If
Bestival feels a little like the exceedingly bearable equivalent to the physically, mentally and emotionally crushing belligerence of Freshers Week only found in unshattered hopes and dreams, its rapidly maturing progeny,
Camp Bestival, presents the sort of kindergarten ambience you wish you'd crawled into aeons before traipsing off to campus-based, all-too-fluorescent post-adolescence. Geared towards the middle class family-centric masses yet with enough multimedia divertissement to enamour all ages, as you wake up to bedtime tales and slumber to the sound of uproarious teen inebriation, the fields encircling Lulworth Castle are as devoid of generational categorisation as the mythical Neverland islet. As if the Dorset bash were in need of further demarcation from competitors in the thematically similar, geographically different field in which it lolls, the aural delectation provided over the course of the weekend, whilst remaining a concomitant element of the Druidic estival festival experience, is anything but the exclusive focal point of jollity, as stunt men exaggeratedly jostle and joust in an elaborate sandpit adjacent to the entrance to a befuddling Wonderland-esque woodland comprised of dirtied shacks and numerous blanket weed-enshrouded ponds.
Similarly swampish is the toilet humour of a disappointingly abridged Shrek the Musical singsong in the pseudo-ironically entitled Little Big Top, whilst the spectacularly innovative animation of Tate and Aardman-backed creation The Itch of the Golden Nit is charmingly designed, if perhaps too colloquially scripted. However the tour de force of the festival's infant-orientated programme comes in the squeak-reliant rendition of Nessun Dorma, mounted by the unfathomably unworn and untorn Sweep of The Sooty Show in deferential tribute to the late Luciano Pavarotti.
Aimed at a somewhat more wise and weary demographic are Brit pop (denote crucial spacial segregation) troupe
Fenech-Soler, who tease a quite meagre mass with endearing, if insubstantial Fearne sodding Cotton-approved cuts from their eponymous debut LP of yesteryear. They unceremoniously hurl a merch stall's worth of white tees towards the teen rabble before airing a Demons entirely bereft of bass oomph, sparking a substantial dwindle in numbers. Of course they still sound indisputably analogous to a certain bunch of St Albans indie disco scamps currently respiring exclusively Hawaiian breezes although following recent trials and tribulations, unadulterated jubilation lingers in frontman Ben Duffy's return to the stage today. Both Lies and Stop And Stare sound like the distilled sound of turn-of-the-Millennium Capital FM squashed through tinny Ford Fiesta speakers and inexplicably, midway through 2011, midway through a Friday afternoon, that's by no means disparaging.
A paradigm of '80s electropop parody maybe although alongside fellow Sheffield discotheque catalysts The Human League, Martin Fry's
ABC ought to precipitate the sort of renaissance Tuscans revere, as All Of My Heart and The Look Of Love (Part 1) incite camp-as-Christopher Biggins euphoria, inducing the brand of carefree nostalgia that smacks of Dale's Sunkist skin tone and dulcet tones as the proletariat helplessly hurtle about his fictitious minimart. Many a Poison Arrow reconfigures its trajectory, piercing many a heart all over again, before
Blondie usher all into deeper profundities of the past.
The New Wave architects have sullied the blueprint and with it their live reputation somewhat of late with a number of
sprinting-through-the-motions, emotionless and largely motionless festival appearances although tonight, for reasons unbeknownst, there's an urgency underpinning the anthems as a gossamer-like backdrop entangles the Castle Stage. There's the customary smattering of new material from latest long-player Panic Of Girls, sure, but everything from the devastating duelling guitar/synth riffage of What I Heard to the stadium-consuming drivetime power rock of Mother bedazzles the constituents of all age brackets. Debbie Harry is resplendent in red, or tangerine, her glacial wail pristine as the seminal NYC outfit clatter through Rapture, Heart Of Glass, Call Me and a truly merciless One Way Or Another as if attempting to wriggle the scribbles free from the toilet walls of the now-defunct CBGB.
