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Gig Review

Arcade Fire / Mumford and Sons / Beirut / The Vaccines
London, Hyde Park

Article written by Paul M - Jul 10, 2011

Mumford and Sons

A grumpy old man writes…

My usual gig is in the back room of a South London or East End boozer. I’ve never attended Glastonbury, Reading, Benaccisim or any of the other rapidly growing number of huge festivals. End of the Road and its relatively intimate 5000 attendance is as big as I manage each year. So it wasn’t entirely by choice that I find myself clutching someone’s spare ticket for an event in bloody Hyde Park. With 60000 others.

The booze is my first grumble. Not the price (at 4 quid a pint it’s not that far removed from the price in the Knightsbridge pubs around the corner), nor the service (outstandingly quick), but the quality. Unlike the good smaller festivals where there is a fine selection of local real ales to sample, here, if it can’t be poured 16 pints at a time from a huge machine then it’s not available. For that reason, I find myself quaffing the only option, Tuborg. It’s so bland that many of the retards in the crowd elect to toss it around rather than drink it. Yep, here’s where we come to grumble two: the loutish element of both sexes that frequent these enormous corporate occasions. People who probably do three gigs a year, and the other two will be at the O2, and behave in a manner that would receive an ASBO elsewhere. Lads piss into cups, rather than leave their spot in the crowd. Teens throw up over themselves. Girls chuck beers over strangers in petty arguments. It’s difficult to ignore the boorish behaviour of others when you’re penned in like that.

And then there’s grumble three… the near pointlessness of the presence of the performers. 99% of people attending don’t actually look at them because they are little more than dots in the distance but spend the entire gig staring at the huge screens that surround the stage. We might as well be watching it on Youtube in the comfort of our homes, with decent cheap booze and without the inconvenience of being pressed up against an obnoxious idiot, as be here.

Manners may not be much in evidence but at fifty quid a ticket for just five acts, the audience is unsurprisingly quite middle class. However they’re nothing compared to the acts. This really has to be the wealthiest line-up of bands outside of the Eton 6th Form Music Club. We turn up too late to see Owen Pallett but he’s so posh his mater and pater apparently had him learning the violin aged 3. We do however catch the last half dozen tracks by The Vaccines, an act so wealthy that one of them has a mum who buys and sells multi-million pound west end properties as a hobby. Their throwaway punky pop fodder (mistaken for Wreckless Eric by one in our crowd) is actually ideal festival material but only in their wildest dreams would they be performing before about an audience this big.

American Beirut is so rich he was able to travel round Europe as a kid collecting musical influences in the way that most of us might gather stickers on a suitcase. His eastern flecked maudlin indie is occasionally glorious, the mournful trumpet of Postcard from Italy especially beautiful, but his set sadly struggles to be heard above the general hubbub of chatter.

Mumford and Sons start off fine enough with three of the strongest songs from their debut LP but they rapidly become wearisome as one slow overblown folky ballad with anguished vocals follows another. With tracks from the second album featuring heavily too tonight and no evidence of another Little Lion Man on the way, I can’t see the Surrey toffs being flavour of the month for too much longer.

Arcade Fire

It seems astonishing that Arcade Fire, a band so privileged they bring their own chef over with them, just in case Wimpy’s quails eggs are not served sunny side up, are headlining an arena like this. Blur, Oasis, Springsteen or Weller, yes, but Arcade Fire? Their clever layered songs are not your average stadium sized arena fodder. But here they are.

The sound tonight is far from perfect, deliberately muffled at the request of the authorities to protect the peace of the park’s neighbours (presumably the local billionaires’ period homes don’t have double glazing). This rattles the Travis Bickle haired frontman Win Butler who mentions it a couple of times but none of this prevents the Fire from producing a decent show. An early airing for Wake Up is soon followed by a great version of the tinkled Haiti, the anthemic Rebellion (Lies), as well as the various Neighbourhood songs before completing the set with Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).

To cap it all we waste fifteen minutes trying to find each other at the end (grumble 4!). Needless to say I’ll not be in a hurry to attend a gig here again.

Links:
http://www.arcadefire.com/
http://www.mumfordandsons.com