REVIEW: Ben and Jerry's Fest [Festival Fever]

REVIEW: Ben and Jerry's Fest

Posted on July 28, 2008 8:04 PM
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Ben and Jerry's Festival
Clapham Common, London
26 - 27th July 2008

Review by Adam Walker

Another year and another round of free ice-cream and sunshine awaited those at the legendary Ben and Jerry’s festival on Clapham Common this weekend. Whilst only three years old, this little gem of family entertainment feels like it has been around forever and is now one of the highlights in the festival calendar. This year followed the same format as the other two, albeit celebrating thirty years in the ice-cream business.

Now grown in size to span a whole weekend, there was the usual mix of eclectic yet safe sounds from the likes of headliners The Charlatans and The Guillemots (Saturday) and Ash and the Lemonheads (Sunday) through to the more obscure Florence and the Machine and Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. But the point here really isn’t the music. Rather strangely for a festival, the focus is on eating, even more so than drinking. And eating only one thing, ice cream.

For the ‘real’ festival-ite, this is seen as a weekend of capitalist, commercial, shameless self-marketing. For the rest of us, it’s all about the fun. Not trying to be anything it’s not, this welcomes all ages – even those with prams (a sure no-no at Reading). But that’s the point. It’s just about lazing around on a sunny day (they seem to be fortunate every year with the rays), catching up with friends, listening to some cool music – if you can hear it – and eating as much free ice cream as your stomach can handle. The loos are clean, the bars are well stocked, the food-vans actually offering decent grub and not a tent in sight. And with a curfew of 8pm, everyone leaves in a merry state. At only £8 a ticket, it pays for two tubs of ice cream alone. And this weekend it’s all about the smoothies, as Innocent hosts its version of a corporate festival – The Village Fete. Free ice cream one weekend, smoothies the next. London surely doesn’t get any better than this.