Excuse this massively negative point to start this review on, and hate-on me freely for being a hater, but has anyone ever really had the best time ever at Field Day? Like, really really enjoyed the festival? I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s been to any of the three years it’s been running and said ‘it was amazing, I’d totally recommend you go’. It’s usually the verdict of ‘It was alright but there was problems with the sound/layout/beer queues/loo queues/hipsters doing Ket instead of watching bands.’

Anyway as someone succinctly put it to me recently, because it’s now in its third year, I was feeling resoundingly optimistic as now they’re on their third go, surely they couldn’t get it wrong again?

Blame the horrible rain but aside from the weather there was an odd atmosphere which greeted me last weekend. It might be down to the sniffer dogs and old bill which seemed a tad on the excessive side, or maybe down to the fact it was £3.70 for a can of Red Stripe. Or maybe it was because the place felt packed. And not in a good way.

Whatever it was, I wasn’t exactly ‘soaking up the festival atmosphere’ from the get-go. So when we went into a tent to catch a bit of Micachu, the offensive sound quality and general offensiveness of her bland pop songs which aren’t quite as bad on record was only dampened further by the torrential rain starting outside. So, with a pack-a-mac out and barely keeping me dry, what followed involved 10 minutes of The Horrors before realising I was too wet to care any more so I relaxed with some serious drinking to try and help get through the day before completely avoiding any chance of seeing Fennesz on the main stage. This is a serious question to the organisers: who decided to put him on the main stage? No one puts Fennesz on the main stage. It’s ridiculous. So, narrowly avoided, we made a few attempts to catch bits of Rusko (tent too packed) and finally settling on Malcolm Middleton who was probably grateful for the weather as his tent was rammed. His slightly-twee semi-confessional very Scottish story-telling indie-folk was about as mildly uplifting as it could’ve been, but didn’t exactly leave me feeling excited or invigorated or up for a fun evening of cutting-edge music.

Santigold didn’t do a lot to improve the situation, and like her performance at Dour festival a few weeks earlier, much of what she does feels full of unachieved promises and under-ambitious creativity. She seemed to play for much longer than was necessary or allocated, which seemed confirmed when you take into account Skream’s set, which followed. Here are the facts: he came on late, was stuck on some decks right on the corner of the stage, DJ-ed for approximately 20 minutes, played while Mogwai set up around him. A bit of a joke no?

If nothing else one of my previous concerns was that Mogwai would suffer from some quiet, shoddy sound during their headline set, however standing reasonably near the front it was actually pretty decent. And what followed can only be described as the salvation of Field Day by the band Mogwai. Opening with ‘Yes! I am a long way from home’, their set was a well-chosen one and while yes the sound could’ve been louder, it had enough clout to create the peaks and troughs which the ‘gwai fall flat without.