Field Day

Victoria Park,

London

01/08/09

We were promised a hot, dry, global-warming-induced summer this year, but trailing our soaked boots to London’s Victoria Park for Field Day, we’re having anything but. The rain clouds are hovering ominously, so teasingly that most people didn’t stray too far from the tented stages, even with a blinding Final Fantasy set outside. The cowards.

We’ve no such fears of getting damp, and so settle in for the downpour and an outrageously satisfying set from The Temper Trap. Every time we see the Aussie epic-poppers they get better, this time discarding their Springsteen cover to pack as much from debut album ‘Conditions’ as possible into their short set. With the past few years churning out countless also-rans with weedy vocals, it’s a pleasure to witness Dougy Mandagi’s majestic voice, not least on the melancholy ‘

Down
River’, which really sets the four-piece apart. That said we scurry into a tent where people are watching Micachu And The Shapes, partly because she’s incredibly and brilliantly understated, and partly to get dry.

Back on the main stage and The Horrors try their best to be My Bloody Valentine and prove that all those people who say their new album is awesome are right. They try, anyway. The crowd are unresponsive, but the show is good. In any case, we move onto the Village Mentality stage as a purposeful Mumford And Sons play to a packed out big top. This crowd isn’t just staying out of the rain; they’re besotted. Not because Marcus Mumford and co. have had massive radio success or a telly-battered video but because time after time they deliver on performance. ‘Whispers In The Dark’ is especially moving, dare we argue a semi-epic, and dispels any rumours that folk has to be twee.

Venturing on and the main stage DJ is taking the piss; ‘Here Comes The Sun’ by the Beatles rings out as the heavens open once again. We wind up watching The Big Pink as Santigold takes forever and a day to make it onstage where no amount of sun-kissed pop is worth the deluge, as incredible and upbeat as the atmosphere is across the whole site. They’re understated and sonically low-fi, sounding like everything you were promised Glasvegas would be, and yet they’re not even trying to. They just ooze cool. It’s Ian McCulloch fronting Spiritualized, shoegaze without the fussiness. Honest, unassuming rock done through smoke, silhouettes picking out dirty guitar feedback and misty vocals. What’s best is, just as they ear-gasm with ‘Domimos’, the sky clears and we can all euphorically run home like Charlie Bucket.

Alex Lee Thomson