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Rhian Teasdale swaggers onto the main stage at Wilderness Festival, turns her back to the audience and flexes her muscles like a prize-fighter. The Wet Leg singer has every reason to be feeling cocksure, given that the band recently topped the UK album charts with their sugar rush of a second album, ‘Moisturizer’.
Drawing a huge crowd on the Sunday evening of this fabulous weekender, the reigning indie champions leave no doubt as to why they beat Oasis’ best-of ‘Time Flies’ to the top spot. Their muscular guitar anthems are so full of wit that the audience responds in kind: one little kid down the front waves a sign that reads: “I’m your smallest fan.”
The band’s gritty performance shows how many ways you can ‘ave it at Wilderness. Held on the picturesque Cornbury Park and now in its 14th iteration, the festival has cultivated a reputation as the glammest on the boutique circuit. Yes, there’s a Veuve Clicquot champagne bar. And, yes, there’s a spa (and another champagne bar) beside one of the two lakes sunk into the site. Here pampered punters watch on as families enjoy a spot of wild swimming, minding not to disturb the people doing yoga on a cluster of paddle boats.
So, much of it’s very genteel and this is a distinctly family friendly do, with parents weaving kids’ trolleys around the throng (Wilderness has a capacity of 30,000 but it feels like the enormous site could accommodate double that number, which prevents any chance of overcrowding). At night, though, the freaks come out to play in a designated dance section that begins roughly at a secret garden-themed bar called The Riddle and leads to The Valley, an expanse of woodland that’s been transformed into a vast dancefloor.
Vibes-wise, this side of Wilderness is Charli XCX in her shades and Vivienne Westwood wedding dress, demurely smoking a Vogue. Late on Saturday night, Confidence Man move a packed crowd with their DJ set at The Valley, lasers zinging overhead as the Aussie dance dons pump out the likes of ‘Gossip’, their sassy, Spanish guitar-adorned collab with JADE. The freewheeling atmosphere is pretty well summed up by the lad good-naturedly dunking his fox tail-wearing mate face-down into a recycling bin.
There’s decidedly less neon on display at The Dive, a small venue that’s new to Wilderness this year. With an exterior that’s styled to resemble an American roadhouse, this gloriously dingy bar hosts scuzzy indie bands such as Goodbye, a five-piece who blend fragile, Cocteau Twins-style vocals with a guitar tone that’s by turns dreamy and full-on grunge. They’ve yet to release any music but are clearly one to watch.
If there’s a single band that embodies the louche side of Wilderness though, it’s Air who grace a main stage framed by a white oblong box. The minimalist set-up indicates the effortlessly cool approach that the French space-pop duo (rounded out by a live drummer) take to noodling through their 1998 masterpiece ‘Moon Safari’, which they began to play in full last year.
The band’s crisp beats, snaking basslines and neon-hued synths conjure images of, well, people sipping champagne in a hot tub overlooking a lake, which you couldn’t quite say of Kent ravers Orbital who obliterate the same stage with a sonic assault later in the evening. At one point the pair – cast in shadow, with flashing white lights affixed to their heads like eyes – are accompanied by a pre-recorded video of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson, who barks class war missives during their pulverising collaboration ‘Dirty Rat’.
Norwegian singer AURORA is also outspoken the following evening, as she intersperses arty synth-pop with pleas for a better planet. “We see the world in so much pain and we want to do so much,” she says, “but it’s hard to know what to do.” In the end, she concludes, “our voices help and everything we do matters so much”. In that spirit, she dedicates the delicate, heartbreaking ‘Through The Eyes Of A Child’ to “the children of Palestine”.
She’s followed on the main stage by local lads Supergrass, who batter through their sensational debut album ‘I Should Coco’ to mark its 30th birthday. Peppering the set with other classic tracks that didn’t appear on that record, Gaz Coombes and co. put on a weekend highlight for all-ages audience who prove the Britpop revival continues apace.
After Wet Leg display their mettle on the final night, with Teasdale at one point dousing her hair in water, looking like a boxer who’s just floored the competition, Basement Jaxx close the main stage with a truly jaw-dropping show. The London dance duo rock out from a circular hole cut into the floor, aided in their big beat bonanza by a rotating cast of vocalists and dancers in space-age silver tutus, all of whom strut fearlessly down the tilted stage.
After a 10-year break from performing, the lads are certainly back with a bang. It’s yet another KO at a triumphant Wilderness Festival, the heavyweight glamp-ion of the UK.
