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Wilderness Festival review — from the sublime to the ridiculous

Further proof that British live music is neck-deep in a big Nineties revival, the latest edition of the Wilderness Festival fielded a retro-heavy bill dominated by acts from the Britpop decade, with Supergrass, Orbital, Air and the recently reactivated Basement Jaxx headlining over the weekend. Nestled deep in the rolling woodland of Cornbury Park, a former royal hunting ground owned by the Tory peer Baron Rotherwick, Wilderness is a laidback Cotswolds carnival with an inescapably posh reputation. How posh? Put it this way: no other music festival has a Fortnum and Mason picnic stall, or its own cricket pitch. Even the symbolic stick figures on the gents toilets were wearing bow ties this year. Boasting more Michelin stars than pop stars, Wilderness is also a big food and wellness event. Beyond the music, the weekend menu was thick with pop-up banqueting halls, luxury spa treatments, and guest appearances by prize-winning chefs including Prue Leith, Angela Hartnett, Rohit Ghai and Tom Sellers. This year the rapper-turned-foodie Professor Green even co-hosted a bespoke Sunday feast with the snappy title I Used To Rave But Now I Roast. • Read more music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next Overstuffed with DJ sets and novelty party bands, the patchy bill at Wilderness was emphatically not pitched at cutting-edge music connoisseurs. That said, there were some genuine gems among the younger performers, notably the nonbinary Scottish singer-songwriter Jacob Alon, who stunned a late-night audience with luminous finger-picking guitar and tremulous, gorgeous, piercingly emotional vocals. Alon was also charmingly funny, concluding an earnest rumination on the challenges of being queer with the dry quip: 'Anyway, this is a song about Grindr and poppers.' • The UK's most fun wellness weekenders Another breakthrough artist, the Mancunian spoken-word rapper Antony Szmierek, won over Wilderness with infectiously bouncy grooves and deadpan lyrical snapshots, saluting his Manchester roots with a lively rendition of New Order's True Faith. A chart-topping superstar in her native Norway, Aurora Aksnes — who performs simply as Aurora — also radiated enjoyably quirky Nordic Pixie Dream Girl energy, balancing comically earnest save-the-world sermons with bombastic folk-pop songs that sounded like Kate Bush doing Eurovision. A highlight among the headliners, the Parisian chill-out veterans Air delivered their superbly designed audio-visual show, launched to great acclaim last year, performing inside a rectangular lounge-style stage with a retro-futuristic sci-fi feel. Bulking up their fragrant dream-pop with a live drummer, Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel added welcome new layers of crunch and crackle to their usual easy-listening tastefulness. They were surpassed by another Nineties electro duo, Orbital, whose ageless techno-pop anthems galloped along on sampled vocal snippets of Stephen Hawking, Greta Thunberg, the Spice Girls and more. This was Wilderness at its best, the sublime and the ridiculous in one unifying, exhilarating rave-rock package. ★★★★☆ Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews