My Bloody Valentine triumph on first day of a muddy Bestival

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Bestival 2008

Friday 5th to Sunday 7th September 2008
Robin Hill Country Park, Downend, Nr Arreton, Isle of Wight.. PO30 2NU, England MAP
£130 w/e with camping, aged 13-16 £65, under 13 FREE but ticket needed - SOLD OUT

A lot has changed since the last time I visited Bestival back in 2005. Then in its 2nd year the festival had a capacity of about 8000, however that figure has doubled and almost doubled again in the intervening years, until in its 5th year the festival's headcount has finally been capped at 30,000 people, making it a far bigger beast than the one I remembered. There was a totally new site layout with many new stages and tents, but we began our weekend in one of the tents I did remember from three years back - the Big Top - with Trans Global Underground.

Trans Global Underground are one of those bands I have always meant to get around to seeing. People who have caught their festival shows in the past rave about them and it took me all of 30 seconds to see why - they're awesome. Fusing traditional Asian instrumentation with modern afro-inspired dance beats, the band put on a show that was both musically interesting and ass-shakingly dance-able. An incredibly sexy female singer gyrated around the stage wearing a tiny dress split to the waist, adding Bollywood-style vocals and dance moves to the show; a male MC added lyrics and generally presided over the on stage proceedings in a way I am more used to seeing at hip hop shows; a crack team of musicians, playing sitar, all kinds of drums and synths, kept the music pumping. This band reminded me of a more world music version of Faithless perhaps, and the dancing crowd grew and grew as their set continued.

Leaving the Big Top, we were just in time to see the sun make a rare festival appearance and decided to take the opportunity to visit The Village Green to find some food. The Village Green was almost exactly as I remembered it, with a bandstand, the enormous HughJart 'Bestival' sculpture for people to clamber upon, a local farmers market and BestivAle pub set on a steep slope in a quieter, more relaxed part of the site that also offered plenty of play equipment for smaller Bestivallers to clamber on. Here the site still had small patches of green grass scattered around, but it was clear these probably wouldn't last long as the mud was quickly taking over and rain was beginning to fall once again. From here, we cut back through the forest path to the Main Stage arena, in time to see The Wedding Present finally opening that stage in front of an extremely sparse, wet and grumpy-looking crowd. The terrain in this area was already a sticky mess of almost knee-deep mud and no one had even been on stage yet. I could see why the organisers had delayed opening the Main Stage, cancelling all bands before this, if it was this bad already - with more rain a dead cert, how much worse would it get?


As the rain continued to howl down, we headed over to the X Box Social tent in time to catch the end of Sam Sparro's acoustic set. Sam Sparro is yet another performer whose live show I keep hearing wonderful things about, but knowing only the obvious hit single 'Black and Gold', I have never really made the effort, expecting no more than radio-friendly, over-produced pop. On Friday I wished I had made the effort to see him much sooner as Sam's warm, jazzy vocals and friendly Northern stage presence made for an intimate gig that one punter near me summed up perfectly with the words, "This is a proper festival atmosphere!" Sam invited an extremely inebriated girl on stage to play the maracas for him, who then got so involved with her performance that she broke her instrument, before Sam incited a huge crowd sing-along with his cover of Crystal Waters' classic 'Gypsy Woman'. I vowed I would catch Sam's next set later that night on the BBC Introducing stage.

Outside the rain was still pouring, so we dragged our wellies back through the mud to the Big Top once again, this time to catch Ladyhawke. According to the recent hype, we are to expect great things of this young and hotly tipped newcomer, but the London-based soloist, backed by a full rock band, offered me nothing new. It was yet more electro-tinged power-pop, once again fronted by an easily marketable, guitar-wielding blonde hottie. Her weak vocals were clearly being bolstered by a backing track so over-powering that at points she appeared to be miming. We were unimpressed and so decided to amble through the mud to the comedy tent.

