Bestival

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The Bestival is a music festival on the Isle of Wight. It is held annually in late summer since 2004 in a small country park called 'Robin Hill'. The event is organised by Rob da Bank and is an off-shoot of his Sunday Best record label and club nights. The Isle of Wight was chosen for many reasons as the site of the Bestival primarily due to its outstanding natural beauty and the fact that the Isle of Wight has more carnivals per capita than anywhere else in the country.

It is the smaller of the two festivals recently started on the Island. It is more alternative than the (Nokia) Isle of Wight Festival, offering a large selection of vegetarian foods; a dressing up tent and 'secret stages'. 2005 saw the attempt to set the Guinness World Record for most people in fancy dress at any one event. There was no previous record.

It was voted the Best (Medium-sized) Festival and the Most Innovative Festival at the 2005 UK Festival Awards.

1 2006 Festival
2 2006 Controversy
3 Line ups
4 External links

[edit] 2006 Festival

Triumphantly dubbed by organisers Sunday Best as, 'the festival of the year (because Glastonbury was not on this year)', this is a typical quote which encapsulates the ambition and humour that both organisers and festival goers give to the annual Bestival. However the claim had a greater foundation than most would imagine as a crowd of 15,000 were treated to a 3 day frenzy of Boutique festival madness which has quite rightly been dubbed the mini-Glastonbury.

Some of the most notable performances were produced by the Scissor Sisters, The Stranglers, Gogol Bordello, FAT Samba and Youngblood Brass Band.

The Scissor Sisters widely recognised as the best act of the weekend were inspirational using dry ice, strobe lighting, paper streamers and shooting various stage items onto the crowd to impress the crowd into submission. Witty conversation, Fantastic showmanship and a euphoric audience reception were some of the ingredients of the dish of the day. The Stranglers drew upon their back catalogue and a large audience all singing to the tunes of Golden Brown and Peaches amongst others. Fat Samba drew on a large, excited crowd as they lead the fancy dress parade, tight drumming and eccentric costumes helped to win over the crowd. Gogol Bordello were an unknown quantity initially but after their set it became clear they were an eccentric, innovative and colossal quantity of music talent, lead singer Eugene Hutz was particularly entertaining, reminiscent of Freddie Mercury in his prime. Youngblood Brass Band dazed the crowd with their no nonsense, get on stage and perform attitude. The unusual miz of trombones, trumpets, drummers, a tuba player and a rapper/snare drummer, the band performed an energetic set got the crowd jumping and dancing.

[edit] 2006 Controversy

Following on from 2005's dressing attempt, the organisers of the festival decided to make this year's theme the circus and to have everyone dressed as clowns. On 8th July 2006, it was announced that this had been scrapped as festival-goers asked for refunds as they were scared of clowns.

The Scissor Sisters quite blatantly went out to court this controversy, opening their set dressed in clown costumes, in response to complaints of Coulrophobia by some festival goers. Ana Matronic unconvincingly claimed that she failed to read the memo stating that she didn't know clowns were banned, this was followed by her trying to protest that clowns were nice people with "blood" spewing out of her mouth. They put the icing on the cake by finishing their set accompanied by six stilted clowns.