Following last year’s troubled relocation to Strathallan Castle, T in the Park’s organisers have been keen to reassure fans that this year’s event would be a return to business as usual. In many respects it is, but controversy also continues to be synonymous with the brand. By Friday morning, the festival had already had two deaths, one mass brawl and the audacious theft of a cash machine from the main arena.
The image problem isn’t unfounded, but it’s often overstated. Good, clean(ish) hedonism remains the order of the day, although T in the Park continues to drift further from its indie-rock remit: the Stone Roses (piped on stage to the strains of Scotland the Brave) and Catfish and the Bottlemen are received like returning monarchs, but many of the weekend’s biggest draws are blokes behind decks.
Calvin Harris closes the main stage on Saturday night, bringing Dizzee Rascal along for a kinetic run-through of their new collaboration, Hype. Pop-house duo Disclosure also make a convincing case for themselves as future headliners, and while Jamie xx has a trickier task – he’s on a stage in a remote corner of the site while the Stone Roses are on – the hardy few who make it down to the King Tut’s tent are treated to an atmospheric masterclass.
Elsewhere, the Last Shadow Puppets may be the weekend’s biggest head-scratcher – it’s hard to know whether Alex Turner’s reptilian lounge act is an exercise in sardonic self-deconstruction, or if he’s simply gone off the deep end. Either way, like T itself, it makes for terrific entertainment. Whatever its faults, it remains the biggest – and best – party on Scotland’s cultural calendar.
• This headline of this article was amended on 11 July.
