Scene Report📝Mr Motivator, McFly and A Massive Rave: Welcome to Camp Bestival

In between teaching guitar at the on-site Rock School, let's take a stroll through the Dorset festival site past the bubble machines and into the glitter-clad crowds

I Believe In A Thing Called Love: Camp Bestival’s Castle Stage field before the masses descended on site

“My son attended yesterday’s morning session,” the man opposite tells me, “and it’s been the highlight of his festival!” I’m standing in the slightly muddy fields of Camp Bestival after finishing my latest shift at the on-site Inclusic Rock School tent. The set up is simple; every hour, a new group of budding young musicians select a track from our songbook. Working with their tutors, they get to grips with their parts on their chosen instrument and then piece the whole thing together ready to perform to friends and family.

The gentleman before me works in Arts Education and he and his wife have been bowled over by the school’s inaugural appearance at the festival. Over the weekend, I work alongside the team to deliver over sixteen hours of Rock School performances on guitar and bass guitar. That’s over thirty next generation Joan Jett’s and Carole Kay¹’s unleashed into the world. As you know, I grew up in rural Norfolk so role models for my own indie leaning adventures were scant. Mr Cooper’s Thursday guitar lessons during junior school were the highlight of my week but it was a stretch for this Spanish-string playing older gent to really dig my Origin of Symmetry tab book.

Guitar Heroes: Inclusic Rock School tent at Camp Bestival

But the Rock School wasn’t the only thing going down at this year’s Dorset edition of the Rob Da Bank-founded festival. In fact, even though the festival insisted that this year’s “theme” was Intergalactic Aliens and Space, the weekend’s curation held a pretty impressive six degrees of separation for our headline acts, very much tapping into the noughties-era small screen stars. Think back to 2002 when TV talent shows like Pop Stars: The Rivals gave us Girls Aloud and then a decade later when The X Factor boasted their household voted winners, Little Mix, the first group to win the UK version of the show.

Here at Camp Bestival, our Saturday night headliner and bombastic soul singer Paloma Faith was a judge on The Voice UK in 2016 alongside fellow coaches Boy George, Ricky Wilson (of controversial COVID commenters Kaiser Chiefs-fame) and will.i.am, a man that surely needs no introduction. Faith returned to the panel in 2020 for The Voice Kids UK, reunited with will.i.am and welcoming our Friday night festival headliner McFly’s Danny Jones into the mix. Jones also won ITV’s The Masked Singer² earlier this year dressed up as a suited Piranha fish (naturally) performing enormous renditions of dear Celine Dion’s belter ballad ‘It’s All Coming Back To Me’ and Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since You Been Gone’. Even Saturday night sundown rockers The Darkness' Justin Hawkins appeared in the same show in Season 1 as a muscular Chameleon performing Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and Portugal The Man’s ‘Feel It Still’.

Obviously, it’s Danny Jones from McFly in the suited piranha fish outfit on ITV’s The Masked Singer

Not to mention bogie-touting scamps Dick and Dom’s Massive Rave (we only wandered by this post-Paloma) and the nation’s original fitness coach Mr Motivator who reassured the crowd that “movement is medicine even when you have your beer in your hand.” So strap in for a run down of some of this weekend’s biggest highlights, from our TV starlets to Nick Terrific and his Junior Jungle for little ravers, plaster on the body glitter and don your shiniest space suit for a free ride to Camp Bestival 2024.