It’s ironic that the golden rule of capitalism is at work in something as historically left-of-centre as festivals. This summer the power of the market is separating the wheat from the chaff in festival-land.

The beauty of it is, that whilst money may be able to book a big headliner,  it requires imagination to create a festival that fills a gap in the market. Sure, the results might not always be nice (the unwelcome rumours that the marvellous Truck Festival may be bust for instance) but it’s sure to guarantee that no-one’s complacent.

Camp Bestival was started as a more family-friendly version of Bestival. As the popularity of taking kids to festivals has grown, so has this (now medium sized) festival. The Sunday Best lot know their audience and they have enough confidence in their own instincts that they don’t feel the need to schedule the acts in order of record sales. An obvious example is the headliner on Friday night. Other festivals might relegate Blondie to a tent, and stick the flavour of the year on the main stage, but Sunday Best know their audience. Obvious really since the man in charge is a DJ (Rob Da Bank) and therefore has an intuitive grasp of what the next tune should be.

The audience are mainly grown-ups with small children so the audience find themselves watching Primal Scream on the same stage as Zingzillas had been on seven hours earlier.

As well as a smart line-up, there’s the detail. Everywhere you turn there’s something else to gawp at or examine which makes the place feel twice as big.

The upside to the family focus is that it’s very safe and there’s distractions in every direction. The downside is that having hundreds of families on site is that they are essentially hundreds of self-contained units. They’re harmless, polite and friendly but can be a bit insular. They’ve planned everything, but at festivals, being a bit unprepared gives you a great excuse to talk to strangers. Anyone can have fun there but the people getting the most out of it were parents enjoying the chance to party with their children present and then, once the parents are in bed, teenagers enjoying the chance to finally party without them present.

Who did we see? Well here’s some one-sentence reviews…

Blondie reminded everyone how much they loved Blondie. Ed Sheeran seems to have become a teen idol for people who think Frank Turner’s too old. Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer is still making knees bend and lips giggle with his ‘chap-hop’. House of Pain have turned into a funk band with rapping and damn it, it works! Ms Dynamite has made the standard (but successful) move towards dubstep, but needs to be aware that having recorded backing vocals is where live hip-hop is in danger of becoming karaoke. Primal Scream are pure nostalgia- Screamadelica may sound of it’s time but it was a time that the audience are getting to enjoy again. The Wonder Stuff may have never broken barriers like the Scream but for our money they’ve got more pop classics. Beardyman is a clever clever bastard and the perfect man for a party.The Correspondents is like a hip-hop jive bunny winning Britain’s Got Talent- we don’t know if it was awful or brilliant but we couldn’t stop watching.

If you want to have a weekend where you can have as much fun as your kids, Camp Bestival is still the obvious choice.

Early Bird tickets (with a 6 mth family payment plan) for next year’s event can be found at the Camp Bestival website.

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or else we’ll kill you in your sleep or join our Facebook group if anyone is still daft enough to use it or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS OR WE’LL KILL EVERYONE YOU’VE EVER LOVED!

As you may have noticed we’ve thrown ourselves into festival season like nobody’s business this summer.

We’ve already had some great weekends and it’s still so early!  If you still haven’t decided where to go this summer, then please allow us to make some recommendations! So what’s in store for July then?

Apart from shouting ‘bollocks’ in a field and hoping everyone will join in, as opposed to bricking your tent to death…

If you’d like to spend some time with some dogs-on-string, people in awful novelty hats while drinking warm cans of lager which cost you £20, roll up, roll up, step right this way…

Wakestock 8-10 July, Cardigan Bay

Curious one this- music and wakeboarding. No, us neither but you have to admit it sounds interesting doesn’t it? And at £100 a ticket, pretty good value too considering music-wise you get Biffy Clyro (who are the closest thing you get to a sure thing at a festival), Subfocus, Chase & Status, Kelis and of course Ed Sheeran who, it has been predicted, will have been seen by every man, woman and child in the UK by the end of the summer.

Sonisphere, Knebworth 8-10 July

The one remaining essential weekend for metal. They’ve bagged themselves an outrageously good line-up this year including the big 4 (Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax), Biffy Clyro, Slipknot, Mastodon and (cleverly) Bill Bailey.

