A BEST FEST
DJ Rob da Bank brings his highly regarded Bestival music-and-art festival across the sea for a two-day run,
The U.K.’s highly regarded Bestival music-and-art festival uproots from its longtime home base on the Isle of Wight and plants a committed first foot across the Atlantic with a two-day run at Hanlan’s Point on the Toronto Islands this Friday and Saturday.
Some might think BBC Radio 1 DJ-turned-festival-impresario Rob da Bank — who started the everso-slightly “rave”-y Bestival with his wife, Josie, and a couple of like-minded promoter pals in 2004 — is hopelessly mad for following such high-profile international players as Chicago’s Riot Fest and the Tennessee-based Bonnaroo crew behind next month’s lavish WayHome fest at Burl’s Creek into a Toronto-area concert market already overrun this summer by homegrown spectacles such as North by Northeast, Field Trip, OVO, Digital Dreams, Veld and T.U.R.F. and the looming 35-day, Panamania behemoth.
But, as a relieved da Bank reported from Bestival’s first satellite site earlier this week, ticket sales currently stand around a strong 15,000 a day for an eclectic lineup that includes Florence and the Machine, Nas, Banks, Wavves, SBTRKT, Caribou and Jamie xx.
That’s not a bad initial foray into the Colonies, really, when one considers the original 2004 Bestival drew 7,000 en route to attracting the horde of 55,000 it now annually entertains overseas.
What possessed you to bring Bestival to Toronto at this particular, frenzied moment in time?
I’m asking myself that very question. We’ve been approached a lot of times over the last decade since we started Bestival by people from different countries interested in hosting a Bestival somewhere. And it’s been a long road of just kind of not feeling it was totally right until we landed in North America and drilled down gradually on different sites and then saw the Toronto Island site and really fell in love with it and thought: “Yeah, this definitely feels like somewhere Bestival could work.” We’ve had some great offers all over the world in different territories, but this one kind of sprang out as a great site in a cool city and just felt right. And it still does.
The island is a magical spot, I gotta say.
Oh, it’s fantastic. Amazing wildlife, a beautiful spot, the city as a backdrop. And I love boats and getting on the ferry to get here. So yeah, it’s a nice adventure. You leave the busy city behind and escape to the wild.
In keeping with Bestival’s island roots, too.
Exactly, yeah. We only do festivals on islands.
Surely you didn’t have “international expansion” in mind when you started this thing, though, eh?
We’d always thrown parties and did gigs and concerts until it gradually just got bigger and bigger and it kind of turned into a mini-festival, so we thought “Let’s just go for it and start our own festival.” It was never a big sort of game plan in the first place. It all kind of happened accidentally and it’s just grown from there. To be launching our first international festival 12 years on was never the plan, but I’m glad it turned out this way.
What was the impetus, then, to finally take Bestival abroad?
We’ve got a big staff — there’s like 20 or 25 people working year-’round on Bestival and our other Camp Bestival festival in the U.K. — and it just felt like we had the capacity to do an international festival. And, you know, we’ve got a pioneering spirit. We felt like we needed to expand, maybe. And now we’ve got the bit between our teeth we feel like that’s our plan. We’re not gonna go wild. We’re not gonna suddenly launch five new festivals around the world. But I think we are feeling kind of brave. It’s like the gold rush over here, really. Canada and Toronto, in particular, seem to have a lot of festivals going on at the moment. It feels like maybe a new dawn of festivals, so it’s good to be in there at the beginning.
But there’s so much competition out there right now. It must be insanely stressful.
Man, tell me about it. It keeps me awake at night. We’ve got four festivals now in the Bestival “family” and the first thing I do when I wake up is have a look at the ticket counts. It turns your hair grey worrying about it so I’m really pleased that Toronto is being so supportive.
So are you guys committed to doing this in Toronto over the long haul?
I hope so. You can’t really expect to be able to break even and work out financially the first year and we’re never driven financially, we’ve never done anything for money. But at the same time, we’ve sunk a lot investment into this with our partners, SFX and Embrace, and we’re all very firedup about it. So, yeah, it’s definitely gonna be a long-term plan and the city of Toronto and the authorities and everything have been really supportive so hopefully it’s all gonna go off without a hitch, it’s gonna be a lovely weekend and everyone’s gonna reflect on Monday and want us back. I definitely hope to be here for quite a few years.