Six years ago Belle and Sebastian had the daft idea of gathering up their favourite bands and performing over a weekend in a Pontins by the sea. It's not hard to see why that festival's promoters, Foundation, wanted to turn it into an annual event: the combination of sand dunes, chalets with fitted kitchens and celebrity curators is pretty irresistible. Now on its fifth anniversary, All Tomorrow's Parties has a devout audience as concerned with playing beach rounders as it is with spending hours listening to avant-garde guitar music in Pontins' two gig spaces.

Those who did see any bands this weekend were treated to a string of surprises. The first came early on Friday, with a formidable set from the Fiery Furnaces. Unfazed by the cavernous proportions of Pontins' main room, they unleashed a kaleidoscopic racket: a splintered collage of songs, strung together at such lightning speed that the whole had the violence and sickening fascination of a pile-up on the M25.

Sonic Youth, Saturday's curators, had their own trick up their sleeves: playing real tunes, not just feedback, in their headline set. Watching Arthur Lee, frontman of Love, it was clear he felt a trick had been played on him: his bristling, occasionally beautiful set was punctuated with snide references to the fact that Foundation, Sunday's curators, had billed him below the Tindersticks.

He should have been grateful. It meant he could catch LCD Soundsystem and Dizzee Rascal in the club-sized downstairs room. Both were phenomenal, LCD playing pulsating dance-rock, Dizzee Rascal alternating celebrity-puncturing new songs with bold, spruce versions of Fix Up, Look Sharp and Jus a Rascal. No one could have anticipated how beguiling Dizzee would be on stage. As he rhymed plonker with Willy Wonka the room erupted in giggles, and his raps about kids trying to leave council estate violence behind had the crowd hanging on every word.