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Bestival
Rocks!
Bestival, the award-winning 3-day
boutique music festival set at Robin
Hill, is 5 years old. The event was born
out of BBC Radio 1 DJ Rob da Bank's
vision of how a modern-day music
festival should be. Rob, his partner and
Creative Director Josie da Bank, along
with co-founders Ziggy and John Hughes
from Get Involved, have realized this
vision by staging eclectic musical line-ups
in a unique boutique campsite setting,
spreading some magic across the Solent in
the process.
Ziggy had good reason to feel the
love when Island Life spoke to her. The
Island event had long since sold out,
and the Bestival team were doing a tidy
business on tickets for the festival’s new
offshoot, Camp Bestival, held in Dorset.
We asked Ziggy what first attracted the
Bestival team to the Island. “We’ve all
got connections”, she said. “Rob da Bank
grew up in Southampton and he spent a
lot of time there as a kid. And my parents
live in Bembridge, so it’s a place that we
36
all know and love.”
The Bestival reputation just keeps getting
stronger, and the event has won a straight
hat-trick of awards for best medium-sized
festival at the UK Festival Awards. Ziggy
reckons the Island location has a big part
to play in this success. “What we have
tried to create with Bestival is a feeling
of escapism. I think that the Bestival acts
as well as the audience really feel this
when they step on the ferry,” she said. The
event’s website hints of the venue’s earthly
Island pleasures for jaded and stressed-out
overners, with Robin Hill described as “a
veritable Garden of Eden!”
Perhaps the flagship event at Bestival is
the Saturday fancy dress parade, which is
particularly popular with Bestival’s many
family attendees. Ziggy talks fondly about
the strong Island connections that inspired
last year’s dressing up. “Rob wrote a
poem about the Island and we used that
as the basis for the fancy dress theme,
encouraging the crowd to come as Island
inhabitants such as kings and wizards.”
www.wightfrog.com/islandlife