Wide Awake festival is a punk voyage round the globe from a Brixton park

Despite the summer funk and power pop, the acts that really make a mark at London’s Wide Awake festival are grungy, doom-laden and very loud.

There’s a freeing sense of abandon, a frenzy that drives the scuzzy guitars and buzzing synths — perhaps the natural reaction after a pandemic and with the onset of summer a reminder of the ever-hotter ones looming on the horizon.

A one-day city festival is a route to outdoor gigs without the in-tent baby wipe showers. But at Saturday’s Wide Awake, it also means a mission to see as much alternative music as possible in a day — while attempting to stay, as the event’s name implores, on two feet. That’s no mean feat when the roster includes Eastern European new wave, dubstep, jazz and a lot of rock.

The Brixton shindig’s a chance to get something different, to an extent away from the usual festival sea of bucket hats and flower crowns. Aussie punks Clamm get the party started by ripping through a frenetic lunchtime gig to a packed Windmill X So Young tent. And what better band to confirm an eclectic line-up is in store than 1970s cult icons Wasted Youth? The top-hatted post-punkers look slightly dazed to be out in the rare afternoon sunshine. But they give Jealousy and Paris, France a gruff exuberance from the small Shacklewell Arms X The Gun stage.

If the old-school is represented, so is the new. Brockwell Park is transformed into a (admittedly badly signposted) Gen-Z mecca, with bubble tea and vegan fried chicken among the veritable village of food and drink. There’s even a zine fair.

Back indoors, in the Moth Club X DMY tent, Gilla Band, formerly known as Girl Band, put their guitars through abuse in an efficient set, frontman Dara Kiely standing stock-still, Laser-focused, even while he screams. There’s a rendition of the always astounding Lawman — an endless, shapeshifting, path of crunching guitar, scuzz and screaming, shaped by winding-downs and ramping-ups like tides.

The apocalypse party approaches its dizzying height with the doom-laden Belarusian new wavers Molchat Doma, meaning ‘houses are silent’. Black braces-clad frontman Egor Shkutko is positively eel-like as he creeps and slithers around the stage, uniformly glaring. The soaring synth melodies are catchy as hell and contain a euphoria that has the crowd enraptured. But Shkutko’s deep, serious vocals, channelling Ian Brown, smothers the music with darkness that makes it much more interesting. It tunnels down into the bones.

Experimental pop singer Caroline Polachek is closing the main stage, but the alt headline option is Californian rock legends Osees, and it’s a no-brainer.

Frontman John Dwyer has formidable stage presence and never loses sight of the audience. And at turns garage , noise, hardcore, grunge and electro, the furious set’s energy never lets up.

Neither do the individual songs, lengthened by guitar solos that seem fuelled by pure love of playing. Double-duty on percussion means the audience is treated to twice as much drum as other bands — why don’t more groups do this? — and the two freakishly good drummers sometimes play the same beat, matching each other exactly.

It’s an electrifying end to the night, a reckless sea of headbangers and crowd-surfers lost in reverie along with the band, who surely must be about to drop to the floor. But they make it off the stage, and the audience makes the trains home. No tents here, just plenty of intensity.

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