day one review

Last year’s inaugural Wireless was a half-hearted attempt at a festival. The heavily sponsored four-day music bash in Hyde Park suffered from a dodgy line-up, bad weather (ok, not their fault), overly annoying levels of corporate involvement and, most damningly, a rather poor turnout. Last year, it was only four days. For its return in 2006, the organisers have tacked an extra day’s entertainment on the end, expanded the capacity and seem determined to overcome the shortcomings of last year’s trial run.

Five days with no camping, with a line up varied enough that it gives you indie archetypes The Strokes one night, 80’s behemoths Depeche Mode another, whilst still finding room for James Blunt, music’s equivalent of steamrolling babies, in between them. The short of it? Wireless doesn’t expect you to stick around from start to finish, it’s the festival that caters to every niche of London’s trendy 30-somethings as each day goes by, where the most prominent chemical indulgences are the ones bonded in fake tan and you’re more likely to be drinking from the over-priced wine bar than from your smuggled-in bottle of vodka and Tesco Value lemonade. So don’t expect anything approaching what you might call a ‘festival atmosphere’, most of the girls in face-engulfing sunglasses (it’s clouded over, love) are having trouble working out which way the stage is, let alone who’s actually playing on it, and their boyfriends are too busy checking their hand-mirrors to make sure the wax has stayed immaculate in their sickly high-lighted hair to spare a moment to relax and have fun.

Enough bitching about the clientele, what about the music? The Like open up the festival on The Main Stage, to sunny weather and (for all the criticism above) a smiling crowd. If you don’t know already, they’re three averagely attractive girls, who’ve been overly marketed as a trio of glitzy rock chicks (in a manner about as convincing as the latest line of Bratz dolls on the shelves down at your local toy store), yet for all the hype, they remain decidedly average. As they knock out recent single ‘What I Say And What I Mean’, the crowd seem content, but it’s hard to be angry in the afternoon when the weather’s good.

Meanwhile over on the Xfm stage, the CBBC-worthy titled Pigeon Detectives draw in a curious crowd of people, picked up straight from the main gates as they enter the festival site, and kick up enough excitement to get people clapping along to their illustrious indie pop. As they leave the stage there’s just time to navigate the stalls selling Strawberries and Cream, Pimms Cocktails and Couscous Vol-au-vonts (or so I imagine) to find somewhere with a good old-fashioned festival burger, before finding a prime spot at the Main Stage to catch Ukrainian-borne Gypsy Punks, Gogol Bordello.

It’s as if pirates have raided the festival and are calling for mutiny as the patchwork-spangled troupe, complete with scissor-kicking dancers, show the unsuspecting London crowd how a violin and accordion can be employed to make proto-communist rock rock eccentrically harder. As rebellion leader Eugene Hütz leapfrogs about the stage in boho attire that, judging by the skin-tight yellow vest, took inspiration from Hulk Hogan, it’s a lesson in musical otherness and that worldly inspiration that’s so fatally lost in much of the self-absorbed contemporary mainstream. As their music juggles the sickle and hammer, you can’t help but wonder why so many people in the UK are wasting their time with damp try-hards like Johnny Borrell and the rest of his brit-pop clique. After playing a teasing percussion solo on a badly beaten fire-bucket, Hütz bellows out the chorus of “I Would Never Wanna Be Young Again” with accented delivery that resonates right off the walls of downtrodden soviet boulevards, and Gogol Bordello put forward their strongest argument for living it up in a wheel-chair. Youth? Who needs them...

Maybe not Gogol Bordello, but The Young Knives are no doubt thankful for the zeitgeist-riding younger fans who turn out for their performance on the Xfm Stage. Performing at the same time as Dirty Pretty Things on the Main Stage, one of Wireless’ main shortcomings this year (a list which, to the festival’s credit, has been greatly minimised from 2005’s) is that there is very little draw to see the smaller bands, meaning that despite the massive tents in which they perform, throughout the day there never seems to be more than a couple of hundred faithful fans grouped at the front to see them.

As a result, Loughborough’s own Laurel & Hardy double-act are swallowed by the foreboding blue marquee, their shouty, angular indie is blunted at the edges by the draft meandering about them. Despite this, current single ‘She’s Attracted To’ gets the small crowd dancing, whilst ‘Here Comes The Rumour Mill’ offers the day’s most satisfying falsettos.

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