Wow!!!! What a summer that was! We were privileged to be at a bunch of cracking festivals and The Rig was played and enjoyed by thousands of children. Big shout out to all the lovely festival people at Mycenae House, Cornbury, Chilled In A Field, WOMAD, The Geffrye Museum and End of The Road. Photos to come soon. It’s been a blast!

Edit: Photos all uploaded, go find yourself!

Following on from our exciting day in Bethnal Green, we packed the stuff into the van and hot footed it down to Cheltenham for one of the biggest festivals of the year, Greenbelt.

This is a lovely, friendly Christian festival, although the multi faith and arts angle is everywhere to see. What was also evident to see was how well organised and super safe and friendly this festival was. Amy was still recovering from having her appendix out a few weeks previously and we were well looked after in the disabled camping area. We arrived in the pouring rain and the loveliest man, called Vincent, who had been going to Greenbelt for 40 years, helped us put up our tent and made us all hot chocolate at 11pm at night. What a dude!

This is a big festival, with about 35,000 people attending at Cheltenham Racecourse and we had over 2,500 of them play The Rig over the course of the weekend. This was our biggest crowd yet and we were so chuffed by how loved and popular our wonderful creation was. WE thought it was an amazing musical playground, but to have so many people play and keep coming back to play it over the weekend spoke volumes about its popularity and our crazy but brilliant idea!!

We had one adorable boy who spent about an hour playing with the wind up music box and the Victorian tin bath. When you hold the wind up music box against the side of the bath, it resonates round the metal and amplifies the sound. Once we’d shown him how it worked, he very quickly picked it up and spent ages mesmerised by it and showing others how to use it. I think we might have changed bath times for the better for this little boy!

Winding up the music box

Have a look through the rest of the photos here.

This was the first gig that we had been booked for that wasn’t from our little black book of contacts. We were so excited that the word was getting out there about our musical junk percussion installation and that The V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, London had asked us to come and spend the day at their childhood festival.

We had an amazing time there and entertained over 1,500 children during one day. We had some cracking little players who loved playing on The Rig and we got to début the massive bunches of keys. The kids loved playing these and thinking up what door it could open. Castles and treasure chests featured highly on the list! Have a look at the photos of the day here and do let us know what you think the bunch of keys open!

In this video, you can see Becky explaining the oven tray earphones. It really is quite amazing the sound that is produced by them. Your body acts as an amplifier and resonates the sound all the way round your body. As you can see, it is a great one for drawing grandparents and parents in to play and discovering the delights of making music out of unusual items.

Chilled in a Field festival. Well! What can we say about this lovely festival! Run by friends of ours, this family friendly festival was held at a private manor house in picturesque East Sussex in August 2013. It is a wonderfully thought out and well planned festival with a lovely family section in the programming. We were delighted to take The Rig to this festival and we hung out on the lawn in the glorious sunshine. With the bunting out it felt like a proper village fete kind of feel and we drank lemonade and licked ice lollies on the lawn!

The festival had cleverly arranged a wooden spoon craft making workshop for the children the day before we arrived, so when we turned up, they all had their own beautifully decorated and individual wooden spoons to play on The Rig. Wooden spoons are our playing instrument of choice and we were very inspired by the beautiful creations we saw being played!

Double bravery points also go to Amy for this festival after she ‘didn’t feel very well’ with a bit of stomach ache. The following week she was admitted to Kings and had her appendix removed.

Photos at Chilled were taken by Stephen Gregory

You can watch a video of the festival here. The Rig is shown about 1 minute in.

There is a lovely review of the festival here. The Rig and the groovy samba beats are mentioned at the end 🙂

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Following on from our success at Mach Comedy Fest, our next outing for The Rig was for upmarket kids company Sharky & George. Sharky & George are an awesomely fun company (founded 10 years ago, hence their 10th Birthday party!) providing the very best children’s parties and entertainment in London. We’ve had the pleasure of working with them since 2009 and it was following a conversation with them about a ‘musical playground’ that the idea of The Rig was born in early 2013.

Their tenth birthday was held in Holland Park, London and hundreds and hundreds of children attended and loved interacting and playing with The Rig and all the other fun and fabulous games that were there.

Photos here