The Secret Garden Party, in the Cambridgeshire countryside, is a bifurcated experience. Indie rock in daylight hours competes with the sunlit uplands of house music, the latter largely outmuscling the former.
The Pagoda stage at any time over the weekend has hundreds of hopefuls in the queue craving access to an Ibiza beach bar simulator on the lip of a reservoir. The Drop and The Scullion stages provide the second and third choices for an incontestably vivified crowd keen on putting the legwork in early doors.
By dusk, however, the main stage headliners temporarily unify the tribes. Headliners are scored out on the on-site lineup posters but, like an abstract Wordle, edges of letters could be made out to spell Self Esteem on Thursday, Kae Tempest on Friday, London Grammar on Saturday and Metronomy on Sunday.
None of that dampened the rumours that hermitic enigmas Sault and the Chemical Brothers were going to headline. Spoiler: they didn’t. As with Glastonbury, the lineup is almost immaterial given most of the audience want to catapult themselves into pounding house most of the day and all of the night.
But in the unforgiving glare of daylight, Deep Tan bring math-goth and songs about adults cosplaying as animals (“This would be the perfect festival for furries,” says singer Wafah Dufour). Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning’s deadpan lyrics about the beautifully mundane multiplied through Emo Philips facial twitches seems to spook some tentative trippers. Dubliner Orla Gartland’s post-grunge indie pop, meanwhile, powers through a cycle of emotions. “The next one is angry,” she says halfway through. “Are you up for getting angry with me?” Surprisingly, many are.
