Field Day Festival 2010

Saturday 30 July brought Field Day 2010, trendy London's day out as Victoria Park, in the east of the capital, does a really quite passable impression of a rural idyll.

Of course, it helps if the sun is out like it was last weekend. It cooked us during the afternoon, but Field Day was at its most beautiful when the setting sun came at it side-on, beams cutting through the trees  and lighting up the dust kicked up by the thousands of party people wandering the parched fields of Victoria Park.

It may be a one-day event, but Field Day is a proper festival, with five stages competing for your attention alongside the 'Village Mentality' sports day, where among other competitions, you can – as my friend did – run a blindfold relay race carrying a water melon.

It's not an enormous site, quite easy to walk from one side to the other; but cleverly laid out so it's easy enough to lose your orientation and feel like you're lost in a much bigger event.

We wandered in mid-afternoon and lingered a little at the first stage we got to – the Village Mentality stage, a big round tent, sponsored by The Quietus rock website and hosting at that point Geordie folkster Beth Jeans Houghton.

We were tempted to stay but instead headed for the main stage – named after Eat Your Own Ears, the record label which puts on the festival.

We hit the EYOE stage in time for Lightspeed Champion, whose obvious talent won out over the poor sound quality served up by the festival's technicians. He played out the hits his growing fan-base expects, and rounded off his set with his own version of the Beach Boys' 'Don't Worry Baby'.

Elsewhere, highlights included Max Tundra - “impossibly original, creative and technically superb”, according to a friend who saw him – the only problem being, in common with a lot of the festival and presumably due to licencing issues, was that he was too quiet. But even so... “There was a bit where he seemed to toy with the crowd – playing some fairly mainstream dance music through a ridiculous instrument to get everyone dancing, just to prove he could if he wanted to, before going back to his own stuff which is generally quite a lot more obtuse and a lot harder to dance to (though I did my best).”

Simian Mobile Disco did a great job of getting the crowd going at a stupidly early time (3pm); Memory Tapes were good, but didn't have the backbone live that it has on record, and his voice wasn't great live either.

As well as the five stages – including dance tent Bugged Out – there was a smaller, 'cabaret' tent called DoYouComeHereOften?. There we caught London band Oh!gunquit with charismatic, hula-hooping lead singer Wanda Smacksome and retro rock'n'roll tunes which sounded like The Kills but with a fuller sound.

After the obligatory hog roast sandwich and cider refuel – we were in the countryside, remember – we headed back to the main stage for the impressive spectacle of Caribou, a four-piece built around Canadian musician Daniel Snaith.

The four played in a tight circle in the middle of the stage, facing in to each other, and put out a captivating, big, electronic sound. The sun was starting to set, and electro pioneers Silver Apples were just starting on the Village Mentality stage.

Since the death of co-founder and drummer Danny Taylor, surviving member Simeon Cox III plays shows alone, recreating Taylor's stripped down, driving beats with a drum machine, while minimal synth waves wash over the top, drifting in and out of harmony, at once complex and childlike, sinister yet euphoric. It's an intoxicating mix, and perhaps the best received gig of the day.

As stages wound up around the site, the two main ones – Eat Your Own Ears and Bugged Out – prepared for their finales. I was swept up in the crowd heading to see headliners Phoenix play EYOE, and night fell as we arrived during the first track.

Parisian indie pop band Phoenix seem to be properly hitting the big time, and the sizeable crowd at Field Day was certainly pleased to see them. They played a full length set to the sing-along crowd, with girls on boyfriends' shoulders and random flags and placards galore. Their tunes are easy to like, even first time around, and it left the crowd on a suitable high at the end of what had been a fun – if, as most seemed to agree, unspectacular – Field Day.