BYT: Little People

AUGUST 2010

Little People

‘Little people. Little people. Everywhere.

‘That was my first impression of Camp Bestival. There was also quite a lot of screaming, and not of the crowd loving a good band kind. More the ‘I’m teething waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah’ kind. Still, I’m a big kid at heart. I figured I’d survive as a childless punter at a child-friendly festival. I pictured balloon animals and top notch fancy dress.  I was not let down.’

I went to Camp Bestival in my ‘Top Music Journalist’ role at the weekend.

You can read my review about it over on Artrocker.tv … word count was teeny tiny so here are some other observations…

*Little people wake up early. This is worth remembering if you go to bed late AKA early, the kind of early that is perhaps a few minutes before those little people are up screaming, and playing tag around your tent. Loudly. I’d suggest stealing a pair of those brightly coloured kids’ headphones that you see on the children sprawled out practically unconscious by the mainstage speakers of an evening. They seem to work well at drowning out all noise. I failed to do that so got up early too. So early that the shower queue was only 2 hours long.

*Scroobius Pip doing his spoken word stuff without dan le sac is AMAZING. I had a nice chat with him after his packed out Lit Tent set and let him keep my pen for all the signings that were demanded of him. Proper good.

*Ellie Goulding: Besides the fact that she sings in that ‘allwordsrunintoone’ way that annoys the crap out of me, the fact that her trousers are badly ill-fitting distracts me too much. I walk away.
*These are some of the creatures I saw at Animal Farm: peacocks and hens and roosters and bunny rabbits and goats and ponies and pigs and birds that look a bit like emus, but aren’t emus. My favourite was Oscar the Rabbit. He looked fierce.

I’m performing in London Town this weekend at my pal’s fundraiser in Chalk Farm. There’s loads of top acts, music, fancy dress and fun and frolics. Come along