Wide Awake 2025

The inaugural Wide Awake festival in 2021 was my first after lockdown. Ever since, it’s heralded the start of festival season for me. Excellently curated, with great vibes and great beer, they also seem to luck out with the weather every year when compared to their other Brockwell Park festival mates.

This year, the Wide Awake team’s run-up to the festival was anything but lucky. First, with the controversy around headliners Kneecap and the call for their show to be cancelled. Then, the successful legal challenge from local campaign groups demanded all shows in the park were cancelled. The one thing in their hands, and to their benefit, is their choice to remain as the only independently owned music festival held in Brockwell Park. The rest faced protests and, in Field Day’s case, large-scale artist pull-outs, due to the unethical investment choices of their parent company KKR.

But the show does go on and once the gates are open, the festival is in the hands of the artists, the crowd and the excellent weather. Who better to capitalise on the latter than the Don, Donny Benét. The Australian’s louche lounge funk is served with a huge dollop of self awareness, grooving the sunshine kissed crowd into the day with smiles on their faces.

Due to either a last-minute timings change or my own incompetence, I arrived with an almost-finished vegan gyros (good stuff from What-a-Pitta) to a crowd streaming away from Dazed Club at the end of Channel Beads’ set. Either way, I was staying here in the increasingly crowded tent for Marie Davidson. Early afternoon Friday techno will take a while to get into the bones of the crowd, but the set built to an exhilarating mid-set peak. The still-underrated classic Work It closed the main part of the set brilliantly, before she was joined on stage by deBasement for a raucous version of their new single, Juicy Juice.

The change of timings did give us a chance to pop out of the tent to see a bit of Getdown Services. Sadly, the size of the stage didn’t give us much of a chance to hear them. We vicariously enjoyed their set through the clearly ecstatic front section of the crowd, before heading back to Dazed Club for Fcukers. Some artists just exude a sense that they’re going places, and these guys have it in spades. That’s not an arrogance or rockstar persona, just an accomplished stage presence and consistently good tunes creating a sense amongst everyone that they won’t be playing in the tent next time. Closer Bon Bon sets a daytime peak not to be topped until the headliners.

Though it was a shame to miss Erol Alkan b2b Optimo (Espacio), live music felt like the order of the day, so it was CMAT’s time to shine. Another artist who’s clearly on the path to stardom in short order, her infectious personality pulls the crowd through the set of midtempo country-pop. Though, for me, the music doesn’t quite hit, there’s no doubting the impact she has on the crowd.

So the time had come… After a flurry of media outrage and criminal charges, Kneecap take to the stage. The political context does give the set a sense of importance that their brash and mischievous music could otherwise miss, one that’s clearly felt through the supportive crowd. An early set highlight is the excellent Better Way to Live, lifted by a superb chorus from the sadly absent Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. There’s a call from the band to protest the court, though, like everything Kneecap say, the crowd understands their words in the context of who they are as a band rather than taking it literally. Though the issues are clearly important, the context is always one of irreverence and humour; even if that has, in the past, crossed a line. There are no such issues tonight though, and the time for think-pieces is over. In fact, nobody is thinking anything at all as they launch into set closer H.O.O.D.; not least myself, ending in one of the many mosh pits towards the rear, on the floor, being handed back my crushed glasses.