Bestival 2010

As the final hurrah of the festival season, it’s always a treat to peruse the Bestival line up and see that no one, least of all Mr Da Bank, is taking it lightly. 2010 makes no exception to this rule, where The XX, Echo and the Bunnymen, Skream and The Prodigy all help wave farewell to the summer, among a host of others.

Thanks to a fantasy-themed fancy dress code this year, we’re surrounded by unicorns and inflatable women – and somewhere amidst them all, Gil Scott-Heron is kicking us off, by delivering soul by the bucket-load and a solemn ’I’ll Take Care of You’. Meanwhile Giggs’ is decidedly less sentimental; the south Londoner plays under what looks like a giant mechanical spider.

The twilight belongs to The XX, whose first post-Mercury gig swells out of the Big Top with a scattering of strobes as the familiar ’Intro’ ramps up the bass.

Whoever decided to put Hot Chip on before Dizzee Rascal must have had only one intention: to make everyone dance like it’s 1999 (or thereabouts). As Alexis and co whip out vocally perfect and percussively energetic versions of ‘I Feel Better, it’s clear they’re more than capable of a headlining of their own. The band plump up the cushions suitably for ‘Bonkers’.

Having said that, we’ve escaped to watch a mental woman in a silver cape shout along to the bassoon as Chrome Hoof; variety being the key to Bestival.

There’s only one headliner worth discussing from Saturday: Flaming ‘motherfucking’ Lips. With Wayne Coyne intent on getting us ultra hyped, his tradition of zorbing into the crowd didn’t go amiss. With the ear-shredding ’She Don’t Use Jelly’ followed by ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’, it feels like the band had found a spiritual home. Finally, a million pieces of confetti are canon-propelled into the crowd to lift the set closer ‘Do You Realize??’ from a drunken sing-along into something much more monolithic.

Instead of taking the show up a notch, The Prodigy seem hell bent on blasting us into rave submission. Fortunately, there are the much more tuneful delights ofCaribou to attend to, albeit with ‘Jamelia’ suffering from a slightly quashed sound.

The magic of Sunday is left until late in the day, with a stunning and frankly bizarre set from Fever Ray. The stage had been littered with a dozen or so lamps, a monsoon’s worth of fake cloud, and finally topped off with a hardly visible Karen Dreijer Andersson in full fancy dress. Irking out of the darkness, lines of green lasers stretch and separate like claws, while the hypnotic tendencies of ‘When I Grow Up’ and ‘Concrete Walls’ have us rooted to the spot. Absolutely mesmerising.

The Big Top closes on a high, if a little odd, note with LCD Soundsystem, whose James Murphy throws himself into the set, closing the mighty ‘Losing My Edge’.