Wilderness festival review: Chem Bros and Fatboy Slim bring the rave

Wilderness has earned its nickname “Poshstock” for appropriate reasons. Within five minutes of arriving on site on Thursday, parents have called out for “Claus” and “August”. £200 wellies are everywhere. Long table banquets. A lakeside spa. Champagne. Talks on the monarchy and English food history. But NME wasn’t there for the middle-class madness, instead to experience what was arguably the best music line-up in the Oxfordshire festival’s history.

Confidence Man, the Aussie electro-pop duo, are early openers of The Wilderness Stage on Friday with their fizzing four-to-floor tunes and impeccably silly dance routines. ‘Boyfriend (Repeat)’ hears Janet Planet deliver monotone statements about her beau (“He says I make him nervous / But he only makes me bored”) atop funky acid house. Together with her musical partner Sugar Bones they ask the crowd to crouch down to jump after its build and release – a move that only serves to crank the energy up. ‘Holiday’ imbues a dreamy trance-like state that arrives just as the sun pokes its head out of the clouds.

Friday’s headliners The Chemical Brothers bring their big beat prowess to the main stage. The Manchester duo wed thudding techno, house and more with laser beams, colourful visuals and the giant toy robots that are now a mainstay of their set. New song ‘Live Again’ sounds huge live. Its warped shoegaze opening unfurls into twitching electro, and it’s clear from the fans’ reactions that the pair are still capable of making massive tunes decades into their career. ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ is the highlight, with lights convulsing and bodies heaving to its big beat booms.

Towards the end of each night at Wilderness is an exodus of families with young children to their camps and clubbers congregating in The Valley. Imagine the most perfect setting for a nighttime rave: a forest on the fringes of the deep, lights skipping in the sky, super sonic subwoofers staged incrementally up a hill with a triangular stage nestled at the base. TSHA later delivers a masterclass in mixing, with a high energy performance of club classics and demonic reworkings. A truly magical space in which to close the first night.

A washout on Saturday can’t dampened spirits when ‘60s-formed rockers The Zombies open the main stage. It’s astonishing just how many of their songs are inscribed indelibly in the rock cannon. ‘She’s Not There’ and ‘Time Of The Season’ are just some of the gems in a supple set by musicians heading into their 80s.

By the evening, there were fears that Christine & The Queens would continue his habit of performing a ritualistic poetry session around the release of his recent album ‘Paranoia, Angels, True Love’. Those fears were realised. Not a single song from his excellent back catalogue was played: only those from his intriguing, although a little alienating, new project. Many of these deep, dark, operatic gothic pop songs are beautiful to hear live, completed by a ghostly set of Michelangelo statues. ‘Tears Can Be So Soft’ – undoubtedly the strongest track off ‘Paranoia…’ – is a welcome crowd-pleaser that best shows off Christine’s unbelievably powerful vocals. Even so, it’s a tough set for a Saturday night headline slot.

On Sunday retro psych rockers CVC make The Jumpyard stage pop off in spits of rain. ‘Sophie’, one of the Welsh band’s songs on radio rotation, is a doozy in the vein of Pink Floyd that has one fan jerking around feverishly like he’s on his first acid trip. Sugababes hit the main stage later and one-up The Zombies with pop banger after pop banger. ‘Freak Like Me’, the sinister electro pop stomper that samples Tubeway Army, is absolutely sublime. Sugababes’ original trio – Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhán Donaghy – sound flawless, as if they never left the early ‘00s limelight. Their cover of Sweet Female Attitude’s ‘Flowers’ continues the healthy resurgence of love for UKG, with the crowd jumping to its fidgety rhythms and playful bass.

Fittingly, the best is saved until last with Fatboy Slim’s incredible closing set on The Wilderness Stage. People in the crowd said how they expected to stay for just a handful of tunes: the Brighton DJ’s big beat classic ‘Praise You’ or ‘Right Here Right Now’. But from the get-go this was no normal performance. The DJ – real name Norman Cook – clearly has a love for thick, rib-shattering beats, mashing up classics such as Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ and dotting in his own creations such as ‘Rockafeller Skank’. He cleverly introduces the first eight bars of ‘Praise You’ throughout the set before record-scratching into ‘90s rave or techno melters. Eventually he does play a reworked version of ‘Praise You’ that unites the crowd, emitting a warm glow much like the twee statements and berserk happy trippy visuals onstage. It’s the show of the weekend.

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