Wide Awake festival is a punk voyage round the globe from a Brixton park

Festival season has officially hit London.

Despite the summer funk and power pop, the acts that really make a mark at London’s Wide Awake festival are grungy, doom-laden and very loud.

There’s a freeing sense of abandon, a frenzy that drives the scuzzy guitars and buzzing synths — perhaps the natural reaction after a pandemic and with the onset of summer a reminder of the ever-hotter ones looming on the horizon.

A one-day city festival is a route to outdoor gigs without the in-tent baby wipe showers. But at Saturday’s Wide Awake, it also means a mission to see as much alternative music as possible in a day — while attempting to stay, as the event’s name implores, on two feet. That’s no mean feat when the roster includes Eastern European new wave, dubstep, jazz and a lot of rock.

The Brixton shindig’s a chance to get something different, to an extent away from the usual festival sea of bucket hats and flower crowns. Aussie punks Clamm get the party started by ripping through a frenetic lunchtime gig to a packed Windmill X So Young tent. And what better band to confirm an eclectic line-up is in store than 1970s cult icons Wasted Youth? The top-hatted post-punkers look slightly dazed to be out in the rare afternoon sunshine. But they give Jealousy and Paris, France a gruff exuberance from the small Shacklewell Arms X The Gun stage.

If the old-school is represented, so is the new. Brockwell Park is transformed into a (admittedly badly signposted) Gen-Z mecca, with bubble tea and vegan fried chicken among the veritable village of food and drink. There’s even a zine fair.

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Post-punks Wasted Youth draw a nostalgic crowd to a sunny stage in the early afternoon (Picture: Author’s own)

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Los Bitchos’s bouncy summer rock is the perfect way to start the season (Picture: Author’s own)

No such paradise is on show in the SC&P X Village Underground tent, as avant-garde prowler Nuha Ruby Ra takes over. As the screen behind her undulates in blood red, giving the dark tent a hellish glow, the Londoner saunters panther-like across the stage and snarls her mostly spoken-word songs. Sometimes the arrogance gives way to spellbinding pain, at at once point she screams a long, blood-curdling scream into two echoing microphones.

The Bug Club are more standard fare; energetic and crowd-pleasing, but a little too reminiscent of 2008 indie. And Black Country, New Road’s gentle rock falters, too. The much-hyped outfit provides something fresh, armed with violin and bow-played guitar, but they’re not quite right for the chatty, loosely drawn daytime crowd at the big Bad Vibrations X Desert Daze stage, getting a little lost in the noise.

Better are the funky Los Bitchos, with a spirit-lifting set hailing the summer. And Swedish punks Viagra Boys command the main stage like it’s nothing, launching into heavy tunes and being funny and frank with the audience. ‘I’m pleased to be with my peers,’ says frontman Sebastian Murphy as he bemoans a previous festival apparently full of older people who smelt ‘like hemp’.

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Evening bar-goers chill out to Habibi Funk as they recharge before the headliners (Picture: Author’s own)

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The crowd sits down in the sun to soak in Arooj Aftab’s haunting set (Picture: Author’s own)

There’s much more than rock to see. Electronic sets include dubstep mainstay Joy Orbison and DJ Habibi Funk, offering up a tantalising mix of Arabic music, jazz, funk and disco. But better than any DJ is Pakistani jazz minimalist Arooj Aftab, who transforms the main stage with ethereal music that washes over the audience — many of whom are lying down in the grass — like the afternoon sun. The melodies she weaves are delicate and fleeting, but come together to create a rich sound that haunts and soothes. Not that the revellers nearby would know it. ‘They always put me next to this techno s***,’ Aftab jokes.

Back indoors, in the Moth Club X DMY tent, Gilla Band, formerly known as Girl Band, put their guitars through abuse in an efficient set, frontman Dara Kiely standing stock-still, Laser-focused, even while he yells. There’s a rendition of the always astounding Lawman — an endless, shapeshifting, path of crunching guitar, scuzz and screaming, shaped by winding-downs and ramping-ups like tides.

The apocalypse party vibe approaches its dizzying height with the doom-laden Belarusian new wavers Molchat Doma, meaning ‘houses are silent’. Black braces-clad frontman Egor Shkutko is positively eel-like as he creeps and slithers around the stage, uniformly glaring. The soaring synth melodies are catchy as hell and contain a euphoria that has the crowd enraptured. But Shkutko’s deep, serious vocals, channelling Ian Curtis, smothers the music with darkness that makes it much more interesting. It tunnels down into the bones.

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Frontman Shkutko’s donning a goth summer fit as he gives the music some deep-voiced doomy edge (Picture: Author’s own)

Experimental pop singer Caroline Polachek is closing the main stage, but the alt headline option is Californian rock legends Osees, and it’s a no-brainer.

Frontman John Dwyer has formidable stage presence and never loses sight of the audience. And at turns garage , noise, hardcore, grunge and electro, the furious set’s energy never lets up.

Neither do the individual songs, lengthened by guitar solos that seem fuelled by pure love of playing. Double-duty on percussion means the audience is treated to twice as much drum as other bands — why don’t more groups do this? — and the two freakishly good drummers sometimes play the same beat, matching each other exactly.

It’s an electrifying end to the night, a reckless sea of headbangers and crowd-surfers lost in reverie along with the band, who surely must be about to drop to the floor. But they make it off the stage, and the audience makes the trains home. No tents here, just plenty of intensity.

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There’s double drum kits in store for Osees fans as the alternative headline set begins (Picture: Author’s own)

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Guitar held almost aloft throughout, Dwyer is a bundle of endless energy in the furious gig (Picture: Author’s own)

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