With Secret Garden Party packing away its tit-glitter for good, is the wasted White Rabbit calling time on the boutique festival? Last year Bestival, at its original Isle of Wight site, carried a faintly withered air: Britain’s wildest costume party gauging the sour national mood and winding down, with fields once full of techno trees, rum shacks and underground pirate restaurants abandoned to camping.
Transferred to a smaller site at Lulworth Castle, this year’s event feels at first like a V&A exhibition about Bestival. Previous years’ centrepieces such as the world’s largest mirrorball, the clockwork robot and two giant astronauts are displayed like monuments, and a miniature replica of the once-mighty Wishing Tree stands by the campsite entrance, forlornly whispering reggae remixes. All that’s missing is an audio tour in which the Cuban Brothers inform you how many breaths it took to blow up the world’s biggest bouncy castle.
The newest exhibit is Happy Kanye, an illuminated rainbow enshrouding the giant inflatable face of Kanye West, which represents 2017’s costume theme of colour – and the acts duly oblige. Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano hits the stage in a neon-red veil and kabuki dress, like Grace Jones playing Ziggy Stardust. If only their amorphous electropop were as vivid; it has as much flavour and substance as yesterday’s gum.
London’s post-gender collective HMLTD are another eye-aching sight, featuring a blue-haired dandy sailor, a catwalk Bay City Roller and a singer in a lime green Let’s Dance suit. Somehow their theatrical sound-clashes – channelling Fischerspooner, Adam Ant, Suede, Bond theme fanfares and an ultra-camp Nick Cave – match up well.
Pet Shop Boys also got the memo. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe appear against luminous spheres wearing sci-fi Malteser helmets and lead a band of metallic bird people through a hit-shy set of brainiac synthpop about the pitfalls of commercialism and love being a bourgeois construct (it isn’t). By the time they break out West End Girls, It’s a Sin and the big cover tunes that sell their magnificent pop songwriting short, Tennant is in a silver rainbow jacket, multicoloured bubbles hang from the stage roof and Lulworth Castle has become English Heritage’s most rainbow-washed edifice.
Friday bill-toppers the xx don’t play ball, instead dealing in monochrome magic. With Oliver Sim swinging his bass like a Game of Thrones dragonslayer and Romy Croft coming within a fringe flick of rocking out, their formerly stillborn alt-soul has been brought to life by an emergency infusion of Balearic electronics. Once they were the house band at the sort of introverts’ disco where Morrissey might’ve been able to pull; now they conjure spectral dance music that manages to be both tempestuous and vulnerable. Loud Places and the superb On Hold are the euphoric dancefloor payoffs their tantric set of zero-gravity Adele songs always demanded. Though they tell us “we’re so excited to be here” as convincingly as David Davis claims he’s fully prepared for the next round of negotiations, the cheering rightly lasts an age.
Bestival’s Lulworth relaunch battles a deluge of vibe dampeners. Torrential rain slimes around the hilly new setting, Wiley and Justice cancel, and wind shuts down the entire site on Sunday afternoon. By far the most dominant costume onsite is the very convincing body-armoured policeman.
But Bestival parties on regardless, and the firing of the world’s largest confetti cannon on Saturday afternoon is the starting pistol on a new era of that grand Bestival tradition: getting munted with random Freddie Mercurys. Dizzee Rascal’s populist grime anthems send the crowd bonkers and, after-hours, the compact site creates a Khao San Road of themed clubbing areas. Glittery Neptunes, complete with tridents, slide and slither between neon 80s disco, a battleship rave, a woodland dub cinema and a hilltop Buddhist temple, chasing the strains of Despacito. Here, DJ Shadow is king with his geometric rap sampling and Charlotte Church is his queen, demanding she “fuck you like an animal” while covering Nine Inch Nails in her Late Night Pop Dungeon.
Bestival’s broadmindedness survives the sea crossing too. Laura Mvula’s space-age soul shows up Rag’n’Bone Man as the pointless throwback he is. A Tribe Called Quest’s farewell gig – full of moving tributes to late member Phife Dawg, who is present on backing track – is a hip-hop masterclass. Indie rock stages a fightback in the form of Jamie T, Twin Atlantic, Honeyblood’s ball-busting grunge and Circa Waves, whose Hawaiian-shirted indie has the crowd standing on each others shoulders despite the distinct lack of T-shirt weather.
And the boutique mindset? That lives on in the bloke going round making people wear 3D glasses that turn all the stage lights into love hearts. The Bestival spirit, it transpires, is stormproof.
