I don’t know how they can afford to do this.

It’s a market place. A gigantic sprawling demographic of bait and switch. You, Mr.Punter – You Are The Quarry. Here’s your pop stars, you paid for them.

Here’s the tent you can enter, but only if one of your gang has an O2 phone and sends a text message to them. Here’s the adverts on the big screen. TEXT! NOW! TO! WIN! SOMETHING! Or not.

Here’s the cO2rner where you can submit yO2ur dreams to O2’s dream catcher, giving you the O2ppurtunity to realise what yO2ur heart desires. Unless you reach in, wondering what it is, and steal the dreams of a stranger. Naughty naughty you.

Outside the touts are taking a bath. Tickets are £40 on the door from official outlets. Otherwise, less. In an oversubscribed festival season, there’s always something on somewhere – every weekend. In the old days, there’d be Glastonbury, Reading, maybe Donnington. Now there’s Wireless at London, Wireless at Leeds, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Glastonbury, Reading (and Reading At Leeds), Download @ Donnington, T In The Park, V Festival Chelmsford, V Festival Stafford, Get Loaded In The Park, The Summer Sundae, Isle of Wight, Hyde Park Calling, Liverpool’s Pops, The Tower Of London Festival…

Even without Glastonbury, that’s a crowded summer. And that’s a summer which – a few big hitters such as V and Reading aside – sees many tickets still available even now. So much so that on the purchase page for today, there are at least two halfprice special offers in the upcoming days, and no doubt a multitude of others for other festivals. O2 must be sinking a lot of mO2ney into this, trying to glean potential customer bases, TV coverage, advertising, and hopefully get the kind of brand leverage that V-For-Virgin-Festival and T-For-Tennants-Lager-In-The-Park get. And then one day O2 will start selling soft drinks…. 

The undersold field is spartan until about 7.15 when Goldfrapp appear. Before then, Thomas Dolby offers his one man show to about 2,000 picnicking disco mum and dads, forgetting to play to his strengths : his hits. Darth Vader and his army of Stormtroopers stroll casually through the field during The Dears set, attracting more attention than the act on the main stage. Through this surreal moment – blazing sunshine, pop music, the Sith Lord himself – I learn that Stormtroopers have a “no hugging” rule. Like strippers.

On the MySpace stage, struggling and passionate emo kids in denim rock like motherfuckers. However – their assault is roughly akin to that of  an adolescent nuclear bomb, no precision or intelligence, but plenty of energy and passion. Roxanne serenades the Acoustic stage – a bandstand – to about thirty people in deckchairs, losing a war against identikit indie in the nearby XFM stage. If you stand halfway between the two, it creates a curious, imaginary band that actually sound pretty good, like some kind of angry Cocteau Twins. Remember when you would be on the stairs at home, and you could half-hear your Dad listening to an instrumental section of a Bonnie Taylor album, whilst Miles Hunt sang upstairs? Like that.

Goldfrapp are doing it for the kids on the main stage performing a set of strangely chintzy, old-fashioned, sultry disco. The kind of dance music that people who don’t go to nightclubs anymore like. I don’t go to nightclubs anymore. I suppose this must mean I like it.

Sexy isn’t about how much you try – and the more you try to be sexy, the less sexy you often are.: Alison Goldfrapp seems to be in complete denial of the fact that people have birthdays and get older – and thus, is mutton dressed as lamb for the MILF-crowd. Nice mutton though. Their set drifts over in a largely indistinguishable soundscape of fuzzy beats and dancers.

In the meantime, Gang Of Four, looking and sounding like, well, the old arty punks they are – manage to acquit themselves as the Elder Statesmen they now are. Grizzled old war dogs of frankly unexceptional ability, providing a history lesson to the young, a reminder to the old, and failing to kickstart a dancefloor frenzy when they play something very obviously popular of theirs.

As the evenings finale, Depeche Mode, now a quarter century into their career, are perfectly pitched for the suburban festival demographic. However, faced with a typical London crowd of floating voters hoping for big hits, their set – which despite being 95% singles – is a frustratingly uneven experience for some. Big hits are spread out unevenly through the set, singles from last years album “Playing The Angel” dominate the first third of the show, and the songs from the late Eighties and early Nineties appear sporadically. Hyde Park wakes up, has a little frug for around five or six minutes, then eases back into conversation.

Which is a great shame, as the material is consistently excellent, a perverse bastardisation of pop music in the sunshine : songs like this should be listened to alone and in darkened moods. The idea of David Gahan is a paradox : on one hand, vocalising about The Pain He’s Been Subjected To And Is Used To, and on the other getting everyone to clap along and yelling “LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS!” seems very odd. A misnomer. He grabs his crotch at frequent intervals, twirls around, and yells.

Meanwhile, in the now busy field, the Mode project.. In fact, one could look at this kind of stadium gloom as ‘Acting Out’. As a soundtrack to the summer evening, the band rack up a list of hits ranging from gloom to despair, pain and suffering, in all manner of tempos and styles. From the blues rock of “I Feel You”, to the stadium disco of “Photographic”, the summer air becomes some kind of communion of vague disaffection. As the triple whammy of “World In My Eyes”, “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy The Silence” form, live, breathe and die within the space of a handful of minutes, like some kind of brief flower, the crowd starts to thin. The music is fantastic, the show slick and clean and real. Vibrant and brilliant, intelligent, and free of bland, idiotic truisms. And yet, faced with a fickle crowd, perhaps the energy they project fails to leave the stage.

It’s the end of the show.  Another set of shows on the crowded calendar have come to an end. And then there’s next year – another weekend in Hyde Park, another set of last minute deals, grabbing hands, handshakes, and pain and suffering on various continents.

Work in the morning. Time to go.

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