Secret Garden Party 2009 @ a secret location, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire

Just to up the unique selling points in an increasingly crowded festival market, this year’s Secret Garden Party attendees have been nominally divided into two tribes – Eden and Babylon – and have been asked to dress accordingly. On arrival onsite, we were therefore unsurprised to see grown men dressed as snakes and apples, a lot of oversized fig leaves and several human Hanging Gardens.

So yes, it’s another fancy-dress festival. But somehow SGP gets away with not seeming as self-consciously kerayzee as, say, Bestival by dint of a music programme erring decisively away from novelty acts and ironic curios – and assuredly towards hype-free class.

They Came From The Stars (I Saw Them) should have been our first act of SGP ’09, but according to the sound engineer they arrived at the second stage having “forgotten their instruments”. As such, our first band proper are Manchester livewires Ten Bears, who set us up absolutely peachy like for three days of cider and smiles with tunes, attitude and banter aplenty. “This is a song a bout Tim’s mum – it’s called ‘Tim’s Mum’,” trills singer Sam, before tearing into an irresistible spazzpop song we suspect has naff-all to do with the keyboardist’s mother but makes us dance anyway. More please.

White Rabbits offer surprising thrills on the main stage, the bookish New Yorkers coming across like robust cousins of Vampire Weekend and Little Ones – and how could that be anything but irresistible? New single ‘Percussion Gun’ is especially impressive. Back on the second stage, The XX (not XX Teens, as we’d thought) are as introverted and introspective as SGP gets. Rousing party fare it ain’t, but their “standing still and doing sod-all” stagecraft only serves to make us concentrate more on their defiantly retro post-punk minimalism.

Friday ends with a Phoenix/Jarvis Cocker double whammy on the main stage. The French groovesters up the carnival mood, while King Cocker is swamped by the weekend’s first stage invasion. With the best will in the world, we all know he wasn’t booked because everyone loves the new material, but ‘Black Magic’, ‘Angela’ and ‘I Never Said I Was Deep’ hit hard and we’re all swept up in, well, the Jarvness of it all.

Hafdis Huld sees in Saturday with appropriate gentle motions at sunlight, the inscrutably bewitching Icelandic pixie coyly charming the hungover and still up alike with pedestrian tales made captivating. Songs about belly-button piercing and vampires are the norm, but while the songs are undeniably twee, you still get the feeling she’d knee you in the nuts if you took the piss. So we won’t.

While failing to see Little Comets, yet another frustrating scheduling second stage re-jig means we bump into Rosie Oddie And The Odd Squad instead. (Apparently they’re changing their name soon, but there’s no doubt we’ll hear from her again whatever she’s called.) Bill’s daughter’s something of a revelation – spiky, powerful pop delivered with almost palpable relish. Which is more than can be said for a flu-ridden Noah & The Whale, who battle not-especially manfully through a short set before seemingly just giving up and sidling off. Shame.

Atrocious pun aside, grubby disco warriors Chew Lips are 1000x more exciting later on, ballsy singer Tigs prowling the stage like a coquettish shoeless meerkat. ‘Salt Air’ and especially ‘Solo’ should by rights see them careering past La Roux and into electro-pop ubiquity, but let’s see how it goes.

Main stage headliners Rodrigo y Gabriela don’t stand a chance in the face of the fireworks and flaming Tower of Babel (in the middle of the lake around which SGP’s built), but Dan Black’s 1.30am set on the second stage raises the roof. Why this man isn’t yet a daytime radio superstar it’s hard to fathom, although debut album Un’s irksome title can’t be helping. Anyway, ‘Alone’ raises blissed-out smiles and unlikely dancing from all quarters – new fans made tonight, that’s for sure.

Since Dan Black’s beat-heavy dance-off led to hours of ridiculously cramped but fun hands-in-the-air action in a tent called, by all accounts, The Officer’s Mess, it’s no surprise that Alessi’s Ark suited our ailing bonces perfectly come Sunday lunchtime. Singer Alessi Laurent-Marke’s otherworldly singing accent veers from West Country to Vectron despite hailing from Hammersmith, but ‘Over The Hill’ is as beguiling as it’s whimsical.

Cocosuma, One Little Plane and Those Dancing Days serve a triple decker of similarly soothing purposes back on the main stage. The former offer a serviceable impression of what a decade ago would’ve been called Loungecore, OLP’s self-conscious Four Tet-assisted glitch-folk slowly prods us into a state of full wakefulness, and Swedish tweecore fivesome TDD finally get us onto our weary feet with a frenetic take on ‘Home Sweet Home’.

In fact, today’s top draws seems to be almost completely female-fronted, and we find ourselves back at the second stage for winsome Brooklyn keyboarding trio Au Revoir Simone, whose affectionate tributes to German techno and, well, Stereolab are enthusiastically received by what must be 80% slack-jawed men. Slow Club next, and it’s a quiet delight to see and hear the Sheffield country folksters growing up and flexing their musical guns in public. The album’s a corker, and ‘Because We’re Dead’ is genuinely cheering.

To redress the girl-heavy balance, we try in vain to see Toddla T in the Ninja Tune tent, but goddammit he’s either running late or gone AWOL, so after half an hour of faff we’re back at the second stage and hoping Brighton’s The Mummers will salve our frustration. And how! An eight-piece (maybe even nine, it’s actually hard to tell) bursting with horns, double bass, viola, trumpet, xylophone and two percussionists, it’s all orchestrated by mistress of ceremonies, Raissa Khan Panni. It’s a beautiful noise they make, although sometimes there’s so much going on it leans slightly towards cacophony – but sometimes that works just fine.

Raissa, who older readers might remember had something of a solo career a few years back, holds the gang together, conducting as she sings as she plinks on the glockenspiel with the air of a multi-tasking Hogwarts head girl. Her singular voice adds to the Victorian carnival-esque feel of proceedings, imbuing ‘March of the Dawn’ and ‘Wake Me Up’ with a giddy “Björk does The Sound of Music” charm. A triumphant closing cover of Passion Pit’s ‘Sleepyhead’ only serves to prove that the Massachusetts residents’ songs sound far better when they’re not involved at all.

Secret Garden Party 2009, then: while not a vintage year for this (or any other) festival in terms of line-up, crikey they don’t half know how to throw a party.

Charlie Ivens

Originally published on the-fly.co.uk