Wireless Festival (London) 2006 review
Mon 26th Jun 06
Wireless Festival Wireless Festival (London) 2006 What’s that big conspicuous rectangle bartering for our attention to the left of the Main Stage? Oh no, it’s the T4 On The Road Tour Bus, daubed in plastic Hawaiian foliage, the Media Mecca for London’s yoof’ consumers and wannabe Nathan Barleys.
Day three of Wireless is Spot The D-Lister. Crap celebrities and hanger-oners everywhere, all looking as plastic and self-conscious as the next, made all the more surreal by a bemused Wayne Coyne looking lost in amongst them, wondering what time he’s meant to be on stage.
Hyde Park is rammed. Gnarls Barkley’s early afternoon set draws a crowd bigger than David Gray did the night before. The Danger Mouse / Cee-Lo collaboration project has already garnered them a smash hit number one (‘Crazy’, as if you didn’t know…) so their arrival on British shores for their first full live shows is, for many, something to get excited about.
With a full string section and backing band, robed in masterful white karate gear, the soulful sound-makers certainly look like they’re onto something pioneering. Then Cee-Lo starts whining and swearing and suddenly they’re demure is necked quicker than a festival rat-burger down the gullet of a cidered-up piss-head.
The sound is awful and the songs don’t translate across the massive Wireless stage – they’d have been far better suited to the intimate enclosure of the tented Xfm stage. People keep watching, more out of curiosity than from genuine enjoyment, but once they’ve played their mega-hit, it’s off to pastures new for many.
Sway’s offering on the Xfm stage does a far better job of exciting the massive crowd that turn up to see him. The Ghanaian-blooded, London-born rapper’s already made waves in the public eye, winning a MOBO award for best hip-hop act in 2005, telling co-nominee 50 Cent where he can stick it. Picking up the torch for the capital’s thriving underground grime scene, tracks like ‘Harvey Knicks’ (a collaboration with genre contemporaries The Mitchell Brothers) and his own single ‘Little Derek’ have people raising arms to the air and indulging in the call-and-responses that characterise every hip-hop show worth its salt. Chucking in snippets of Blur’s ‘Parklife’ and MC Hammer’s ‘Can’t Touch This’ succeed in motivating the crowd in obeying Sway’s order to ‘Bounce!’
Pharrell, free of his N.E.R.D. entourage fails to inspire as his goes through the motions on the Main Stage. The sound is still terrible (shouldn’t someone have sorted this by now?) and his lackadaisical attitude makes the crowd almost as bored as he is. His debut solo single, ‘Can I Have It Like That?’ can barely be made out through the muddy noise from the speakers, and even hits from his old band, like ‘Rockstar’ and ‘She Wants To Move’ suffer from a tempo slur that leaves them weak and lumbering. Some minor excitement is found when beat-boxing wizard Killa Kela joins him on stage for a semi-acapella run through of Snoop Dogg’s ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’, but it’s still not enough to prevent this performance from being a total write-off.
Surely the highlight of the entire festival so far, The Flaming Lips put Pharrell’s weak effort even further to shame, as they give Hyde Park 110% for their Main Stage extravaganza. After performing the now legendary crowd-surfing-in-a-giant-bubble stunt, front man Wayne Coyne returns to the stage to launch into a jubilant ‘Race For The Prize’, which is followed up by an unexpectedly successful cover of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Launching balloons and streamers into the air as each song goes by, and joined on stage by a carnival of Santa Clauses, aliens, superheroes and giant inflated space-men, the stagnating corporate stench of the festival is finally shifted in favour of free-spirited celebration. So it’s a real shame that someone in the Gods clues up to this and orders a handful of massive 02 balloons to be released into the crowd amongst the band’s planned theatrics, sabotaging the end of an otherwise excellent ‘Yoshimi Battle The Pink Robots’ with stinking advertising.
As they leave the stage at the end of their hour long set, ended with a confetti-littered arrangement of ‘Do You Realize?’, people cheer persistently for an encore. Sadly, it’s not to be, so everyone rushes off to try and keep the high going elsewhere.
If they arrive at the Xfm stage for DJ Shadow’s first show in three and a half years, they’re likely to be sorely disappointed. With a twenty-metre tailback outside the tent, nothing – NOTHING – can get you anywhere close.
Touring DJ’s have low labour costs, so they spunk all their money on the AV displays. Tonight’s no exception as Shadow appears atop a raised platform, in amongst a two level visual display that’s monolithically impressive. Sadly, this view’s only spied from outside the tent, so most of his trip-hop beats are swallowed and dulled by the time they reach our distant ears.
Back over to the Main Stage for tonight’s headliners, Massive Attack seem to be acclaimed and name-dropped by everyone, but the second you ask someone what their favourite track is, most struggle to name two, let alone pick a personal preference. Their performance is desperately uninspiring and drab, and their festival closing status is unconvincing. Heartfelt on record, ‘Teardrop’ is here performed at a soulless distance and is massively boring to watch. By the time they play an anti-climatic ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ it’s frustrating to think of the time wasted hanging about for it, leaving day three of Wireless on a dulled note.
As the weekend draws in the threat of even denser, directionless crowds, as well as the looming culture-bomb that is James Blunt, one question remains - although Wireless is far from being failure, with only one or two acts each day really making any kind of impression, has the real talent been spread too thin?
review by Alex Hoban
more pages about Massive Attack Bristol |
more pages about The Flaming Lips
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