Wireless Festival: London

Peculiarly, for a festival that finishes at 10.30pm each evening, is located slap bang in the middle of central London and is awash with corporate sponsorship, Wireless manages to generate some homegrown atmosphere.

This is in part due to the refreshing decision not to include that most ghastly feature of Hyde Park music events, the ‘golden circle’. There are no VIP lushes (fondly known as the Golden Shower) drinking Pimms and trying to avoid eye contact with the commoners hanging over the fence ten metres behind them. To say that the crowd is close to the bands would be overegging things a little – there are still acres of camera runners and security between the keenest fans and the stage - but it’s certainly progress.

Add to this a well-balanced sound system and what is, by festival standards, a reasonably small site, and you have the essentials for a decent event. New Noise went along to sample the atmosphere on the Wednesday and Saturday, days selected more by luck than judgement, and the two very different line ups showed what a changeable beast Wireless can be.

Wednesday saw appearances by American posh girl band The Like, Dirty Pretty Things, The Raconteurs and a headline slot for The Strokes. Aside from a fairly high billing for Belle & Sebastian and a monotonous aural assault from Gogol Bordello, the day belonged to the indie kids, or more accurately, the indie twenty-somethings.

With the exception of Gogol Bordello’s misplaced mish mash, every band put in solid performances - The Raconteurs demonstrating the weight of their collective experience of live shows and The Strokes treating the audience to the highlights of their back catalogue.

Sun-drenched Saturday, on the other hand, only saw the crowd rise to its feet for the final act – the loudly detested, quietly adored James Blunt. For the remainder of the day, people were happy to camp out on the battered grass drinking overpriced beer or, if in possession of luck, thrift and foresight, their own illicit stash of smuggled booze. The Boy Least Likely To, Nizlopi, Beth Orton and Zero 7 all drifted by, appreciated but getting little back beyond polite applause and the occasional whoop of a hardcore fan. Nizlopi were particularly endearing, with Luke Concannon’s reaction to being on a festival main stage reminiscent of the small boy characterised in the band’s Christmas JCB hit.

The Eels then provided a welcome shake, transforming a rather suspicious and sleepy crowd into something rather more lively. They also played their money shot refreshingly early and he was goddam right – it was a beautiful day. That said, the person whose prescription sunglasses we found may not have agreed, particularly after we taunted them by sending a snap of them onto the big screens. We did feel guilty enough to follow this up with a message saying we were going to hand them in (pictured), but then lost the bloody things.

The corporate presence was most keenly felt in the lulls between bands, when the big screens were hijacked by an excrutiatingly irritating Popworld-wannabe whose giggly backstage interviews and plugs for main sponsor O2 managed to out-cringe finger nails on a blackboard. She also attempted to entice festival goers away from the main arena to one of three other stages, again sponsored and coloured blue by O2. Her efforts were hampered by the fact that it appeared you had to be an O2 customer to gain access and because New Noise wanted to do justice to a mainstream event by sticking to the mainstream stage. Or to put it another way, we couldn’t be bothered to move.

Our inertia did at least allow us to shed our alternative trappings and view the festival from the average punter’s perspective, delivering two very different verdicts for two very different days. Wednesday was certainly worth the ticket price, with a solid line-up that held together in its own right, while having enough variation to please everyone. Saturday, however, only worked because the sun was shining.

Whilst you could bounce around to The Strokes whatever the weather, the sort of blissed out musical drifting produced by Orton and Zero 7 would have been utterly infuriating if it had been pissing it down. The lesson, if there is one, is if you’re thinking of going next year, try and match the line-up to the weather forecast.