After an hour of DJ-ing, it became evident that there was something seriously wrong on the Jestival comedy stage - performers were supposed to have begun some time ago, but we couldn't see anyone who appeared to be waiting to come on. Eventually the compere came out to deliver the bad news: there would be no Jestival today and almost certainly no Jestival all weekend. The conditions were simply too bad for them to risk putting a performer onstage with electrical equipment when everywhere was that badly waterlogged.



Leaving the Jestival tent it became evident that the comedy tent was not to be the only casualty of the mud and rain: The Polka Tent and The Insect Circus were both closed never to re-open that weekend, The Band Stand was closed, the Dressing Up Tent had to shut down and bale out all together and in spite of the make-shift table dams they had created, a river still ran straight through their tent. Even the BBC Introducing Stage was closed for the day as their production crew battled to get things in order for Saturday, meaning there would be no Sam Sparro for me that night.



With half the stages shut, the festival seemed to be in total chaos and I heard rumours that the Main Stage had also been forced to close again, and so we crossed the site to see if this was true. Pendulum were just starting as we got there, which lifted our spirits a little, and even more so when we saw a fresh new batch of flooring had been laid out across the arena. A security guard told me that they had closed the area earlier to lay out the additional flooring, but they had no intention of closing any stage if they didn't absolutely have to. Clearly the crowds surging into the Main Stage arena were not put off by the torrential rain as Pendulum began their rocking drum & bass set, but we trudged back through the deep, sludgy mud to find some shelter as the heavens opened for what seemed like the millionth time that day.

With no proper walkways, the thick mud made the medium-sized site felt twice its actual size. The boggy, water-logged tracks made getting around the site an aerobic workout and we were quickly tired. Every under cover tent or café was packed to bursting as soggy, muddy Bestivallers did their best to hide from the rain. Unlike Glastonbury, this mud was generally of the more liquid variety, and I regularly thanked my lucky stars that I had finally got around to buying some waterproof trousers in time for the festival. While they may not be very sexy, they were a total godsend at Bestival and could well be the best £9 I have ever spent.



We sought shelter in the infamous Spiegaltent travelling ballroom, which at this festival was billed as the Come Dancing tent, rather than the Pussy Parlour as it is more usually known. There we found smiling faces, space to dance and a wonderful 7 piece band called The Fabulous Lounge Swingers, who went a long way to putting me back in the festival spirit. This 1940s retro band played a mixture of songs from that period alongside modern day pop songs given a wartime makeover. The three singers (two male, one female), piano, sax, double bass and drums were all dressed in period costume as they reworked tracks including Beyonce's 'To the Left' and 'Take Your Mama Out' by Scissor Sisters for an ecstatic crowd.

Leaving the Come Dancing tent, I was pleased to see the rain had stopped as nothing was going to stop me from watching My Bloody Valentine headline the Main Stage tonight. My Bloody Valentine are one of those groups who are a little difficult to explain to the uninitiated. I remember reading something about them once that described their now-classic 1989 album Loveless as "almost always threatening to descend into total sonic chaos, but somehow managing to hang onto a thread of melody", which is a description that works for me. Their beautiful dirge sound was a precursor to grunge and a direct influence on bands like Spiritualized and Death in Vegas.

Guitarist and singer, Kevin Shields, clearly wasn't a happy man as he took to the stage, gesticulating angrily at the sound engineer as the first song began. I certainly didn’t envy the sound man’s task tonight as Loveless is one of the most intricately engineered albums I own, but he rose to the occasion and once the levels were sorted after the initial hitch, the sound was flawless throughout the rest of the gig.

Playing songs from across their back catalogue, but weighted heavily towards Loveless, there was nothing in the way of crowd banter, but that was to be expected: with music this dark and intense jokey asides would seem odd indeed.

Tonight the crowd seemed to be a 50%/50% split of those who had just heard the hype surrounding MBV's recent reformation, who had come to see what the fuss was about and those - like me - who were clearly chuffed to pieces to finally get to see a favourite band who went on sabbatical over a decade ago, a band I honestly thought I would never get to see play live. But here I was and they still sounded fantastic: a fan girl festival moment if ever there was one and a fantastic end to an otherwise rather hard day.