DJ Format and Quantic join Playgroup 2011 festival bill

Think The Big Chill’s lost its maverick edge in recent years? Worried Secret Garden Party’s too full of K-addled Jaspers and Binkys for your taste? Too old for the Skins-fest that is Underage, but too young to join the mums, dads & toddlers at LolliBop? If so, we might have found just the festival for you – and the line-up keeps getting more interesting.

Devoting as much time and space to theatre, cabaret, magic and good old-fashioned dressing up as to music, Playgroup is a festival that takes several leaves out of several books and adds a bewildering bundle of its own as well. And the Brighton-based Playgroup collective organising the, er, Tunbridge Wells-based festival, taking place Fri 5-Sun 7 August in Eridge Park, aren’t skimping on the tune-based thrills either.

Two new additions to the bill have just been announced. DJ Format aka Matt Ford is well known to many as a prime deliverer of crunchy hip-hop, soul and funk – with the all-important grin-inducing element that puts him up there with Mr Scruff when it comes to bringing the party. And Tru Thoughts signing Quantic will be bringing his Combo Barbaro to Playgroup, a rare UK outing for the riotous Latin folk/Cuban funk ensemble. We can’t bloody wait.

The pleasingly eclectic range of already announced names includes Ninja Tune glitch-folkers Grasscut, loopy swing-hop pioneers The Correspondents, skwee denizen Boss Kite and country powerhouse Holy Vessels. You want more than music? OK, try out cabaret collective The Immaculate Extremists, guerrilla gardener Josie Pearl Jeffrey, steampunk noise-making machine The Perhaps Contraption and Brighton Science Festival founder Richard Robinson.

If Playgroup sounds at times like a demented school fete drenched in Bloody Mary and dressed as a squirrel – this year’s fancy-dress theme is “woodland creatures” – that’s because it will invariably seem like that at various points. The festival’s (benignly threatening) self-professed aim is “100% participation”, so if your idea of a fun festival experience involves watching, not mucking in, it might not be the place for you. But for the rest of us, we’re off to make some whiskers out of pipe cleaners.

A few tickets to Playgroup 2011 are still available at Playgroupfestival.com/tickets, priced £77.