Bestival Proved Just How Much DJs and Electronic Artists Are Changing the Face of British Music Festivals

In the UK's ever growing calendar of big summer festivals, Bestival has become something of a closing chapter. Positioned on the second weekend of September, it essentially falls at the latest point in the year that could be discernibly referred to as summer. The weather is just about to turn to shit, schools and universities are about to roll back into action, and most people's tents have got about one viable use left in them.

Luckily Bestival is more than equipped to live up to this unofficial closing party status, perfectly pitched as it is somewhere between the artisan communality of Glastonbury and the Foster's-box-for-a-hat culture of Reading. It's got a beautiful site, a discerningly picked line-up, but is also a more than accommodating environment for spending a weekend off your head listening to repetitive rhythms. For many people, it closes every summer with a sort of picturesque hedonism, the final night spent surrounded by woodland and bizarrely sculpted stages, fireworks plunging down over grinning faces, all now reluctantly ready to slope back onto a ferry, and back to autumnal reality.

Coming at the end of the summer inevitably means Bestival provides a chance to reflect on the whole season of festivals, and how they have changed in comparison to previous years, and our time on the Isle of Wight brought one shift in particular to our attention. During the whole four days of music, partying with a pretty large group of people — made up of different ages and varying musical tastes — I saw a grand total of one band. Naturally writing for THUMP I'm basically contractually obliged to spend my weekends watching DJs, but this wasn't just my call. The whole festival seemed completely centered around electronic acts and selectors, from the over-spilling Big Top greeting Jamie xx's opening night appearance, to the Chemical Brothers pulling a cross-generational crowd during their headline slot on the Saturday night. One thing was made very clear by the Bestival 2015. It is now completely plausible to go to an ostensibly populist festival and only watch electronic artists and DJs.

This isn't something that has happened over night; the landscape of music festivals has always been in a state of constant evolution. Paul Oakenfold's appearance at Glastonbury in 1995, or Daft Punk's headline set at Coachella in 2006 stand out as emblematic 'moments' where DJs were considered main stage material, yet the point we have now reached is less of viable consideration and more complete domination. Bestival doesn't market itself as a dance music festival, offering instead a wide range of "mind expanding music", but glance at the line up poster on Bestival's website and strikingly (depending on where you place FKA Twigs) over half of the top ten lines of acts are DJs or electronic musicians. If we take the line ups of popular festivals as a relatively sound reading of what is critically and commercially popular in the UK, then DJs and producers are surely enjoying their furthest reach in recent memory.

It's not just statistical though. The sets themselves this weekend were testament to just how healthy the relationship between dance music and big summer festivals is on creative terms. DJs are tailoring sets to this environment in nuanced but devastatingly effective ways. Four Tet is a prime example. Despite recently releasing Morning/Evening, a record best described as an in depth graceful exercise in Bollywood sampling and shifting melodies, his DJ sets have comparatively bounced between sparkling intelligent house, driving techno, grime instrumentals and UK garage. His appearance on Bestival's Port stage was no different. This isn't to say he is mindlessly crowd pleasing, rather his Bestival DJ set offered the idiosyncrasies of his personality as a producer and a DJ, on terms that encompassed fair-weather fans and dedicated followers. The same can be said for Hudson Mohawke, who has enjoyed a festival season balancing both a new live show to accompany the release of his second album Lantern as well playing numerous DJ slots. Bestival saw him take on two DJ sets on Saturday, the second of which, on the Temple Island stage, was an unimaginably glorious celebration of seemingly every sound that has influenced his career, and a few he's influenced himself.

Some scenes at Bestival simply echoed the palpably spreading recognition that is being afforded to DJs on the festival circuit. At the start of the weekend Greg Wilson, a veteran DJ and the first to ever mix on live television, played a set of jacked up disco edits to a crowd with an average age of probably 22. Then on the closing night Ben UFO and Joy Orbison's back to back saw the Bollywood tent flooding so far over with people many were forced to vaguely fist pump in the rain outside. The weekend felt like a crystallisation of the powerful influence dance music's rise in popularity has had on the festival landscape. "Popularity" is a loaded word, especially when referring to DJs and club music, but refreshingly this isn't a statement on anybody, or anything compromising or selling out. Rather, British festivals, more than ever, are booking more great DJs and affording them the stages and time slots they deserve. From Daniel Avery's taut and winding back to back with Erol Alkan, all the way through to Annie Mac's main stage slot of elephantine proportions, Bestival was a celebration of selection in all forms.

Even beyond traditional DJs, electronic artists and producers are at the top of their games in terms of providing a festival show, and have never felt more at home. Trance icons Underworld were welcomed by a thronging late night crowd blasting open arms and every word into the furthest reaches of the Big Top. FKA Twigs (all too often given the lazy vague alternative R&B label) once again combined bold imaginings of her album's synthetic groves with her genuinely magnetic choreography. Even Dean Blunt, an artist we'd have trouble pinning to any genre electronic or otherwise, put on a show that blended trippy loops with his own brand of unbearably claustrophobic psychedelia.

It's worth noting that Bestival was founded by a DJ. Rob da Bank will naturally have an inherent appreciation for booking great DJs, something he has made very clear by his other ventures, such as LEAF which we headed to earlier this year. But LEAF, like Bloc, Found, Farr, or Boomtown, is a specialist dance music event. Bestival is not — yet the majority of the lineup is now geared in this direction. It's a pattern visible all over. Reading and Leeds, traditionally rock festivals, have had dance tents since 2011 — even if they're not entirely sure who Evian Christ is. Glastonbury, which has always had a good legacy of electronic artists, has seen a massive increase in DJ bookings. It's not a completely fool-proof measure, but as a small indication, the word 'DJ' appeared on the 2010 Glastonbury lineup approximately 30 times, whereas it appeared on 2015's over 150.

All told, there's never been a better time to go to a big music festival as a fan of house, techno, dub, bass, or any other electronic genre. DJs are being given more prestige than ever before, and nowhere was this truer of than Bestival. From underground to chart topping, the bill bounced from the likes of Andrew Weatherall to Skrillex, Mala to David Zowie, all pulling full and fanatical crowds.

For now at least, we are enjoying a sweet spot where typically underground sounds are being celebrated on larger platforms alongside their 'mainstream' counterparts. Bestival was this all over, an unflinching celebration of the bizarre, brilliant, and many-faced nature of partying in 2015.

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