Saturday 17/06/06 Escape Into The Park @ Singleton Park, Swansea

There are a few things that we gather quite quickly on arriving at Escape into the Park in Swansea:
1. This is not as big a festival as the advertising would have us believe.
2. It's very much a Welsh thing. We may be the only people who have crossed the border.
3. No one, including the festival organisers at the gate, seem to know where their festival or its press parking is. This is hardly surprising since there are more signs to Global Gathering in August than to Escape (i.e. none to Escape).
4. Fairground rides are really expensive these days.
5. The M4 is a cone breeding ground where 9 miles tailbacks are the norm.
6. There are so many pills in the park that some attendees decidedly rattle.

The weather is blistering, topless men are scattered like a plague, and yet Festivalwise is grumpy given how long it took to find the damn site. However, there's a great party atmosphere going on, with groups scattered across the hills on blankets in various stages of nudity relevant to the heat of the day. Everyone seems on top form ready to enjoy the sunshine. The only problem is no one is here for the music - although with Goldie Looking Chain headlining this is hardly a surprise. The tents seem to only interest a small handful of people. On many levels this is a great festival, but Festivalwise can't help but ponder how good it would be in the rain.

The burger we have for my dinner is an orangey purple, and that's after a twenty minute trail to look for some decent food. The VIP tent saves us later on with a bacon roll. There are some excellent DJs here, but no one really seems to be paying much attention. Scratch Perverts are doing some blistering work with a mash-up of Prodigy tracks, but only a small collective seems to appreciate it. The Radio One stage, while obviously having to play some quite commercial sets (Dave Pearce kicks off with trance classic 'Silence'), is very much the place to be with the sun beating down on a bevy of topless participants, most of whom seem to be triangular squaddies. It's an odd festival, and its poorly organised (we're still flummoxed by the lack of signs), but we're hopeful of being impressed by the headliners.

Mylo has improved vastly since last years festival sets, and is dropping some great bassy guitar beats into his sets which have really modernised it and made his sound evolve. Well Festivalwise enjoyed it. His follow-up on the Godskitchen stage makes it easy to see why Atlantic decided not to renew their contract with Goldie Lookin Chain. While a band that has so much fun has to be respected, an act with such a one-joke mentality is not one a label is best off throwing money at. The joke is old. Some songs stick out, but even favourites like 'Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do', stick out for lyrical reasons not melodic ones. The band have fun and leap about the gorgeous Godskitchen stage, and sample ATM's The Launch, but the fact that the Radio One stage is packed in comparison to GLC's small crowd shows that their appeal is fading, even in their homeland. By the time night falls, most people want to dance, and that's certainly going on next door at Radio One, where fluorescent flashes of costume litter the hill. Judge Jules plays  a nice remix of Clash's Stay or Go, and Eddie Halliwell's set is a nice pacey mix.

However, you can't help but feel that Rod Hull and Emu could have been on stage to the same effect. While the atmosphere beats a lot of alternatives east of the border, the sickly feeling that no one is really here for the music nags against you like GLC's yelling competition. We drove 5 hours on the M4 for this, and feels slightly under-rewarded, with no surprises, and an audience that doesn't seem like it wishes to be.

Photos by: Graham Harries