The Secret Garden Party – The Beat Surrender
Hardly boasting the best festival line-up this year but with a party buzz to compete with the likes of Glastonbury, The Secret Garden Party near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, has a reputation that precedes it. Last year’s winner of ‘Best Small Festival’ is an event created by love and a killer attention to detail.
Not many events around can boast a Tower of Babel as its centrepiece, with the two tribes of Edenites and Babylonians running around in a plethora of fancy dress costumes, but sold-out event The Secret Garden party can, and pulls it off magnificently.
As The Beat Surrender rocked up to the green gates and hiked our way through a cornfield in order to locate Camp Beat (or Camp Surrender?) for the weekend, the heavens opened. This, and a momentary scatterbrained-approach to tent construction, left us with soggy accommodation and a good reason to plan the weekend’s music and numerous events. 
Walking through the festival arena was like musing through some kind of ethereal wonderland. Whimsical fairy lights hung from trees, contrasting with bizarre and bordering-on-disturbing art installations, nooks and crannies had surprises in store – a musical Badger statue, a 30-person Twister board, a hoola-hooping contest, and a Dave-off. The epicentre of the festival was a picturesque lake lit by bulbs, home to a floating dancefloor that saw a line-up of party-starting DJs take to the decks.
On Friday night, Phoenix rocked the socks off the eager audience as the sun began to set, despite being amongst the many artists who had their set plagued by poor sound over the weekend. The nice Parisian boys there are, they continued without complaining too much, and had the crowd dancing and singing as the festival spirit drew everyone in – particularly the guy handing out fruit shortcake biscuits to everyone.
Jarvis Cocker unfortunately was a bit of a letdown. Being of the Pulp generation, we were keen to witness Cocker’s lanky swagger first-hand. There was a lot of swaggering, but unfortunately not much gelling with the crowd. Shame.
The great thing about The Secret Garden Party is that it’s not just about the music. The best parts seem to be the ones that you come across by accident. Exploring one of the many, many tents at this award-winning boutique festival, we came across a small outdoor arena resembling a coliseum of hay bales. Revellers chanting from all sides, there was a gladiator competition going on (of which one of us entered and won, not before it was interrupted by an impromptu dance-off). To keep one’s brain ticking over, walk-in ‘camps’ such as Conspiracy Camp show conspiracy theory videos, or Guerilla Science with university lecturers talk about some really hip stuff.
Not one to conform to any typical kind of stage arrangement, The Secret Garden Party continued to suprise as we came upon The Manjinga 7 dangling from a tree, playing their funky stuff whilst twirling from harnesses in the warm sun. Later on, we caught the magnificent and charismatic VV Brown for a string of recent hits and a cover of The Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’.
On Saturday night, everyone gathered on the lakeside grassy banks to watch as the Tower of Babel in the lake was majestically set on fire in the lake to everyone’s hearty cheers. Later, headliners Rodrigo Y Gabriela were heading up the main stage, but there were rumours of a secret gig in a smaller tent after a handwritten message on the listings board set tongues wagging. Unsure whether this was someone’s prank or not, we rocked up at the Where The Wild Things Are tent anyway, to be greeted by cheeky unexpected guests The Kooks who played a mediocre set. After that, we checked out Evil Nine which were rocking out and stumbled across a comedy polka band at The Feast of Fools, a small hay-strewn stage serving strong mead.
Sunday saw us begin the overcast morning with the obligatory coffee and bacon sandwiches before going to see the magical Alessi’s Ark cast her spells over the hungover crowd. Instructions on the contrived festival flyers instructed us to exchange gifts with others at 2pm but it was clear that this rule was ignored!
Later on, we caught Au Revoir Simone who attracted quite the audience, and part of Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac fame who had his guitarist talk the set whilst he sat there uncommunicative. As the rain came down, we escaped to Alessi’s solo set in The Living Room – a space dedicated to sofas, cake and tea. Later on, a live set from Zero 7 had the tent overflowing with festivallers keen to pack in their last bands of the weekend, those who didn’t make it in the tent were left out in the drizzle.
As festivals go, the toilets are worth a mention for their cleanliness throughout the day, although we were quite disgruntled about having to pay for showers – no matter how ‘eco’ they are, a girl’s gotta wash! If you’re expecting a stellar line-up of chart-breaking bands, forget about The Secret Garden Party.  This party is about exploration: silly outfits, silly games, giving beer to randoms, and discovering artists you ‘like the name of’.

8/10