Wilderness Festival 2024 review: surrealism and a sensational Michael Kiwanuka

“It’s the first time I’ve been to this part of the country,” announces Edinburgh wunderkind DJ Barry Can’t Swim as he gazes out from the main stage. “It’s proper nice, man.”

Wilderness Festival, held on the prim and proper Cornbury Park estate on the edge of the Cotswolds, has a reputation for being one of the poshest in the country. More than just a music fest – or less, depending on your perspective – it’s almost equally focused on tunes, talks, food and oddball entertainment. Wander around at night and you’ll find three women in pink cowboy hats (aka DJ collective Femme Again) lip-syncing to Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman!’ opposite a sports ground where two teams are having a vigorous dance-off over who’ll go first in a game of dodgeball.

Against this backdrop, it doesn’t really seem so weird that electro-funkers Ibibio Sound Machine spend Friday evening hyping up an audience that includes two punters dressed as lobsters, or that a guy in a loincloth gets his groove on to Barry Can’t Swim’s emotional house. Even returned ‘90s dance giants Faithless’ bonkers heavy metal cover of Joy Division‘s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, which segues into throbbing house before the two styles merge in mind-melting fashion, sounds perfectly normal here.

Is Wilderness as posh as people say? General camping tickets are £278 before booking fees, which makes it cheaper than Reading & Leeds, and the food trucks are only as expensive as those at most festivals. There are boujie ‘dining experiences’ and suchlike on offer, but you don’t have to book those. So it’s only really ‘middle-class’ if you have preconceived ideas of what middle and working-class people like to do. Us plebs like nice stuff too, you know?

In any case, no-one’s too stuck-up to resist Alison Goldfrapp, who demands the audience “get [their] arses moving” to her liquid funk on Saturday night, the band blasting the Van Halen-style synth of ‘Rocket’ and drafting in a keytar – always a good sign – for a super-slinky ‘Ooh La La’. Over on the Atrium stage, London DJ Jordss plays to a small but appreciative audience that swells when she drops Diana Ross’ ‘Upside Down’ (the communal spirit is only mildly interrupted when someone dressed as an alien chases their pal through the middle of the dancefloor).

Easily the musical highlight of the weekend, though, is psychedelic soul don Michael Kiwanuka, a quietly subversive figure whose songs sound like lost ‘70s masterpieces that tackle police brutality (‘Hero’) and racial identity. The audience is packed on the main stage and as serene strings give way to a distortion-drenched ‘Hard to Say Goodbye’; it’s the beginning of what feels like a ‘Glastonbury moment’ at the wrong festival. ‘Hero’ crashes out in a squall of feedback and a howling solo tears through epic closer ‘Love & Hate’, the heady atmosphere answering the question Kiwanuka posed in earnest at the top of this sensational set: “Are you ready for some soul music?”

Indeed, hip-hop titans De La Soul cheerily demolish any faint prospect of a Sunday evening wind-down with a fuzzily feel-good set that sees rapper Posdnuos lead an enthusiastic crowd chant of “potholes in my lawn”, which probably isn’t actually much of a problem in the Cotswolds. After disco maven Jessie Ware breezily declares Wilderness her “favourite new festival”, it’s up to future-facing electronic duo Bicep to close the main stage with their hyped CHROMA show, an audio-visual bonanza that pulses with glitching, kaleidoscopic visuals and beats like controlled detonations.

Hugely ambitious and drawing perhaps the youngest main stage audience of the weekend, it’s a fitting end to a do that’s as much about the party as it is its immersive quirks. New this year, for example, is The Riddle, a dance tent and bar built around trees that sprout up to the rafters, which leads out to a chintzy garden populated by people dressed up as characters from Alice in Wonderland. This is the meeting point of the two sides of Wilderness.

By night the festival is a party paradise, with punters flocking to The Valley, a hedonistic strip deep in woodland that leads up to a triangular stage pumping out house and techno. And then there’s House of Sublime, a burlesque tent that hosts what can perhaps best be described as a BDSM dominatrix show. Yes, there’s cage dancing. By day, though, you’ll find families taking dips in the tree-lined lake, which is also not a bad way to shake a hangover (though you’ll probably want to give the Family Field a wide berth).

Obviously, with Michael Kiwanuka and Bicep as the big draws, however great they are, this isn’t a festival with a superstar musical line-up to rival that of, say, Reading & Leeds. If you’re here solely for the tunes, it’s probably a four star weekend. But if you’re looking for pure escapism – be it hedonistic or family friendly – it’s a five. Wilderness: it’s proper nice, man.

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