Review introduction

If you’re a large corporation, staging a festival is currently very much the ‘in vogue’ thing to do. The market researchers have spent years tinkering away, like monkeys trying to write Hamlet, in search of that elusive pitch that’ll enable them to ram their product down the throats of unwitting consumers, like babies being force-fed processed food, and it seems doing it under the guise of a festival is their most effective rouse yet.

Sometimes it works - the V festivals have, to their credit, managed to balance gratuitous product placement with staging a well-organised, atmospheric event, but from there on the march of corporate branded festivals quickly spirals downhill. So for every Glastonbury and Reading we get a Bud Rising and Bacardi Live and for every lovingly crafted festival of tradition we get a cynically concocted ‘shove some bands in a field and give it a title’ impostor.

The arguments for and against corporate sponsorship and its levels of involvement with an event are in constant debate and no clear answers or agreed standards have been realised. As a result, it’s important to consider each festival individually and not allow pre-conceptions of over-branding spoil potentially fantastic days out.

However, it is hard not to be sceptical when every tenth person you encounter upon entering a festival arena is wearing a Nokia t-shirt and offering you the chance to win a ringtone for your mobile phone, as it is with the inaugural 02 Wireless Festival. It is also telling that, whilst a huge 02 enclosure in the centre of the Hyde Park arena is up and running from the time gates open, the main stage had still not even completed construction until late in the afternoon, meaning all but the final three acts on the first day perform on a stage filled with giant holes for un-erected television screens and suffer from poor sound engineering.

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