If there was a festival anthem to this year's Summer Sonic, it was "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." The overflowing crowd at Cyndi Lauper's Sunday set on the Sonic Stage was mostly made up of women who mouthed every word to her string of hits. And when she finished with her biggest hit, the female members of The Polyphonic Spree and Tilly and The Wall joined her on stage to she-bop ecstatically.

There were a lot of girls having fun at SS: The Pipettes, with their choreographed retro girl-group pop; The Long Blondes, with their Blondie update for the 21st century; Tilly and The Wall, whose percussion parts are handled by a tap dancer rather than a drummer; the pan-Asian female members of the Australian reggae group Blue King Brown, who exuded more soul than anyone else all weekend; the irrepressible Brazilian girls in Cansei de Ser Sexy and Bonde Do Role; and local lass Anna Tsuchiya, with her punk fashionista act.

The only woman who didn't seem to enjoy herself as much as she should have was Shingai Shoniwa, whose group The Noisettes was the only foreign band (they're London-based) to play on the Island Stage, and whose bluesy hard rock set seemed to confuse the few people who showed up. I think Shoniwa would have preferred playing on the Mountain Stage with Motorhead.