THIS SITE HAS BEEN ARCHIVED AND CLOSED.

The rain fell and there were considerable queues for the toilets, but these twin disappointments couldn’t mask the fact that the second Field Day festival, held in London’s Victoria Park on August 9, was a vast improvement on last year’s event in terms of organisation. Some may argue the bill this time around wasn’t quite as strong – last year saw Liars, Battles, Justice and Chromeo wow the crowd – but highlights remained plentiful, as DiS’s team of on-site scribes discovered.

Photo evidence: Lucy Johnston and Owen Richards

Written apologies: Alex Denney, Kev Kharas, Samuel Strang, Luke Turner, Charles Ubaghs

Foals

Pray you never get close enough to witness this, but for all the afrobeat claims and counter-claims concerning Foals, they make this writer want to dance like it was Madness blaring out those speaker stacks, not these floppy-fringed horsemen of the afrocalypse. Primarily, though, they make us want to dance, and all the Dave Sitek production jobs in the world can’t change the fact that taking this band as seriously as they seem to be nowadays would be like trying to successfully inhabit cardboard scenery. That said, they’re on home turf tonight and looking magisterial with it, so as long as they keep the BPM euphorically high we’ll happily submit to their flailings. Album number two, however, could prove a trickier beast to tame. AD

The Mae Shi

LA’s The Mae Shi are a welcome relief from the elements as we stumble into the Adventures Close to Home tent. Like their fellow Los Angelenos No Age, the band play the part of welcoming hosts as they invite the audience to their rollicking party with a barrage of fist-pumping screams. Nursery school style games are encouraged when a large, multi-coloured parachute is passed into the audience and it’s all topped off by the sight of a crowd surfing guitarist never once missing his part while being held aloft by the huddled masses beneath him. The Mae Shi do everything they can to smash through the barrier that separates artist from audience and, all in all, they succeed. For the water-logged among us, it’s a punk-fuelled reminder that when push comes to shove, a couple of screams and an electrifying dose of onstage energy (as Les Savy Fav also prove later on) are all you need to renew the spirits. CU

of Montreal

The prescription funk of Hissing Fauna, You Are The Destroyer still seems to be order of the day for of Montreal, whose main stage set is dominated by interminable closer ‘The Past Is A Grotesque Animal’. Well I say interminable, but really I mean ‘best thing they’ve ever done’, Kevin Barnes surveying the rapt throng like a clown contemplating the void in colourful garb and crudely applied rouge. Backed by that sinister, krautish guitar figure and a minimal procession of “oohs”, wallowing in another man’s self-pity has rarely been this hypnotically good. Some of the band’s more fitful fancies are somewhat lost to the indifferent sound – no doubt abetted by the appalling weather – but when of Montreal really bring the pain we’re lapping up every second. AD

Telepathe

According to past reports, Brooklyn’s Telepathe are a notoriously hit or miss affair in the live arena with their abundance of ideas often outstripping their technical reach. Of course, the past is the past and it turns out that today is not just a new day: it’s a revelation. Minus a few hiccups with their equipment at the start, the X chromosome dominated trio perform like the brilliant, bastard children of J.G. Ballard. Clad in black as they stand behind the strands of wires and technology spread out before them, Telepathe give us a glimpse of a pop future that confidently fuses kraut jams, urban beats and Gang Gang Dance-style rhythms into a hypnotic, droning whole. If this is the sound of what’s to come, then we certainly have something to look forward to.* CU*

Wild Beasts

One of the improvements of Field Day 2008 is that the organisers have made a success of the village fete feel to things. The Otter ale is pleasant enough, and people seem to be taking to the sack racing with gusto. If there’s any band that suit the hardy joy of a drizzly British fete then it’s Wild Beasts, who seem currently to be on the verge of attaining the wider recognition they so richly deserve (go on, give Limbo, Panto your Pluto vote here, y’hear). While their set at Field Day might not quite reach heights of last week’s exuberant outing to the 100 Club, it still triumphs over the all-pervading drizzle with aplomb. Hayden Thorpe’s (newly shorn) lips and snarling falsetto delivering eloquent tales of a damp England that’s one-third reality, and the rest a misty imagined land where the 21st Century is still announced via block-printed sandwich boards and gnarly faced criers with a penchant for an old-fashioned sort of gurn at the weekend. After they’ve sung that we’re all jolly good fellows and departed with a splendid ‘His Grinning Skull’, the uninitiated are to be heard mumbling among themselves that that was quite incredible, but they can’t exactly put their digits on why. Wild Beasts’ indefatigable presence sends me scurrying off to the shooting stall where, suitably inspired, I blast enough ducks to win a toffee apple. Jolly good fellows, indeed. LT

