Grown Up Gossip & Internet Villainy
Argghhh! Panic! The festival industry is dying! Run for the hills (well, the cities)! So, then Big Chill- what are you about? Should we be impressed or not?
You're run by Festival Republic who really aren't the leftwing revolutionary group that?your name would like?us to infer, but your line-up isn't exactly the warmed up Radio 1 tedium soup of V.
If our weekend was anything to go by, it's where the kind of punters who used to frequent Glastonbury now like to er.. chill.
Hyde Park?s a funny old place, what with it seeming to have two festivals sharing the same field. And as we walked in, there was a Radio 1 style pop-event going on. Ke$ha was on stage. She is profoundly irritating. Do we really need to justify this with serious journalistic observation? Well, according to her wikipedia page she cites Banksy as an influence. What kind of name-dropping wank-sack musician cites a graffiti artist as an influence*?
Needless to say, her performance successfully manages to reflect the pretentiousness of this notion. She puts on a show, and makes more of an effort than a thousand Snow Patrols but after watching her, even Nelson Mandela would have to murder a stranger just to let off some steam.
Retro electro**-pop duo Chromeo are a charming act on record, and on stage some of that charisma does come across but the intricate production that distinguishes their sound is lost in the field today. Their albums take the ?eighties if the eighties had actually been any good? vibe that Les Rythmes Digitales pioneered and add a sprinkling of synth-funk on top of it. Bands can sink or swim in open air, and even tracks like Fancy Footwork and Bonafide Lovin?, the Canadian duo fail to do themselves justice.
Yeah, we know it's already June, and that with each passing day, the notion of it being a preview becomes more absurd. Shut up and read, because these are the festivals that you should be thinking about going to this month.
Arguably if you actually use us as some kind of tastemaker, then perhaps it's best to stay in and not inflict yourself on the wider public.
With that in mind, here?s what everyone should be doing while you stay in, looking at old photographs and wondering where it all went wrong.
