maybe those people who do wave them at festivals are using them as child surrogates...)

Ear candles? Fuck youuuuuuuuuuu

No bugger is sitting in a goddamn healing field orbing, no one is doubling up on Orgone, no one is sucking in Egyptian plasma juice...

Flags as children waves...



TRICKS: the 2 Lokis (9 and 12) are instead listening to The Fall while trying to ride clown bikes or Tinie Tempahing to the beat of juggled balls and hoops and tightropes and someone's playing The Threshold Houseboys Choir's 'So Young It Knows No Maturing' and this is the perfect soundtrack because all those little underpitched slurred voices mixing in and out of the crackles and flurries is the sound of this festival... munkins chatter that Shpongle would be proud of, that Terence Goddamn McKenna would be proud of...

CHILL: Tired? Been Still Walking? Them lil' feet need a rest? Let Icebreaker feat. BJ Cole perform Eno's Apollo for you, let the sap rise again and let the actuality of the Moon Landings be there for all to see: it happened, no conspiracies here, you see?

MYSTERY: Where's Joker though? I keep going back in (lots of 14 year old girls in headbands dubstepping it up like there's no tomorrow, smoke curls and hair tosses allover) but he's never there... I hear he turned up, I'm not convinced...

There is a guy djing in The Bollywood lounge who looks like Aaron Funk...




CLICKS: The Fall are getting good as a festival band despite continuing their resolute anti-Vibe grumbling; they are kinda kicking it, though don't tell their friends...

FUNKADELICATESSEN: Missed some of the point by being a little too adolescent for this crowd (the kids mostly gone to bed now or lapsing consciousness); funk should be everything to this place and people really want to dance but the onstage sweary antics seem out of step, leaving the same kind of - oh, come on - taste that Mark E Smith left when John Peel died and he was asked to comment.

OWN GOALS: What the hell is Gruff Rhys up to with that guy, that VCR repairman, Tony Da Gattora... I've been a Gruff-skeptic before but I loved him at Green Man a few years ago and now he's, well, he's just making a racket and stretching everyone to the point of... it's not even endurance; people simply leave... shit, mate... as shit as a Peter Murphy solo alb



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EAT: Question - how long does it take three people to serve pasta and sauce? Answer - Longer than a homeless guy's toenails, longer than a Namlook discography, longer than a Desperate Housewives pre-credit sequence.

EATING: Yah, food excellent ... expensive but reasonably profound Tapas and Vegfare and lovely Thali... coulda done with a Burger King halfway through Saturday though; the phrase Gourmet Burger makes me weep a little... it's a burger, deal with the fact you're eating it...

JOUSTING: There should be more of that at Festivals, I think...



MISSED: lots and lots, more than I saw, as always and as always that's hardly the point; would've liked to see Marc Almond and The Human League and I'm still looking for Joker...

MATERIALS: if you have kids, go next year; it really is very do-able, very quick, very easy.... if you don't have kids it might be a VERY weird experience - check out the very small, quickly dematerialized groups of older teens looking a little spazzed out - this is no place to be hammered; too many munkins to crush, to many rolling eyed parents, too much knowledge on show here... I guess there's a few creepy virgin late teens (yeah you, with your floppiness and your fringe, with those low swinging lobes - frontal and ear) hanging around the haremic/bulimic 14 year old girls which might remember this as a Festival of dreams but I seriously doubt that a Festival veteran sans kids would understand this place...

EXEUNT: This was great and timely for us Lokis though: I honestly couldn't imagine festivalling with a pregnant wife and two kids anywhere else.

PHOTOS: they've all got the family in so this was all I had left. Sorry.