Electric Picnic review: Saturday

The almighty banshee howl from Pink Floyd’s ‘Great Gig In The Sky’ is the first thing to hit Hot Press ears on Saturday, delivered with flawless precision by the Trinity Orchestra’s Karen Cowley. Thanks to the classical collective’s boundless energy, it’s the perfect pants-kick to propell us back into the festival spirit.
Globetrotting Dubliners The Cast Of Cheers play to the first packed-out tent of the day, crowning a frantic set with a thunderous rendition of Family album track ‘Marso Sava’, complete with a mallet-flailing, foot-stomping tribal drum climax.
Over in the Crawdaddy tent, Delorentos reward some particularly energetic fans by dismantling their own set and turfing it out into the crowd, while Dexy’s impress in musicality if not in theatrics.
Wild Beasts, on the other hand, make a sun-soaked main stage massive putty in their hands, flipping between lavish Smother anthems and skyscraping earlier material, Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming’s chalk-and-cheese vocal as ever the co-stars of the show. Meanwhile, David Kitt takes us right back to 2001 with an amped-up reinterpretation of his best-known album, The Big Romance. Boasting cameos from the cream of the Irish musical crop (Katie Kim and Richie Egan to name but two), it’s a nostalgic yet contemporary set with plenty of worthwhile switches and change-ups.
SBTRKT’s almost iconic dub pop hit ‘Wildfire’ gets a crunchy remix in the Electric Arena, as Aaron Jerome and his musical partner in crime Sampha are left with the task of replicating a massive, star-studded album with only four hands. The result is clever, experimental and dizzyingly fun. Next, Kiwi alt. pop starlet Kimbra gives a masterclass in pizzazz over on the Crawdaddy stage. Part torch singer, part mad scientist, she quickly and effortlessly converts a crowd that perhaps hasn’t copped that she’s that girl from the Gotye song, who fall hook, line and sinker for her head-spinning vocal loops and outrageous move-busting.
On the opposite side of the pop spectrum, electronic duo Solar Bears have arranged a very special performance in the Little Big Tent, bulking up their dreamy-cum-banging sound with drums, bass, guitar and keys. Veering from breezy and delicate to bold and bouncy, their shapeshifting set is an all-out triumph.
Given the creativity elsewhere, a perfectly tight set from instrumental behemoth Explosions In The Sky struggles to make an impression, while a rousing political battle cry that only the great Patti Smith could muster gets punters in a rowdy mood in the all-too-small Crawdaddy Tent. Howling guitar solos, impassioned poetic interludes and expertly-delivered folk spirituals: this show has it all. Thanks to Smith’s enduring charisma, songs like ‘Because The Night’ sound as wild and important as ever. Meanwhile, material from the forthcoming Villagers album sees Conor O’Brien move in a rockier and more forceful direction, thanks to lots of retro, jangling guitars and even a handful of full-on freak-out moments.
For reasons I have not yet determined, The Horrors and Ireland just can’t seem to get it together. The last time my path crossed with that of the Southend On Sea rockers, an ancy Florence + The Machine crowd were cutting them absolutely no slack; now they’re in direct competition with the biggest act of the weekend (the extent to which The Cure raised a non-existent roof at the Main Stage is detailed on the right). Not ones to let the lack of a moshpit get them down, Faris Badwan and company deliver a typically impressive mix of edgy theatrics and stylised goth rock.
The remarkable musical harmony of hip hop’s best-loved band The Roots has never been in question, but even by their exceedingly high standards, the Philly collective have pulled out all the stops in the Electric Arena tonight. Not content with mastering their instruments to an embarrassing level (drummer Questlove Tweets with one hand and holds a groove with the other, while guitarist Captain Kirk leaps into double leg high kicks between chords), they keep our hearts beating with synchronised dance moves and infectious crowdplay. An extended performance of ‘You Got Me’ with a flabbergasted audience member singing lead vocals is one of the set’s many magical moments. Over in the Cosby tent, Grimes is getting just as much love from the crowd, outdoing her own Forbidden Fruit set earlier in the year with squirmtastic male dancers and a scattering of balloons.
At the main stage, Orbital exercise their tried-and-tested formula of marvelous glitches and incredible moving doohickeys, while Squarepusher premieres a gamechanging live set-up that marries the worlds of sight and sound in an entirely new way. Smartypants that he is, rather than connecting what we see to what we hear, Tom Jenkinson has rigged his set so that the beats give the visuals life. The effect is positively zombifying, as, his trademark breakneck electronic sorcery intact, he punctuates each throb with a monochrome on-screen explosion. It’s only right that Picnic’s busiest and most provocative day of music ends with a bang.