I just got back from a thoroughly enjoyable weekend at Bestival, on the Isle of Wight.
We played on Friday on the BBC stage, at the same time as the Chemical Brothers but there still seemed to be quite a few people there and we had a lovely time playing. Everyone else headed off after the show except for Ochi and I who decided to stay at the last minute.

The festival site itself was the perfect setting, in an adventure park with loads of fun things to do… my favourite was going on the tobbogan during Billy Bragg’s set. There were some really cute chipmonks, lots of peacocks and also a duck that looked just like Mia, stamping its foot and shaking its head like she does when she plays guitar. The food stalls were great too, which makes all the difference at a festival. The artist’s camping with proper toilets, clean hot showers and a neverending supply of tea was also pretty good and actually the lack of free alcohol was probably a very good thing (the only alcohol we got was a warm can of Carling halfway through our set…mmm…) because it meant that drinking was limited to when we could be bothered to go and queue up at the bar.

The absolutely best thing about Bestival is the fancy dress. We spent a lot of time sitting on the grass looking at people’s costumes. It was a pirate theme this year but most people seemed to be dressed as animals and insects. My favourite costume was a man wearing an old woman’s legs, with an old woman’s top half sticking out at the front, then his top half was dressed as a baby with baby legs sticking out from his back. It took me a long time to work out what it was meant to be and it looked very odd indeed. There were also lots of people who had clearly taken far too many drugs when they went to the costume shop and were dressed as several different things at once… like the transgendered-bee-horse-pirate. There were also a lot of people dressed as hippies although I’m not sure if they were costumes.

The best bands of the weekend were the Gossip and the Early Years. Also really great were It Hugs Back on the bandstand (go and buy their single!), Foals, Patrick Wolf, Architecture in Helsinki, Mice Parade and Bat for Lashes. We went to see Kate Nash but only so we could get to the front for the Gossip. She was (marginally) better than I thought she would be but her fans are terrifying – we were surrounded by a large group of 11-year-old children (some of them still had their milk teeth!) doing poppers. I wanted to confiscate it, or tell them that they should at least wait till they got some GCSE’s before killing all of their brain cells but I was really scared that they would beat the crap out of me (they looked really hard). Then one of them, who had some kind of fake boob thing going on and was all over a boy whose voice hadn’t broken yet, spilled the entire bottle on herself… I started to feel quite pleasantly light-headed, people were throwing lemons at Kate Nash (in a nice way, because that's what she was singing about) and it all seemed quite funny for about 5 minutes. Luckily the children left after she played. The Gossip were brilliant, as usual… although I got in a fight with a drunk Primal Scream fan…

We hung out with the lovely Early Years all weekend, they gave us a lift back to London… on the way to the ferry we stopped in a small town to have lunch on the beach. I overheard some people laughing about how fat Beth Ditto was (as if that in itself is really funny) then when I looked over, lo and behold it was Mr. drunk-Primal-Scream-fan who had tried to punch me the night before! The world is a small place. I spent about £2 in 2p machines on the pier, sustained a minor dodgems injury, ate some ice-cream and dipped my toes in the sea before heading back. I was quite sad to get back home to a load of pressing responsibilities but I’m easing myself back to normality by playing a gig tonight, then going to see Verity (as Vera November) with It Hugs Back on Thursday (at the Buffalo bar in Islington) and the Gossip on Friday. It’s nice to have a break and recover before our European tour.

If you want to see what the European festival tour looked like then go and see the photos on Emma’s previous post