As the first screaming horde of seven-year-olds clamber over each other to get onto the world’s biggest bouncy castle, kiddie Glastonbury 2025 is go: Mr Tumble your Billy Bragg, a late-night Dick and Dom rave your secret Daft Punk set and out-of-date Calpol your brown acid. Over its award-laden 17-year history, this bubble-drenched offshoot of Rob da Bank’s late, lamented Bestival blow-out – held annually in the grounds of Dorset’s Lulworth Castle – has earnt its reputation as the summer’s finest family-friendly festival. With its giant robot statues, woodland craft playgrounds and all-ages club seshes, it caters perfectly to party people of all sizes and dispositions, be they boggle-eyed in bucket hats or caked in glitter in a DIY tutu. Or, in the case of the many dads of girls onsite, both.
This year, a site-wide plethora of caravans – converted into discos, diners, cinemas and video arcades, often accompanied by nearby Party Portaloos – give the event a retro seaside holiday feel, and the weekend is typically big on the Beebies. For the under-fives present, the CBeebies Bedtime Story Tent pyjama party is their lost night down Shangri-La. Watching CBBC’s resident emo rock arena band Andy and the Odd Socks power through the hits – a song about a dinosaur football match; a reggae tribute to the brilliance of snails – is all their Oasis reunions come at once. The main stage bills are stacked with Horrible Histories, Taylor Swift tributes and, courtesy of the Isle of Wight’s Vote Pedro, frantic mariachi covers of “Tainted Love”, “Livin’ on a Prayer” and Nirvana’s “Lithium”. Here, you’re never more than 10 feet away from someone in a banana-patterned shirt giving a crowd of significant size their first exposure to Abba’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)”.
Yet there are also pan-generational offerings aplenty. In the Big Top, Everyone Says Hi – the new band from former Kaiser Chiefs drummer and songwriter Nick Hodgson – charm Friday’s Bluey socks off with their Byrds-like country folk crooning, Sixties bubblegum pop and the “world’s smallest light show”, a tiny glowing green box dazzling precisely no one. And on Sunday, Heartworms’ Jojo Orme, London’s rising Princess of Darkness, prowls Rings around the stage wearing the only black outfit you’ll see all weekend while howling gothtronic doom rock epics about magick and war… much to the distraction of those in the audience trying to practice their newly acquired circus skills. Pity the poor sequinned compere who has to step into her final thunderous hell-chord to announce “we’re just 20 minutes from Barrioke…”
On the main stage, meanwhile, The Lightning Seeds might drench their summery pop melodies in bittersweet angst, but songs like “Sugar Coated Iceberg”, “Lucky You” and the immaculate “Pure” could have been made to bond generations in the shadow of Lulworth Castle. And though “Valerie” authors The Zutons milk their Amy Winehouse connection dry by also having saxophonist Abi Harding sing “Back to Black”, their reunion after 10 years apart suffers no time-lag. Their devotion to Motown soul and retro Merseybeat defies eras just as much now as it did in 2003.
The headliners, too, are selected for maximum shoulder-tot appeal. To gather for Friday’s Sugababes set in 2025 feels a little like attending a rally to celebrate William Hartnell or the PS1, so many incarnations has the band been through since the Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhan Donaghy line-up began to crumble in 2001. But seemingly un-aged in the past two decades and still immaculate of vocal blend, the original trio have taken on the standing of a British Destiny’s Child of late, particularly since their overloaded – crowd-wise – set at Glastonbury 2024.
They open with that iconic seated performance of “Overload” and, even though they soon have to dig deep into the Heidi Range era for hits such as “Hole in the Head”, “Ugly” and “About You Now”, there’s very much the sense of peak ‘Babes about their resurgence. There’s a louche elegance to their minimalist routines – some casual but effective mic-stand work on a rousing “Round Round”, more perching on stools for an orchestral “Stronger” – that feels refreshing in this age of stadium pop maximalism. The harmonies clearly matter far more than any flying neon horseshoe.
Even when a technical glitch sends them off for five minutes, leaving one wag in the crowd unhelpfully shouting “Push the button!”, they brush it off with a refined cover of Lorde’s “What Was That” and pile onwards into a set as dedicated to honouring the gamut of Nineties styles as their smart pop catalogue. “Round Round” grows a techno interlude, “Freak Like Me” gothic industrial tendrils… and they flit easily between drum’n’bass, jungle, rock and party R&B. All of Bestival’s nostalgia buttons get pushed.
Saturday headliners Basement Jaxx are like Camp Bestival in microcosm. They arrive at the helm of a disco spaceship with a stardusted crew – bongo Valkyries, foil-swaddled soul divas, sci-fi rappers and gravity-defying dancers. In just over an hour, they unleash a space pop carnival packed with sprog-dazzling delights. A dancer clad as a giant, shimmering space orchid unfurls her stage-wide petals to a serene “Raindrops”; others wander around dressed as huge inflatable sea urchins or writhe around in laser bras. “Red Alert” and “Romeo” act as docking stations with the dance mainstream, and there’s an invasion of 2001: A Space Odyssey monkeys seemingly brought to a new level of rave consciousness by a monolithic “Where’s Your Head At”. No sign of the rumoured guest spot from Tumble’s tin sidekick Robert the Robot, but otherwise a blast (off).
Both acts consider the minimal attention span and unpredictable lavatorial needs of half of their audience, and keep their sets to a tight 75. Tom Jones surely knows a thing or two about parenting, too, having impregnated so many women simply by sweating in their general direction. Yet he challenges Sunday night’s main stage crowd to stay put through a full hour and 50 minutes, multiple Bob Dylan covers about mortality and all. Having opened with some wartime speeches from his birth year of 1940 – he’s 85, he’ll have you know – and a couple of songs about aging, death and the legacy we leave (Bobby Cole’s piano lament “I’m Growing Old”, Leonard Cohen’s poignant and poetic “Tower of Song”), he lets out a little chuckle during the first chorus of a seamy, junk blues “Sexbomb”. This is not, he realises as a stream of bubbles strafe the stage, his usual demographic.
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Like several of his Sixties peers – Cohen and Johnny Cash among them – this once strutting bellower has settled into the late-life role of sonorous elder statesman going ungently into that good night. “It’s nice to have a little sing-song,” he says after a samba “It’s Not Unusual” and a sway-along “What’s New Pussycat?”, but much of the rest of the set is of a far graver hue. He turns “The Windmills of Your Mind” into a tortured whirl and drenches “I Won’t Crumble with You If You Fall” in ambient gloom. Terry Callier’s “Lazarus Man” is delivered as a glowering electro-blues, and he declares “this song just about sums it all up for me” of Katell Keineg’s “One Hell of a Life”, singing: “When I’m dead, please don’t philosophise… I had one hell of a life”.
His voice is un-withered though, carrying Prince’s “Kiss” and a fervent flamenco “Delilah” with hearty aplomb, and he’s still capable of striking moments. Most notably on Todd Snider’s psych-rock “Talking Reality Television Blues”, tracing the degrading influence of TV from the moon landings to Trump with an intellectual clarity that Dylan himself would be proud of.
The castle lights up with fireworks, then it’s beddie-byes for another year. Camp Bestival is never going to rival the Glastonburys and Coachellas in terms of big-hitter headliners or momentous spectacle, but what it does it does perfectly – a weekend of full-family fun times that packs significantly more punch per school-holiday pound than Centergouge. In the name of shameless media nepotism, festival veteran Adeline Beaumont, aged seven, insists on giving the “best festival ever” five stars and seven wags of her rainbow tail. It’s inadvisable to argue with her.
