Secret Garden Party 2008

Sonia Zhuravlyova's point of view:

Secret Garden Party is remarkable for its gentle pace, uninhibited atmosphere, and outrageous costumes, even in the sweltering heat. Only a few took this year's theme of "Revolution" literally, and most just improvised – our favourite was a bunch in Wally (from Where's Wally?) outfits and there was a hell of a lot of cross-dressing.

This is an independent festival which has grown from a gathering of about 1,000 in 2004 to a boutique festival which this year played host to 10,000. The setting is the spacious grounds of a Georgian house near Cambridge with its own lake and landscape gardens. The emphasis is on creativity and having a jolly good time while the music seems like a bonus. A big crowd spent most of Saturday cheering along to the sock wrestling, a pleasingly vicious activity.

Secret Garden Party is also heavy on cider drinking and gypsy jazz, with a few tents and stages where the folksters rip loose with their fiddles and accordions. Less fiddle-dominated were the Danish pop darlings Alphabeat, who got the crowd dancing at the Great Stage (made to look like a giant shark's jaw) on Friday. "We're amazing!" screamed Alphabeat's male vocalist Anders, to the crowd's bemusement. We think he meant he's amazed that so many people got up to dance. That's no mean feat, as retro grungers the Sugars found out earlier in the day when they failed to pry people away from lazing in the shade, eating crumpets or jumping in the mud pit.

On Saturday, Esser, the sleazy Beck-esque miserablist, was indeed a bit miserable on the Great Stage, as he couldn't raise anyone to their feet with his vaudeville disco beats. Brazilians Bonde De Role, however, had more luck with their infectious, shouty punk pop. The band's name roughly translates as "joyride trolley" and that's really the best way to describe them. Visuals were provided by a troupe of fancy-dressed ladies who pinged coloured balls into the crowd with badminton rackets.

In the middle of the lake, a pirate boat doubled up as a DJ stage and on Saturday night it was filled with fireworks and set on fire as a precursor to Grace Jones, the biggest and weirdest act of the festival. Ms Jones, the godmother (grandmother?) of disco no-wave, opened her set with a magnificent cover of Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing", her sultry voice and flamboyant lit-up headgear a personification of the New York underground scene of the 80s. Those who gathered to see Jones, whose costume changes could rival Bjork's in their outlandishness, certainly witnesses a spectacle and a diva in great form, but she failed to tap into the crowd's mood and many wandered back to the dance and the Gypsy Jazz stages.

Saturday's most musically innovative act was Micachu and the Shapes. The band is fronted by Mica Levi, a 21-year-old musical genius and grime artist from East London (her original compositions have been preformed at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra). Live, Mica likes to keep it a bit rough around the edges and has been known to grab whatever is around to augment her upbeat, leftfield pop - most notably a Hoover.