Laura Marling

By the time Laura Marling takes to the main stage the drizzle is coming at her sideways. The urge to shower the teenage fawn with sympathy almost overwhelms, but that’s quickly shunted the way of empathy by songs that fight every drop, even if at times here wistful folk matches the pallor of her complexion. Beginning with ‘Ghosts’, Marling plays an abridged set of the stand-out cuts from debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim and elsewhere (such as the building, brooding ‘Blackberry Stone’) that rewards the hardier hoods and cagoules left to soak up a sound that’s taken at wind’s whim and bereft of a keyboard player stuck somewhere on the M25. Whatever your take on her pastoral strum, tracks like ‘Cross Fingers’ shadow well her preternatural talent and loiter longer in the mind than the half hour or so she braves the elements and a braying crowd onstage. KK

Simian Mobile Disco

Whether it’s the rain or because the Foals balloon has begun to deflate, getting into the Beetroot Field tent for Simian Mobile Disco’s headlining set is like doing battle with a conference of soggy rugger-buggers where pep pills have been served alongside the morning coffee. Fortunately, little plastic rectangles are obtained that give us a perfect view from the side of the stage, even if the ramp up makes the rhythmical moving of feet a perilous occupation. Much is made of the contemporary scene’s fusion of the sonic aesthetics and dynamics of leftfield guitar music and dance. But where many glue the two together in some cumbersome craft experiment that falls to bits as soon as you try to shake a leg, Simian Mobile Disco tonight unleash a raving behemoth of sound that sits, uniquely, in entirely its own sunlit plain, waving cheerily to Soulwax and LCD on the purple-hued mountains over yonder. James Ford and James Shaw prowl around their massive bank of analogue machines and gizmos as madmen technicians about to do something mischievous with the Hadron Collider. And what joyous mischief this is - complaints about bad sound have no bearing here as Hackney’s soil is shooken and atoms tremble, clean and pure, into the ears and pulsing minds of a tent full of dancing bodies, their arms raised, feet free of soggy earth. LT

Emperor Machine

A brain in a barrel of ballbags, the quietly mighty Emperor Machine roll into Field Day’s Adventures in the Beetroot Field tent like the few men with sense on their side at any given point of a Shoreditch evening. Stale indie-electro surrounds on the bill and thrusts like a redundant boyfriend. For now and forevermore it can go shove. Going cosmic, motorik flag planted firm and familiar in the ruddy earth, main man Andy Meecham bothers himself behind decks like Oz leaving guitar-cruising comrades to build ziggurats in the distance between sounds ‘real’ and those imagined in the minds of the audience. Living up to the Vertical Tones & Horizontal Noise prescribed in a 2006 long-player, things build steady, a cruise of suites and kraut-sweat that, depending on what lurks in the darker corners of minds clamouring here from the cold wet, rouses spumes of appreciation from heads tiring of Velcro-scenester hustle. KK

Les Savy Fav

Running amok round this sodden circus out comes the court jester and, regrettably, the storm clouds again as Tim Harrington bounds onstage in the sort of mackintosh only perverts and psychopaths wear with the ‘The Equestrian’ starting up as he bounds. As ever Les Savy Fav are the spectacle they always are but, perhaps after so many appearances this year, they increasingly feel less the exotic bird of old that would occasionally fly in for all to marvel at, and more a regular sideshow. Twinned with the fact the Brooklyn cadets’ gusto is gutted by the timid sound levels being swept away in the wind, this is by no means their showcase set of the summer. That this is one of the finest performances of the day is testament to their brilliance but, as umbrella’s head back up and ‘Raging In The Plague Age’ showers down, there’s a sense that the party they bring has been somewhat drenched. SS

The Field

A break in play as the rain recedes and instead of the downpour, cold heartless sheets of splintering techno hail down from overhead. Axel Willner has often struggled to capture the captivating zest of From Here We Go… on his own but, having roped in a ‘live’ drummer to hammer away, never did The Field ever seem the sort of act to play daytime main stage slots. The Swedish maestro’s magnetic strokes are a needed break in play as his sample focused craft kick in like bouts of Stockholm Syndrome, familiar faces (Kate Bush, Fleetwood Mac) all knitted in somewhere. It doesn’t quite subsume all as much as it should in the early evening hours, but provides the anesthetising wash that all wanted. SS

DiScuss: Looking back to Saturday, who were your favourite acts at Field Day 2008? Did you stick to the tents or get soaked like DiS?

Early bird tickets to Field Day 2009 are available now - click to the festival's official site for information