Love Saves The Day
Back for a sixth year, Love Saves The Day hits Bristol’s Eastville Park with another massive line-up of DJs and live acts. From house and techno to grime, reggae and D&B, with a sprinkling of live acts, LSTD’s musical menu is second to none. And with the guys behind Glastonbury’s Wow Stage and Croatia’s Love International festival at the helm, you know all those little other details that make a festival great will be well taken care of.
Eastville Park, Bristol BS5 6QL. May 27-28. £39-£75
Boomtown
The temporary town pops back up for another carnival weekend
This annual shindig is a pop-up cathedral short of being a full-blown city. Every year the Matterley Bowl estate becomes a magical town full of hypnotic basslines and mindbending installations. Music ranges from the underground to outer space, and the roster of activities (which has matured in recent years) includes banqueting, craft and healing areas as well as Boomtown’s traditional mutated ‘art vehicles’. By day it’s fairly family-friendly, but after dark the caners come out to soak up enough beats, dub, ska and reggae to see them through until daybreak.
August 10-13. £202 (weekend), £177 (discounted for coach travellers).
Secret Garden Party
A hedonistic wooded wonderland in the Cambridgeshire countryside Nestled in plush green surroundings, Secret Garden Party is the undisputed home of hippy hedonism on the UK festival scene. ‘Spectacular’ comes as standard: bands, DJs and artists are tucked into every playable space around the site including treehouses, floating islands and yurts. SGP is known for being a woodland fairytale, but this year’s theme – a tongue-in-cheek celebration of all things celebrity – should see SGP’s always up-for-it dressers take things to new heights of tacky and LOL.
Abbots Ripton, Cambridgeshire. July 20-23. £102-£197.