When Brockwell Park’s Wide Awake Festival launched in 2021 after COVID delayed its debut, it presented itself as a mecca for underground post-punk music, situated just half a mile from the influential Brixton Windmill venue, a factory for the next big things in British punk. A focus on exclusively new and upcoming talent as well as a progressive climate-friendly policy made it a pleasing outlier in the saturated London festival market.
For its second year, the festival’s mission statement was a little more muddled. Now set across two days, the first welcomed dance and techno heavyweights, while acts closer to the punk rock of last year played on the Saturday. This new programme, teamed with teething problems leading to delays and one stage being out of action for most of the weekend, meant it took time to settle into Wide Awake’s new identity.
“I’m so happy they approved my visa!” Peruvian DJ Sofia Kourtesis beamed during her Friday set of jubilant beats, while dance stalwarts Caribou and dynamic UK duo Overmono also proved highlights. Complete with a dazzling laser show, Bicep then showed their headliner credentials, gliding effortlessly through a set filled with thumping bass and otherworldly visuals.
With an entirely different clientele in attendance, Saturday’s rockier line-up began with North London’s Sorry, who interpolated lyrics from Louis Armstrong and Tears For Fears’ Mad World into their dark and untraditional post-punk. Later, Aussies Amyl & The Sniffers brought snotty punk anthems while ‘00s indie survivors The Horrors lived up to their chameleonic reputation, travelling from sludgy metal (Against The Blade) to euphoric trance (Something To Remember Me By).
The biggest crowd of the weekend, though, was reserved for Yard Act, possibly Britain’s brightest new hope in the punk world. Sardonic frontman James Smith lands somewhere between Jarvis Cocker and John Cooper Clarke and he led his excellent band through a set of wiry post-punk accompanied by razor-sharp social commentary.
Despite the drastically different feels to both days, it was when dance and rock overlapped that Wide Awake as a whole began to make sense. The cross-pollination of the two genres is creating some of the most interesting and cutting-edge music around at the moment, and in Friday sets from London’s PVA and Yorkshire’s Working Men’s Club, fierce techno beats rubbed up against punk elements with no care for traditional genre boundaries. It was Bristol’s SCALPING that toed this line most thrillingly though. The band’s music is as intense and bludgeoning as their name, mixing techno beats and metal guitars, and they turned half the tent into a mosh pit, the other half a dancefloor.
After a weekend that shone when boundaries melted away and genres collided, it was fitting to end the festival with Primal Scream playing their 1991 classic Screamadelica, one of the defining examples of rock and dance merging. Backed by a troupe of choral backing singers, Bobby Gillespie was on exhilarating form, with Movin’ On Up and Loaded soundtracking a blissful send-off for a festival that, after a few issues, ended up finding its place.
