A STONKING WEEKEND WITH FOUR THOUSAND FESTIVAL GOERS TURNING UP TO ENJOY

Local family friendly festival, Lakefest was a brilliant success with four thousand festival goes turning up for its fourth year running. The weekend was filled with an exhilarating combination of top quality acts, nine headliners, and an array of over 30 activities for children and a selection of local food and drink.

Four thousand people attended the event at Croft Farm Waterpark near Tewkesbury to join in with the weekend’s activities and see the outstanding line-up of headliners including Shed Seven, Buzzcocks, Doctor & The Medics, The Lightning Seeds, Neville Staple, The Bad Shepherds, Fun Lovin’ Criminals, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and SNAP! As well as the headliner’s there was a selection of local acts performing across the Floating globe, BBC and Salem stages.

After being awarded the Festivalkidz award in 2013, this year Lakefest had improved on the family friendly aspect with over 30 activities for the children to enjoy. The activities included drumming and hula hoop workshops, face painting, water sports, bouncy castles, fun fair and many more!

The weather for the weekend was beautiful until Sunday morning when the showers hit the festival although this did not dampen the spirits of everyone there and straw was put down to help clump the mud together. The main arena stayed pretty much mud free and people stayed until the end to watch Fun Lovin’ Criminals and to enjoy the silent disco in the Floating Globe tent.  

Some comments from the organisers:

Lee Martin: “This year’s festival was definitely the best one yet! The acts were outstanding, the crowd were loving the music and the atmosphere was fantastic! Everybody I saw around the festival had a big smile on their faces and it was great to see so many families enjoying themselves. The local food and drink went down well along with all the stalls that were selling various festival essentials including flower headbands and ponchos for the slightly wet Sunday morning!”

Martin Newell: “The weekend has been so successful; we had a lot of people turn up on the day who had come along to see a particular act perform. The weather was great apart from a bit of typical English festival shower on Sunday morning which failed to put off the Lakefester’s. We are so pleased with all the amazing feedback and so happy that everybody had such a good time.”

Steve Daff: “We had a fantastic weekend which wouldn’t have been possible without the festival makers! We had a great turn out of people keen to help out and they did a cracking job!”

A spectacular weekend was enjoyed by all as the comments on social media have been positive with comments of how much people enjoyed their time at Lakefest. A particularly great comment came from Geoff Munro on Facebook on Monday:

Well done guys, the best Lakefest yet IMO. Being a teenager of the late 1970's, The Buzzcocks was a massive bonus for me, as was Neville Staple doing a lot of The Special's classics. Shed Seven nailed it too and their lead singer with his dry Northern wit was very amusing. Good variety of music this year too. Thought the earlier bands were of better quality than previous years and got some decent crowds. In previous years the main tent has been quite sparse early on. Youngerbands like Young Kato and Erica pulled the youngsters in and made for a much better atmosphere early doors. Gaz Brookfield, Sarah Warren and Spunge also deserve mention in dispatches. All very good. I think a cheesy hour with Doctor & The Medics (like Chesney in 2012) is something that should be continued. A sort of equivalent of Glastonbury's legend's slot !!! Also, the Crew Salam tent is a great 4th stage with some really interesting stuff going on there. I'd like to see them back in 2015.