It’s no slight to Wilderness Festival that one of its greatest pleasures is saying goodbye to it. A 30-minute walk from its main field takes you to the local Charlbury train station, a journey that finds you passing disused train tracks, babbling brooks, stone cottages and enormous fields of wheat. It’s the sort of England that Cameron Diaz moved to in The Holiday, or a place so chocolate-box beautiful that if a grisly murder happened here, we’d all be hearing about it for decades. Isn’t the natural world and everything in it so utterly, utterly gorgeous?
By design or not, this is what Wilderness does to a person. You go in a big-city misery-guts and leave pretty much the same, if just with a new and exciting fondness for foliage. This is a four-day event in the bucolic Oxfordshire countryside that encourages you to meditate, luxuriate and rot (serenely), with saunas on hand, massage chairs next to the loaded brownie stand, and champagne-battered fish on the menu. There’s also, if you squint, some music.
Wilderness – if you hadn’t got the gist already – is Britain’s bougiest festival, a reputation so well-established by this point that it comes as no surprise to stumble upon a vendor here selling outdoor pizza ovens. There’s no disguising the luxe, frou-frou commerciality of it all – Disney, Nespresso and Disaronno are among the many companies with installations on-site – and Wilderness, to its genuine credit, doesn’t really bother to. This is not a festival that would insist that its great-grandfather was born in a dustbin and worked really, really hard to become a multimillionaire, actually – it would just offer you an ostrich burger and complimentary yoga mat and call it a day.
Families naturally adore it. All weekend, tiny children run free across vast swathes of immaculate greenland, scream from the seats of rotating swing rides, and rotate on ferris wheels. By night, parents dress up in their sparkliest festival clobber to gyrate and yelp, as if they haven’t been let out of the house since 2005. The music is of a similar bent: Orbital careen through dazzling Nineties trance-pop on the Friday, inspiring the biggest cheers when they launch into a never-officially-released banger that samples the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”. A day later, Supergrass wax nostalgic on the 30 years since they released the Britpop classic I Should Coco, which they play in full alongside 1999’s riotous Bowie riff “Pumping on Your Stereo” and a handful of their B-sides (“We used to do those in the Nineties,” jokes frontman Gaz Coombes).
Prolific Noughties bop-deliverers Basement Jaxx sign off the festival on Sunday with a further trip down memory lane, along with a frenetic, confident set of loud pop-rock by Wet Leg. Outside of a DJ set by Australian duo Confidence Man and lovely Friday-evening folk by Scotland’s Jacob Alon, they serve as one of the few name acts here that feel at all contemporary. Perhaps speaking to the dearth of available festival headliners this year, the bill is weighted heavily on DJs spinning through old hits – by weekend’s end, I think I’ve heard enough of Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” to last a lifetime. And it’s noticeable how unusual it is to hear actual voices on stage. If Billy Bragg seems to haunt Glastonbury, Wilderness seems haunted by Jamie Oliver’s Spotify algorithm – there’s lots of wordless acid-jazz, chill-out pop and dinner-party ditties; mood-music reigns supreme, from the atmospheric wailing of Aurora (think a rockier Enya) to the dreamy death rattles of the French duo Air.
I’m not sure Wilderness is entirely as relaxed as billed – between the constant bag searches, laddish and bantering security guards, and cornered-off VIP areas you only realise aren’t for you once you’ve been ordered to back away from them, it’s tricky to feel wholly at ease. And until the music begins in the evenings, it’s a seemingly endless cycle of wandering, sunbathing and drinking beneath the most beautiful trees you’ve seen in your life. But I suppose that’s its own kind of bliss, isn’t it?
