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| V Festival - 5th April, 2008 - Melbourne |
| by Geoff Lemon | |
| Fri:25-Apr-08 | |
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Page 2 of 3  16:33: Roisin Murphy hits the stage. She’s obviously been taking fashion tips from Robyn; she too has cape-wings stitched under the arms of a gold lamé outfit. Her deep, chilled out backing grooves curve thickly through the afternoon air.16:38: Her fluoro Lycra-clad back-up singers look a bit lost – Murphy has run off stage, and they wander around, dancing without any particular synchronicity. Their outfits make them look like they were kidnapped by Murphy on their way to an aerobics class. She re-emerges, having undergone a complete costume change. Now she’s wearing a conservative black suit, with hot pink gloves and a purple hat that looks like she stole it from a nearby Flemington race-goer (presumably a previous kidnap victim). 16:55: Murphy has an array of hats – each song warrants a new one. She is engaging in some spectacularly odd dancing with her back-up singers. I am wondering why a guy trying to read the small print on his beer can tilts his whole body away from it, instead of just tilting the can. 17:02: It is officially cowbell hour. Roisin’s drummer goes crazy on everybody’s favourite percussion instrument. He’s got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. 17:08: Murphy is the first act today to be really pushing some energy into her perfo  rmance, and getting some back from the crowd. ‘You Know Me Better’ works particularly well. The outfits keep coming, from a cardboard box at the side of stage. Abruptly, she’s wearing a giant white coat made of feathers and tassels, and a hat that is very similar to a pie rack. It’s all a bit like building things out of the Useful Box on Play School.17:26: A lovely bit of theatre during her last song. Her current hat is a flat white disc. Halfway through the song, she pulls it down over her face, turning her face into a blank white mask. From there, she almost becomes a mime, still singing, but moving around strangely, gesturing robotically to the audience. As the beats of the song slowly grind down, her movements become slower, jerkier, more erratic, and she subsides to the ground in a drawn out pseudo-death, complete with final twitching. The effect is half-comic, half-disturbing, but wholly watchable. After a moment’s silence she lifts the hat and, still recumbent on the stage floor, waves to the crowd and beams a beautiful warm smile of relief and thanks. They love her, and cheer her off the stage. 18:00: My god, this festival is punctual. Enter Air, trés debonair. They’re dressed sharp – the three piece backing band come on first looking like waiters, all in black starched shirts and trousers. Then Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel emerge, with the same starched outfits but in gleaming white. Godin has added an aviator’s jacket and a stylishly arranged scarf, doing his best impression of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. 18:12: We get the usual jokes about how lovely we all are and whether we can all speak French. For the record, these jokes are much funnier through a vocoder. 18:40: Despite the difficulties of the open-air stage and the fact that it’s not quite dark yet, Air work as hard as they can to put on a good show. Highlights come from the Moon Safari era, with ‘La Femme d’Argent’, ‘Remember’, ‘Sexy Boy’, and especially ‘Kelly Watch the Stars’. The set ends with a driving, crunching build, many minutes long, that should kill forever any claim that they’re a limp-wristed ambient outfit. Ten years after Moon Safari, these guys are still the essence of cool. 19:15: The toilets are crowded. A guy walks into me and I somehow manage to piss on his shoes. As the pisser, I am apologetic. He is drunk and strangely jovial. I offer to buy him new shoes. We agree that there would be nowhere to get them from. I offer to swap shoes with him. We agree that the disparity between his size elevens and my size seventeens is a gap too great to bridge. I offer to give him money for new shoes. He says not to worry, he’s a nurse and he gets worse than that every day. He goes for a burger. This incident leaves me confused. But I shake it off, so to speak. 19:31: Two words. Both of them are Duran. I’ve been simultaneously anticipating and fearing this moment. They rock on stage accompanied by some sort of epic Wagnerian march. It seems a little self-important for a glam rock band, but I guess self-importance is what their era was all about. They have added a new female back-up vocalist – and yes, I’m quite sure that her ability and willingness to fit into a size eight black PVC dress had nothing whatsoever to do with her being hired. All about the singing voice. Surprisingly, the rest of the guys don’t look that old and crusty. Simon Le Bon has a suit with a giant ‘D’ emblazoned across the shoulder. 19:36: “Is anybody hungry?” asks Le Bon. Hard to believe, I know, but this comment is followed up by ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’. Did you see the link? I watch most of this song, and then with mingled relief and reluctance (I’d say it’s a 90/10 split), decide it’s time to prepare for some pumpkin smashing. 20:10: You can feel the anticipation. The crowd has been building up, and there’s a thick knot of people front and centre. Arriving half an hour ago, I’ve managed to get a decent spot, but people trying to squirm in at this late stage are being roundly told to fuck off. I like this development – if you want to see a band, get there early. Otherwise, take a seat up the back with the rest of the jerks. 20:12: One thing I can say for V Festival is that they’ve managed to avoid the slapstick sound checks that are standard practice elsewhere. Their guys manage to get the shit working without spending twenty minutes on the microphone going “One. One, two. One, two, two….teeeyooo…..wunnnnn…..wunnnnn teeeeeoooo….” 20:13: I look to my right. Standing just in front of me is Gilphex. Last time I saw him was several years ago. He was frothing around on a couch in a scungy warehouse in Brunswick, after inhaling enough horse tranquilisers to drop a humpback whale. Next to him is Space Cowboy, of the same era. They are equally surprised to see me. You go five years without seeing someone, then end up sharing the same square metre of space in a mosh pit. << Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >> |
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