REVIEW: Wireless Fest, Fatboy Slim/Underworld [Festival Fever]

REVIEW: Wireless Fest, Fatboy Slim/Underworld

Posted on July 7, 2008 4:21 PM
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02 Wireless Festival
Saturday 5th July 2008

Review by Max Hogg

For me the defining moment of this festival was the man on his Blackberry. He was dancing along to the end of a surprisingly good set from the terribly named Does It Offend You, Yeah? and simultaneously firing off emails left right and centre. You can imagine the message he might be sending:

“Futures prices on Zimbabwean maize are still far too low. Buy me a million dollars’ worth. Off to see Deadmau5. Keep me abreast of developments.”

Ensnaring your bonus for the year at the same time as signalling your moderately modish music tastes and avant-garde weekend activities to colleagues is undoubtedly fulfilling. But whatever the content of Mr PDA’s emails, the episode neatly summed up a very different festival crowd and atmosphere from those that would lose their wellies on a farm in Somerset or lose themselves under a field of fluorescent butterflies. It left me totally unmoved.

Let’s turn to the music for a minute. It’s almost a given that Fatboy Slim will get a party going wherever he plays. On Saturday night he didn’t disappoint, although I had some sympathy with Gemma next to me who complained that “the crowd aren’t really raving are they?” He didn’t quite seem to connect with the audience in the way he usually does. Maybe it was the enormous branded beach ball that was in the way.

Underworld were the highlight. Specifically Born Slippy. Its an anthem. Hearing it live for the first time rivalled the sight of the PDA-fiddler for the festival’s most memorable moment. It set the tent alight and the roar of appreciation from the audience was fully deserved.

Mstrkrft beforehand were disappointing. They were billed as producing robotic electronica, a billing that was accurate only in the sense that their entirely generic brand of electro was robot-like in it’s lack of flair or ingenuity. But both Cagedbaby and Audio Bullies had brought more excitement earlier in the afternoon, the latter playing to a packed and very sweaty tent.

All in all, the line up was pretty good, if a bit heavy on the nostalgia. But on almost every other count the O2 wireless festival falls down badly. The food, always expensive at a festival, is both seriously overpriced and pretty tasteless if my chow mein is anything to go by. The queues for beer (naturally branded to the hilt) are monstrous, stretching halfway across the site even before you get to the theme park-style snake-like queuing system within the beer tents.

And you just can’t get away from the branding. It’s everywhere. As we stood waiting for Mr Cook to make his entrance, listening to yet another commercial for some new mobile phone, I came to the realisation that the O2 wireless festival is basically one long advert. When you’ve paid nearly £50 for a ticket that’s a bitter pill to swallow.

It’s an easy target to caricature a Blackberry-owning festival-goer and to complain about the branding. But it’s depressing that at the time when 30,000 Londoners were dancing along to Fat Boy Slim’s party vibe, the organisers behind the far, far better Wild in the Country were dismantling their cancelled festival (supposed to be held on the same day a mere 20 minute train ride from the city) and staring bankruptcy in the face because of a lack of ticket sales. As you can probably tell by now, I’d much prefer to have been at Wild. It seems silly to me that one festival succeeds over another solely (as far as I can tell) because of the marketing machine behind it. As festival-goers we deserve better than this.

The O2 wireless festival is billed as a festival that swaps travel chaos and mud for convenience and the Blackberry Owners’ tent. But in losing the chaos and mud the festival has also lost all semblance of soul or character. It seems the 12 hour advert with musical accompaniment may be the future. Perhaps its time for the ravers to find a party elsewhere.