CarFest South 2016
My favourite gig.. well, Festival! Carfest! These days, it’s not often that I get to rock out with my best friend, sipping drinks in the VIP area and dancing along to our favourite bands..but that’s exactly what happened at Carfest South this year. CarFest raises money for Children in Need, and combines fabulous car displays with marvellous music. It sells itself as a family festival, I can honestly say that we found it incredibly friendly, and there was lots to do!
We arrived fashionably late, I’d driven home from North Wales to meet A and we finally arrived at CarFest just in time to hear Will Young on stage as we walked through the gates!
Music? Will Young, The Proclaimers, Jools Holland, The Darkness and Texas! The Darkness had us singing (OK, screeching!) along loudly with them, and we were taken back to our Uni days as we chanted the lyrics along with a group of rather sensible looking chaps to the left of us who were really getting into the spirit of things! Though is it me, or does Justin from the Darkness look a little bit like James Blunt these days..
This led into Texas, I’ve always wanted to see them live so I was REALLY excited, as was A who knows every lyric to every song and we’ve spent many car journeys singing along to their albums, so this was a highlight for us both! Musically it was a real treat, from rocking out to ballards we had it all! It was definitely a top gig! Sharleen Spiteri is a real show woman, and we were all transfixed on her pe- can’t wait to see Texas live again soon!
Atmostphere….the atmostphere was fantastic, it was a really friendly family event! At one point I was stood in front of the stage, with a couple of ladies in their 60’s behind me, and bunch of very happy teenagers to my right, and a family with some children nearby. It was wonderful, and when the music ended everyone very calmly headed back to their tents or cars to leave the venue. I was quite amazed at the amount of rubbish which had been thrown down during the concert, we were wading through rubbish, and I wonder how much will be recycled? I know Laverstoke Farm are very good at being Eco-concious, but I wonder whether they are able to continue their commitments when confronted with the excess waste that the festival produces? I did try to
Accessibility? A is a blue badge holder, so we used the disabled parking. We did find that unfortunately the first marshal didn’t really understand that we needed space to open the car door – “can you squeeze in this space?” – yes if we want to climb out the sun roof.. thankfully a more sensible young marshal came to help and found us a proper parking space so A could get out easily. I do feel that perhaps the disabled parking should have the spaces marked out to make it easy for everyone. Apparently there is a bus which will take you from the disabled parking to the entrance, but we didn’t discover that until we were leaving when another lovely young marshal came to our rescue when we got a bit lost trying to find our way out, but something we will remember in future!