Kicking off an increasingly crowded summer festival season, Wychwood got lucky with the glorious weather. But the organisers also showed smart foresight with their bookings, which included two of the most talked about women of the year: the new Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Little Boots, the latest breathlessly hyped synth-pop princess allegedly destined to save the charts from landfill indie-rock.

Launched in 2005, Wychwood boasts a picturesque location and a family-friendly menu, including a lively children’s literature tent, where Duffy performed her droll verses to an all-ages crowd. Much of the musical line-up was also clearly aimed at fortysomething parents nostalgic for their 1980s and early 1990s youth.

One of several reunited bands on the bill, the Wonder Stuff’s rollicking folk-rock still sounded sprightly. But the Beat, despite being contemporaries of the Specials from the West Midlands branch of the 2-Tone ska-revival movement, have not aged quite as gracefully. Their clunky set included an abysmal mauling of Rock the Casbah, dedicated to the late Joe Strummer.

Little Boots, aka Victoria Hesketh, brought a dash of youthful glamour to Cheltenham on Saturday. In a chemical-blue frock, accompanied by two anonymous boy-slaves, the 25-year-old singer bleeped and bounced through 45 minutes of polished electro-pop, climaxing with her infectious YouTube favourite, Stuck on Repeat.

Even before her debut album arrives next week, a mini backlash is already forming against Little Boots. But while her music is hardly cutting-edge electronica, it is solidly constructed robo-pop built around strong melodic hooks. There is no shame in occupying the fertile middle ground between Girls Aloud and Goldfrapp. Her resemblance to a Eurovision runner-up from the mid 1980s was all part of Hesketh’s knowingly retro charm at Wychwood.

Sunday’s musical line-up was more rootsy and global, almost like a mini-Womad. The Ethiopian collective Dub Colossus played a soothing set of warm, undulating Afro-reggae while the Anglo-Indian Dhol Foundation turned Wychwood into a Punjabi street festival with their thunderous weapons of mass percussion.

But the day’s real revelations lurked on the smaller stages, notably the eight-piece orchestral rockers Revere, who combine the fiery melodrama of Muse with the rousing chamber-pop of Arcade Fire. They could, and should, be huge.

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