In a crowded UK festival market, Bestival has marked out its niche particularly adroitly. This end-of-season hurrah is by far the best annual outdoor gathering for dance music fans, a status that it cannily capitalised on this year by adopting the theme of Desert Island Disco.
DJs receive the same prominence as bands and many of this year's 60,000 attendees, an impressive number of whom were in fancy dress, eschewed the main stages all weekend. Instead they congregated at the non-stop raves in the Bollywood field, where DJs Sven Väth, Derrick Carter and Annie Mac dropped tunes deep into the early hours.
The more dance-focused artists fared the best. Sam Smith's Friday afternoon set of blue-eyed soul tended towards the insipid, but he was more impactful a few hours later, lending his guest vocal to Disclosure's euphoric house. Outkast's fantastical future-funk was addictively compelling from start to finish.
Hearing the 74-year-old, asbestos-lunged Candi Staton belting out Young Hearts Run Free and You Got the Love in blazing Saturday afternoon sunshine was invigorating, but her shout-out for the venerable Alabama session men of Muscle Shoals was greeted with mass bafflement. James Blake knew his audience better, playing a nuanced set in his DJ guise of 1-800 Dinosaur.
Wild Beasts's pernickety art-rock and London Grammar's po-faced electro-pop both rather vanished up their own fundaments. However, Foals's twitchy headline set succeeded because it boasted the urgency and deliriousness of the best club music.
By Sunday afternoon, the party vibe was so established that even Clean Bandit's lightweight rave-pop sounded perfectly palatable, although the black-clad Sohn's tales of heartbreak over glitchy dubstep were more captivating. Both were more fun than Major Lazer's bludgeoning, subtle-as-a-brick air horn ragga.
Nile Rodgers is arguably the man who invented disco, but Chic's closing headline set was hard for him. Hours before the show, his guitar tech of 20 years, Terry Brauer, died at the band's hotel, and Rodgers sobbed as he paid tribute to his friend from the stage. Yet even in these tragic circumstances, Rodgers's celestial catalogue, from 1970s Chic nuggets such as Le Freak and Good Times, right through to Daft Punk's Get Lucky, was preposterously uplifting. As the world's largest disco ball shone above the field like a glam moon, it felt the perfect end to a festival reliably big both on style and substance.
