Playgroup Festival, Eridge Park, Kent 5-7 August 2011

Playgroup 2011 came close to disaster mere minutes after it officially opened. We wouldn’t have known this, had we not previously been summoned to the scene of the near-disaster by a cheerful, bounding member of International Diamond Thieves, the band involved in the incident – an example of uncynical bonhomie that turns out to typify what makes Playgroup great. Having been told to lose our minds – “and your underwear” – by a festival compere in the Burrow tent, IDT’s drummer duly removed his T-shirt and chucked it behind him with a flourish.

The faint smell of burning was quickly augmented by what can only be described as The Wrong Kind Of Smoke, as said vestment was ignited by the already boiling stage lighting. That it was two audience members who rushed onto the stage, grabbed the smouldering tee, and spent the next couple of songs dancing on it to put it out, is testament to Playgroup’s admirable and incredibly infectious “dig in, get involved, make friends and be nice” ethos.

It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that the have-a-go heroines are both sporting tails – and not the kind one might wear to the races; to say the Playgroup festival encourages fancy dress is an understatement. This year’s theme is “woodland creatures”, as evidenced by the already majestically rural festival site’s bucolic décor and stage/area names (the aforementioned Burrow, the main Hive stage, the Trust the Fox dance tent, the Howlin’ Owl bar, the Badger’s Den cinema etc).

Each ticket holder has been assigned one of eight animals to embody for the weekend, and various events are organised to involve all of them. Within an hour of arriving, we’ve already been called upon to represent our chosen animal, the badger, in a surprisingly well organised and dangerously competitive game of human hoop-la in the straw bale-surrounded sports arena. It swiftly emerges that people genuinely seem to be doing their best to adopt what they perceive to be their chosen beast’s character traits: foxes act sly, mice elusive, owls wise, wasps anti-social and so on.

It sounds ridiculous, and rest assured, it is. For sure, if you’re the kind of person for whom a festival is “all about the music, bro”, and think there’s something “a bit wrong” about grown-ups dressing up, Playgroup may not be the place for you. But in a post-Bestival world – not to mention Secret Garden Party, at which the Brighton-based Playgroup collective curate their own area – fancy dress has simply become part of the modern festival lexicon, and we’ve never seen it embraced with such home-made creative abandon.

The music! Oh yes, the music. Tiny though it is – you can cross the whole festival site on foot in five minutes – Playgroup boasts so much going on in its countless corners, it’s almost possible not to notice there are loads of bands on. Or at least it would be, if half the acts didn’t just wander around, playing (and picking up impromptu extra band members) as they go. It feels like there’s a lot of salsa, samba and sundry Spanish-sourced stuff at Playgroup, a fact that might be off-putting were it not a sunny weekend and our first experience of the festival.

Personal highlights on the otherwise very Brighton-centric bill include Benji Boko’s brain-fryingly danceable party set late on Friday night; rockin’ soul revivalists King Salami & the Cumberland Three encouraging some serious grooving early on Saturday evening, inexplicable double-drumming genii AK/DK’s Saturday headline-ish slot; perfectly pitched pastoral cut-up beats and soothing digi-folk from Grasscut on a supremely hung-over, sunny Sunday lunchtime; and the incomparable, jaw-floor interface-inducing dance-till-you-drop spectacle that is The Correspondents lighting up the Hive stage on Sunday evening.

But as mentioned, Playgroup is about so much more than just lounging about watching other people do the work that one feels a bit… lazy after sitting still for too long. The itchy feeling that we could and should be doing something returns quickly and sure enough there’s plenty to do. We’re gutted not to have got around to taking part in a Be Kind, Rewind-style re-creation of an ‘80s movie in the Videopia truck – although we observed with much amusement as two sets of punters had a go at Back to the Future.

At least we mucked in at Stick It On’s Silent Disco collaboration in the wee small hours of Saturday morning, blasting out Jane’s Addiction, Diana Ross and the Beastie Boys to an amusingly quiet headphone-wearing groover-filled tent that had spent the previous day housing the festival’s toddlers. Oh, and on Saturday evening we found ourselves surrounded by a veritable cacophony of instruments, toy and grown-up, as musical saw ensemble Sawchestra oversaw a live soundtracking of a German animated film from 1925. Truly, nothing’s too odd to be featured at Playgroup, as long as it’s inclusive and entertaining.

And when the fun stops? It’s frankly passé to moan about overflowing festival toilets in 2011, but that’s because the majority of festivals have addressed the issue; Playgroup deserve a little slack, this being only the festival’s second year, but the loos were both relatively scarce and unusable by midnight on Friday (this situation was significantly improved on the following days). And one member of the bar staff’s pointed comment that “nothing at the festival is recycled” seemed to jar violently with the Playgroup collective’s otherwise resoundingly world-hugging, hippyish intentions and execution.

Of course, all you need is one bus-load of trouble-making scumbags and the whole festival, mercifully low on strong-arming security staff, would collapse in on itself, but that shouldn’t concern the Playgroupers just yet. Temporarily overflowing bogs and sundry (but very important) green issues are easily solvable problems, and Playgroup 2011’s greatest victory was to combine an irresistible sense of innocent mischief with a genuine feeling that if you don’t like what you see, getting off your lazy arse and doing it yourself – wearing a big grin and a home-made costume – is the way forward.

It may have lacked big-name artists, but to whinge about that is to miss the point of the event; as mentioned in our preview, the Playgroup collective’s stated ultimate aim is 100% participation – and we saw grannies and toddlers and all points betwixt – Brighton crusties, young parents, Dalston trendies, student types, clubbers and newly liberated empty-nesters – gleefully nudging them closer to that goal in Eridge Park.