Kevin Perry Goes Large in The Med's New Party Capital, Malta.

If you're a small Mediterranean island, British clubbers are presumably seen as something of a mixed blessing. Sure, they're going to fill your hotels, eat at your restaurants and buy enough sambuca to double your GDP, but they're also going to get lairy, keep their soundsystems going until 4am and cavort up and down your picturesque cobbled streets.

It's a chance Malta were willing to take this Easter when they invited Annie Mac to put on the inaugural Lost & Found festival over the long weekend. The island is no stranger to hard-partying Brits. Oliver Reed died of a heart attack here in 1999 at the age of 61 after drinking eight beers, three bottles of rum, a few rounds of whiskeys and a couple of cognacs - all the while beating five Royal Navy sailors at arm-wrestling. It's a miracle they've got any booze left at all.

Yet Lost & Found promised something new for the island, and thanks to Annie's dedicated social media following and the fact that the only other dance festivals going on at this time of year require thermal underwear, Lost & Found sold out its 7,000 capacity within days of going onsale. Some 700 of those went to local Maltese fans, and there were a handful of Europeans, but largely this was a British festival transplanted to the Southern Med.

Unusually for a dance festival – and this may well be the Annie Mac effect – there seemed to be an even gender split among the crowds. In fact, according to Radio 1 DJ Monki, the vast majority of tickets were bought by women. She added: "Big up girls! It's been great that it's not a sausage-fest here. There's no angry dancing. It's all love."

While the crowds were clearly delighted they could crack out their bikinis and shorts early, initially the locals weren't so sure about this whole festival lark. Annie Mac's audience may be a relatively well-behaved lot compared to Magaluf in the heat, but after the opening party the Times of Malta ran with: Maundy Thursday Annie Mac event's noise 'unbearable', and that wasn't just a comment on Eats Everything's selections.

Ed Norris, one of Lost & Found's organisers, told me this was just first-year teething problems. "The pre-party was quite a big party and I think it took them a little bit off guard," he said. "I think it's mainly because they're very religious in Malta so it didn't help that it was going into Good Friday. Generally though we've had a lot of support from the people of Malta. The locals have been amazing and the economy has massively gained from it as well."

The organisers are keen to make the festival an annual fixture, but Norris said the dates for next year are yet to be confirmed and the possibility of moving it away from Easter has been discussed. "We just don't know yet," he said. "The Bank Holiday back in England gives us so much time and means you don't have to take time off work. It makes life easier, but we're looking at the options."

A few noise complaints aside, Lost & Found was remarkably on point in its first year. The main festival site, at Club Numero Uno in the centre of the island, housed four separate stages and had been transformed by designers Mad Ferret into a dreamland of oversized neon cocktail glasses, chill out spaces packed with pink flamingos and googly eyes in the trees. "It reminds me of a Zen garden," said Monki. "The venue looks amazing and so did the parties earlier. The infinity pool looked sick at sunset."

Annie Mac – whose constant appearances around the site made her hoodie as ubiquitous as Michael Eavis' tiny shorts at Glastonbury – had clearly rinsed her address book for a line-up that threw together the likes of Skream, Artwork, DJ EZ, Jamie Jones, Heidi, Carl Craig, Oneman, Route 94, Virgil Abloh and Hannah Wants.

Any question about whether you can get away with hosting pool and boat parties this early in the year was comfortably answered on Saturday when the sun beat down on Kurupt FM and David Rodigan's pool party – and Ram Jam even managed to get a few people splashing around with the promise of a free grand for the first one in the water. "The cheque's in the post," he told them. Textbook Rodigan.

Saturday night headliner MK did point out that some fearless British punters had maybe overestimated the April sun. "I think a lot of girls in bikinis learned the hard way!" he laughed. "I was wearing a jacket and a hoody and people ended up borrowing them. It's not quite summer. The boat party I played was really, really fun though."

The Detroit DJ added: "Easter weekend has been perfect. I'm sure Annie was trying to figure out the best time to have a festival as there are so many these days. I think she picked the perfect time to do it without having to compete with everybody else. It's been amazing. It seems like it could become an annual event, and I've heard only good things from my DJ friends who've played already. They told me I was going to love it, and they were right."

Malta, to the relief of its residents, probably isn't about to become the next Ibiza – but for one weekend in April it seems Lost & Found is another step towards a glorious future where the festival season stretches on unbroken all year round and the party never, ever has to end.

Photos via Luke Dyson.

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