Saturday at the Isle of Wight Festival shows off it's Brightside

Isle of Wight Festival 2013

Thursday 13th to Sunday 16th June 2013
Seaclose Park, Newport, Isle of Wight, PO30 2DN, England MAP
£185

Daily capacity: 90,000

Arriving on site Saturday, I was surprised to see how busy it was so early on in the afternoon – usually the first couple of acts are reserved for those who have managed to drag themselves out of the tent to collapse in front of the stage to sleep off the rest of the nights excesses with a better soundtrack than their fellow campers. As I arrived Ian Hunter was entertaining the audience. Best known for his time with Mott The Hoople, these days he has taken the style of his adopted country America, so the bulk of the set was taken up with bluesy rock and roll. Hoople fans weren't left out though as the last few tracks were taken up with songs from that era, finishing with 'All the way to Memphis', 'Sweet Jane', 'Roll away the Stone', 'Saturday Gigs' and the classic 'All The Young Dudes'. The last track giving the crowd the first of many sing-along moments of the day.

After the raucousness of Ian Hunter, the main stage slowed right down for Laura Mvula, whose smooth laid back jazz/soul sound, while certainly accomplished, wasn’t really doing much for me, so we headed off to explore the rest of the site. The festival site has expanded quite dramatically this year, with the addition of several new micro-venues. It was at one of these venues – The Intoxicated Tea Rooms – we stumbled across Nick Heyward, formerly of 80s band Haircut 100, performing an acoustic set to a packed audience. Putting a popular act on in a small venue can be a blessing and a curse – on the plus it can draw people away from the main stages and spread the crowd out, especially good on a site like the Seaclose Park which is very narrow and can get very crowded round the main arena. On the minus however the venue can quickly fill up leaving an area packed out, which is what happened here – a venue with a capacity of maybe 200 people, trying to fit about a 1,000 into it – leaving the vast majority outside and no hope of actually seeing anything.

Random wandering at a festival is always to be recommended as it can lead you to places you maybe wouldn't consciously head to – in this case we found ourselves seeing some of Little Mix's performance in the Big Top. Normally I have an ingrained aversion to anything that comes out of a reality show, but couldn't help but warm to their performance. After a false start where the band started playing then stopped as the four girls weren't ready to come out on stage, They settled quickly into the show, and seemed really pleased "…to be at our first ever festival…" (and given the average lifespan of X-Factor acts this may be their last one too). Although I still can’t totally forgive them for what they did to Daimien Rice's 'Cannonball', they actually do make quite a good fist of 'How Ya Doin'?', and while I don't think I'll start watching X Factor any time soon, it does show that sometimes some good can come out of them.

After a quick swing by the Kashmir for a beer and another local band – this time Fine Lines - folky pop with an occasional heavy riff. It was back to the main stage for Ben Howard whose rise to double Brit-award winner can only be described as meteoric. While he’s nothing ground breaking, taking his cues form Newton Faulkner, Damien Rice and further back, John Martyn and Simon and Garfunkel, he none-the-less provides a pleasant if unchallenging soundtrack to a lazy Saturday afternoon.

By contrast to Ben's sound, back in the Kashmir Café local act Weatherkings are taking centre stage – If wild and surreal funk rock is your thing, then you will love this band, and the full to capacity tent clearly shows that a lot of people do. They were followed on stage by Damien Paul, whose classic blues sound brings to mind Johnny Cash at his peak.

While Indie crowd-pleasers Bloc Party were taking to the stage we decided to delve further into the corners of the festival site in search of something a bit different – given the generally conservative nature of the Isle of Wight Festival, quite a challenge. It was here we came upon Ska'd For Life who were playing the 'Life's a Beach' stage – a sandpit where the kids (big and small) can build sandcastles during the day, and in the evening enjoy an inland beach party in the evening. Ska'd For Life, as the name suggests, are a Ska covers band. Drawing their set from the likes of The Specials and Madness, they also delve into the likes of Toots and the Maytals and Max Romeo too. I don’t know what it is about Ska but it seems to be the one style of music that everybody loves, and this was born out by the crowd, which started about five years old, and had people in their 70s – all dancing along to the infectious sound.

It wouldn't be unfair to call The Killers the American Coldplay, a band that generates as much ire in their detractors as they inspire devotion in their fans. Much like Coldplay, they also have a reputation for elevating a slightly bland, well-produced recorded sound, into something far better live. Fortunately this reputation was something born out by their performance on Saturday. Brandon Flowers is a natural frontman, clearly at home on a stage, and able to engage with an audience, drawing them in with plenty of references and adjustments to the lyrics of songs to personalise them to the venue – Ironically during the one cover version the band performed, a version of The Beatles 'When I'm 64' they changed one verse to mention the Isle of Wight, but dropped the verse which actually mentions the island. The rest of the set was definitely a crowd-pleaser, containing all the big hits, such as 'When You Were Young', 'Mr Brightside', and 'Read My Mind'. The biggest response of the night probably came from 'All These Things That I've Done' – it's hard not to be swept up by 40,000 people singing the refrain "I've got soul, but I'm not a soldier." As a closer at a festival it's hard to beat this band, certainly one of the highlights of the whole weekend, and possibly one of the best live shows I've seen.

review by: Steve Collins / Marie Magowan

photos by: Steve Collins