Saturday doesn't announce its own shape straight away. It takes most of the morning and half the afternoon before you realise the whole day has been quietly rearranging itself around the low end, guitars giving way to something with a pulse in it, right up until Four Tet takes the whole thing over as its most exciting moment, Daniel Avery bookending him on both sides of the night.
It starts on guitar terms, at least. Sailor Honeymoon play what's billed as the last date of a full UK and Europe run, and there's something genuinely special about watching a band close out a tour on the morning their debut album, 'The Worst of Sailor Honeymoon', is barely a week old. There's a strange, quietly deadpan delivery running through the Korean band's set that reads as almost British in its dryness, and the guitarist spends most of it leaning into the crowd, clearly enjoying every second of the attention she's getting. The singer isn't shy about asking for a circle pit either, insisting it's never too early for one of those.
Y turn up mid-afternoon, tucked away at the Chai Wallah stage, and they're the kind of act the live announcer undersells: "they defy expectations and categorisation," which turns out to be true, but doesn't quite capture just how charismatic the pair leading it are at actually carrying that across genre lines in real time. The South London five-piece are built around co-founders Adam Brennan, late of Fat White Family, and Sophie Coppin trading vocal lines out front, and it's Coppin who really pins the whole thing down, a gritty, snarling lead that somehow still comes out upbeat.
Then, just as the day starts tipping toward evening, Jessica Winter happens, and Saturday properly turns. She's billed, nominally, as the day's pop slot, but what actually turns up is a full dance set with genuinely powerhouse vocals stapled on top of it, catchy enough songwriting that it's honestly baffling she isn't playing somewhere twice the size of the Round the Twist tent tucked away in the back corner of the site. Kids in her merch are packed at the barrier well before she's even walked out, and by the time she strips a layer off mid-song because the heat's finally got the better of her too, the whole thing has stopped being a normal festival set and started being an actual pop star moment. There's a kid in a hotdog costume right at the front, holding her hand while his mum does the worm on the ground beside him, and somehow none of it reads as anything other than completely earned. It's provocative without ever losing anything sweet about it, and it might be the single best half hour of the whole weekend that nobody was specifically there to see.
From there, the night is Daniel Avery's in two acts, with one enormous headline slot sandwiched right in the middle of them. He plays an afternoon live set first, and from the opening note it shifts the day's energy away from guitars entirely, sliding all the way from sleepy, ambient blips into full metal riffs without ever losing the thread connecting the two, live musicians sneaking on and off stage throughout to thicken it as it goes, growing heavier and more electro the longer it runs. It's eclectic and expertly stitched together, the kind of set where you clock the ownership he's taking over the whole shape of the day. Then, well past midnight, he comes back to close Saturday out properly with a DJ set that's less about prestige than pure release, the actual party moment for whoever's still upright at that hour.
In between the two Avery sets sits Four Tet, and it's genuinely his night, the most exciting single stretch of an evening that pivots entirely around dance. His reputation barely needs restating at this point, especially given he's already headlined this exact festival before, but it's still worth saying out loud: watching someone warm a Saturday night main slot up as eclectic and organic as he does, before dropping without warning into something that plays to a full mainstream crowd, is one of dance music's stranger tricks pulled off in full view. He's one of the most determinedly leftfield artists working, and somehow that's exactly what a field this size turns up for on a Saturday night. Ben UFO follows him into the small hours, an underground pioneer whose taste has always run more riveting than his public profile really suggests, keeping what's left of the floor moving before Avery reclaims it to send the day home.
By the time you're stood in a field somewhere near 3am with absolutely no memory of when guitars stopped being the point, it's hard not to admire how deliberately the whole day was built. Nothing about Saturday's shift from Sailor Honeymoon's morning slot to Four Tet's headline set feels like an accident of scheduling. It leaves you with a feeling of euphoria that doesn't clock off when the music does either, it's still there walking back through the campsite as the sky starts going light, a whole day engineered to end exactly where it does and still somehow not quite over.
