An ode to the day festival - Wide Awake 2023 review
Yes, Glastonbury looks like the pinnacle of existence, but getting the bus home up Brixton Hill after a day of post-punk, pop music and failing spectacularly to rollerskate is also a slice of heaven
Standing at a gig while the sun sets on a summer evening is the best thing in the world, isn’t it?
You might disagree, but nothing beats the realisation that winter's cold, dark haze is gone. Dreams sparked by photos tacked to your wall of holding an overpriced cider, surrounded by drum beats with the sun prickling the back of your neck, have finally come true.
Festival season is here, a joyous reality that slapped me across the face standing in Brockwell Park in Wide Awake. More specifically, I realised how marvellous their return is during Shygirl’s set, an unapologetic pop synth hip-hop celebration of ‘south London sluts’, given a backdrop of the sun beginning to dip over the horizon at Wide Awake.
I am a day festival evangelist. All of the fun of the fair, but you can sleep in your own bed. Glastonbury envy might get me every year but camping, to me, is hell. Let me have my fun a mere hop, skip and jump from my house and luckily, thanks to the people at Brockwell Live, this is nothing but possible!
Wide Awake, an event that began in 2021, describes itself as “a celebration of independent music and counter-culture”. It has a particularly politically progressive feel with its equal gender lineup and provuding spaces for leftist organisations like tenants union Acorn, Lewisham Anti-Raids, and Hate Zine. Special shoutout to Fan Club For Climate, a campaign group seeking to make the live music industry carbon-neutral, whose doling out of fun temporary tattoos, which both raised awareness for their cause and panicked my mother that I had got inked for a second time in a month.
There’s something quite childlike about the hedonism promoted by being at one of these things, pointing out everything, marvelling at people’s outfit choices, whether they are weather appropriate or not and so on. A point of confusion for me personally is that Wide Awake adopted a nearly identical layout to the Lambeth Country Show, Brockwell Park institution where local kids get their chance to touch a sheep and make a vegetable critter (Kale Marx of 2018, my thoughts are still dominated by you). Local adults drink overpriced cider from Somerset.
After being a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choice, despite their fancy lineup planning app, my mate Alex, who is a semi-professional festival go-er whose annual attendance at Glastonbury will continue until I murder him in cold blood in a jealous rage the year Taylor Swift actually headlines, suggested going on the Deptford Northern Soul Roller Disco and was like, ‘why the fuck not?’ Obviously, I was abysmal, but I looked cute as men were still trying to flirt with me, lying about how I was doing a good job.
That sensory overload over, our ambling took us to the Bad Vibrations stage, where we caught Los Bitchos, a London-based foursome consisting of Serra Petale, Agustina Ruiz, Josefine Jonsson and Carolina Faruolo, who make 70s rock that sounds like it would be at home in a Tarantino movie. Ladies with electric guitars, in the least condescending way, make me feel like I can do anything. More, more, more.
Along with the going home at night bit, another beauty of a day fest is finding new acts, whether you become obsessed or lean into it just for the moment. For one sun-soaked afternoon, you become a musical mindfulness goddess. After came Molchat Doma, a Belarussian post-punk band I was very excited for as they sounded like if Joy Division came from the USSR, which captures what I also love about a day festival.
After that, it would have appeared that the organisers underestimated the demand for Jockstrap in the Moth Club tent as we were condemned to stand outside it—an okay outcome for Alex, who is 6’3, but bad for lil ol’ 5’2 me. However, our position meant we could snag a good spot for the Viagra Boys, my favourite discovery of the day. Okay, they weren’t really fresh to me as I had given them a spin before, and Celeste (author of Celestestack) had told me they were excellent on stage and in real life, and the promised spectacle delivered! They, a punk four-piece from Sweden, put on a very amusing show! It, a beautiful spectacle from start to finish, ended with the lead singer, Sebastian Murphy, doing push-ups in his beer-soaked boxer shorts. If this sounds pathetic, it was majestic. Sebastian also echoed an observation I had made to Alex, remarking on mullets. They knew how to put on a show and applied that knowledge! My new dream job is a sign language interpreter at any one of their shows (or anyone’s show).
Finally came CAROLINE POLACHEK! A woman, who according to my Apple Music stats, has dominated my thoughts since dropping her second album, ‘Desire, I Wanna Turn To You’. If ‘Sunset’ isn’t my top songs of 2023….
Caroline recently shot back at the implication she was this generation’s Kate Bush when she is *checks notes* still here, but her nearly impossible-to-sing-along with soprano is very ‘Wuthering Heights’ at points. Anyway, I love her, and according to the girls behind us is worthy of her “mother” status. Nothing I want to say about her hasn’t been said by everyone else before, but I must remember that the lyric “I cry on the dancefloor. It’s so embarrassing” wasn’t written about me.
Wildlife spotting on my walk home xxx