NME is an official media partner of Wilderness Festival
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Arriving at The O2 for the first night of Radiohead’s London residency, we walk in under Stanley Donwood artwork lining the walkway and the lines of the band’s bleak modern chant “Fitter Happier” printed on a huge banner hanging from the ceiling of the former Millennium Dome. The moment instantly brings back memories of walking into Oasis’ Live “25” tour earlier this summer. This is the other major rock return of the year and the atmosphere carries a different kind of excitement, yet the intensity feels just as real. Instead of bucket hats and throwing drinks into warm air, we have cold weather and a slow shuffle through the night to gather in the dark. Toniiiiiight, I’m a pig in a cage on antibiotics.
It almost feels unreal that nine full years have passed since Radiohead’s last album, the rich and sorrowful “A Moon Shaped Pool”, and that they have not toured since 2017. In between, we have seen several side-projects, including Ed O’Brien’s overlooked but inspired solo run as EOB and the way Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood nearly recreated Radiohead’s spirit under a different name through the sharp jazz-rock of The Smile, as well as a wave of controversy.
After performing in Tel Aviv in 2017, questions grew louder about the band’s connection to Israel as the horrors of the genocide in Gaza intensified. Attention landed on Greenwood’s collaboration with Dudu Tassa, an Israeli musician who has played for the IDF, and on Yorke’s later comments responding to criticism. The guitarist had joined anti-government protests in Israel, where his wife is from, and the band recently made their views clear again by speaking out against Netanyahu’s regime, insisting that music should be something that unites people from every culture. That idea guides the show tonight, where there is no sign of protest or boycott.
The audience surrounds the stage, which sits in the center to create a more personal and absorbing feeling than most massive arena shows ever manage. A flickering vocoder opens the room and builds tension before the band walk out and jump straight into old-school territory with the raw guitar gloom of “The Bends” opener “Planet Telex”. It is one of many choices designed to thrill the crowd from a group not always associated with this kind of approach, and the packed venue screams back “everything is broken. why can’t you forget?” as a shared release against everything falling apart in the world around us.
With a “busking approach” guiding the tour, the band rehearsed more than 70 songs and have performed around 43 so far, so this is not the predictable hit conveyor belt of Oasis’ shows. It feels refreshing to never know what is coming next. The setlist leans heavily on the treasures from “OK Computer” and “In Rainbows” and gives equal space to the once-dismissed but now appreciated “Hail To The Thief”. It creates a kind of Radiohead-style hit parade, without “Creep” of course, and includes the occasional glammed-up oddity to let the show breathe.
There is the roaring political fear of “2+2=5”, the huge and aching sweep of “Lucky”, the pulsing electronic rush of “15 Step” and the joyful sing-along of “No Surprises” anchoring the early part of the performance. This section also includes “Sit Down. Stand Up.” with a new soft happy hardcore ending, “Bloom” from the fragile “The King Of Limbs” that now carries a brighter neon energy, and “The Gloaming” flowing into “Kid A”, giving the night a moment to sink before everything intensifies again.
There is not a single chance for a toilet break from that moment onward. From the gentle pain of “Videotape”, to the wild three-part surge of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” into “Idioteque” and “Everything In Its Right Place”, to the guitar-driven “In Rainbows” songs and the massive first-act finale of “There There”, every moment lands exactly how a Radiohead fan would hope. The visuals also look spectacular.
Then we reach the reward of a seven-song encore that reads like fantasy on paper, complete with the newly viral “Let Down”, a playful return to “a song we wrote on a freezing cold farm in 1994” with the indie powerhouse “Just”, and the huge final blow of “Karma Police”. This show becomes the cinematic and artistic contrast to Oasis’ carefree chaos, capturing that feeling of “standing on the edge” and letting everything wash over you. The entire night carries a fierce energy and a well-judged sense of scale, offered with warmth and intention, and Yorke leans fully into his rockstar presence as the band rotate around the stage to engage each part of the arena. For a group that once cringed at the idea of “arena rock”, no one performs it better. A new album and another night like this would be welcome as soon as possible.
‘Planet Telex’
‘2 + 2 = 5’
‘Sit Down. Stand Up.’
‘Lucky’
‘Bloom’
‘15 Step’
‘The Gloaming’
‘Kid A’
‘No Surprises’
‘Videotape’
‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’
‘Idioteque’
‘Everything In Its Right Place’
‘The National Anthem’
‘Daydreaming’
‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’
‘Bodysnatchers’
‘There There’
‘Fake Plastic Trees’
‘Let Down’
‘Paranoid Android’
‘You and Whose Army?’
‘A Wolf at the Door’
‘Just’
‘Karma Police’