Latitude, 14-17 July, Suffolk

Always a great bet for grown-up left-of-centre music, the heasdliners aren’t up to its usual high standards (Suede, The National and Paolo Nutini) but there are plenty further down the bill including My Morning Jacket, Iron & Wine, Foals, British Sea Power, Deerhunter, CW Stoneking and Ed bloody Sheeran. The atmosphere is very friendly but sometimes it’s a little too polite and is like spending a weekend inside a Guardian music supplement. Not for those who think Glastonbury has gone too middle-class.

2000Trees, 14-16 July, Gloucesteshire

Along with Oxford’s Truck festival, our best bet for underground rock and pop. Our favourites include Frightened Rabbit, Los Campesinos!, The Twilight Sad and Amplifier. A line-up put together by people who clearly spend too much time listening to music so that you don’t have to. Trust them.

Camp Bestival, 29-31 July, Dorset

Run by Sunday Best who know their festival shizzle, this is the ultimate family festival. We don’t mean it’s the ultimate kids’ festival, simply that it’s utterly inclusive. If you want to dance to the early hours or would rather hang out with your kids and retire early, all options are available. Everyone can have fun without having to compromise. Line-up wise they’ve got Primal Scream, Blondie, Beardyman, The Wonder Stuff, Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer and obviously Ed “I’m actually just following you around at all times” Sheeran.

Global Gathering, 29-30 July, Stratford-Upon-Avon

If you prefer telling strangers you love them all night whilst dancing to a line-up that features every kind of dance music we can think of, then this is the one for you. Big name-wise they have Underworld, Ritchie Hawtin, Pendulum, Sasha and others but at this kind of event it’s about the quality of the lesser-known DJs that make the night. The buggers have got them too.

For many, Debbie Harry was a first crush. If you’re older, just a plain ol’ crush. Either way, she’s a well assembled woman who happened to front a pretty cool band that covered a lot of ground. Disco, proto-rap, rock, punk, pop… oh, and that terrible ‘Maria’ one.

And there’s a certain tragic suicide blonde thing going on with Debbie, which makes her even more alluring. She’s been a Playboy Bunny with her boobies out, she was adopted as a baby and is generally a bit broken and trashy.

Oh, and she was nearly killed by one of America’s most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy.

While promoting new Blondie LP, ‘Panic of Girls’, Harry revealed that she was almost murdered by the notorious sex killer Ted Bundy.

She totally forgot to mention this previously, but now there’s an album to promote, this salacious news suddenly sprung back into her mind. Handy that.

Debbie opened up about how she nearly accepted a lift from the Bundy, who of course, was executed in ’89 for murdering over thirty women in the early ’70s.

Debbie Harry told a newspaper we’re not linking to, because they don’t link to us when they steal our articles:

”The hairs on the back of my neck just stood up. I pulled the door handle from the outside. He tried to stop me by spinning the car, but it helped me fling myself out,”

She added: ‘

‘Afterwards I saw him on the news. Ted Bundy.”

If he’d kept her in the car, he probably would have strangled her and then had sex with her dead body. That’s a nice cheery thought to see you safely into the weekend, eh?

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!

Regular readers may have noticed that, when it comes to competition prizes, sometimes we’re a bit on the rubbishy side.

No, no, it’s OK, we are. Or at least we were, because now we’re going to offer you possibly the biggest prize in hecklerspray history – a bundle of CDs, DVDs, T-shirts and goodness knows what else worth somewhere in the region of £200.

It’s all thanks to the wonderful people at EMI and their wonderful new website. If you want to win, then you’d better watch the video after the jump, hadn’t you…

To win this slightly gigantic packet of EMI goodies, all you need to do is watch the video below and answer the following question:

What colour top hat is the man wearing in the Blondie video?

To stand a chance, email your answer, along with a contact address, to Hello[at]hecklerspray.com with the subject line ‘Give me EMI stuff now‘. The competition closes at midnight on Tuesday May 12 when a winner will be chosen at random. UK readers only please.

Good luck and stuff, yeah?