Wolf Alice // Benicàssim, Spain, 2018 – Ellen McVeigh
The Wolf Alice set on the Sunday night of Benicàssim festival in 2018 encapsulated everything great about live music; packed full of spontaneous, communal moments of joy between strangers. At 10pm on the third night of the Spanish music festival, everyone was a perfect cocktail of sunburnt, sweaty and sleep-deprived. Pushing through the sticky bodies to get to the front of the crowd, we heard snippets of Spanish, French, Dutch, German, but as soon as the band started to play everyone was speaking the same language.
The whole set emanated power; the energy of the band, the pinks and purples of the stage lights, the ethereal sense created by songs like ‘Bros’, punctuated by eminently screamable choruses in songs like ‘Giant Peach’, made us feel like anything was possible.
By nature of being on a packed festival line-up, the set didn’t allow for much breathing room, carrying us from song to song until we were completely engrossed in the moment. The stand out moment came with Wolf Alice’s most famous song, ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’. Everyone in the crowd knew the words, and the experience of standing in a crowd of hundreds of people all belting out the chorus in unison created a sensation so powerful, it felt like experiencing nostalgia before the moment had even passed.