FOLLOWINg a roller coaster summer of festival-going, it was Flava Flav, the bombastic, giant alarm clock-sporting member of Public Enemy who summed up the feeling for many who headed to the last real bash of the season.

“This is the best festival of all,” he told the crowd at Bestival, on the Isle of Wight. That’s why they call it BESTival!”

And, you know what, he might just be right.

While many Oxfordshire music-lovers were gorging themselves on Alex James’s cheese on toast, and jigging along to The Feeling – or better, The Anydays – at Harvest, in Kingham, a select band of our great and good staggered, bleary-eyed onto the quay at Cowes after making the trek (and early morning sailing) to the island that time (or, at least, the new millennium) forgot.

They included one of the city’s hottest new names, dance DJ Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (aka Orlando Higginbottom); Secret Rivals; Trophy Wife (among the best of the fertile Blessing Force collective – which also numbers Foals contemporaries Jonquil and Pet Moon); and, our current favourites jazz-swing renegades The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band – who distinguished themselves by playing two headline sets in the retro-cult Black Dahlia tent.

Why do we love them? Because they dare to be different. They know they’re good and they have the kind of supreme confidence in their abilities that you usually only find in test pilots, members of the SAS, and the criminally insane.

Plucky in the extreme, head rabbit Stuart Macbeth went for broke by actually chosing to go head to head with main stage headliners – The Cure.

A nailbiting gamble, our small delegation from The Guide fully expected the zoot-suited party machine to be playing to an empty tent. Not a bit of it though.

The place was banging, with festival-goers peeling away from Robert Smith’s two-and-a-half hour marathon for a heady dose of jump jive, bunny-style.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, the band (and their army of new fans) came back the next day to play the final live set of the entire 50,000-capacity festival. And, if looks alone were anything to go by, the fedora-sporting Oxford boys did it on three days of sleep deprivation, and a diet of wine boxes and Jack Daniel's. And only once did any of them come close to falling off the stage.

Gentlemen: for rounding off the summer in style, we salute you!