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Nick Morgan and crew
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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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| HYDE
PARK CALLING. The Who,
Razorlight, the Zutons, Ocean Colour Scene, Rose
Hill Drive. Hyde Park, London, July 2nd 2006
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It’s
festival time in London. Did I mention that before?
It started with the Foo Fighters in Hyde Park, and
then about a week of the O2 Wireless Festival, with
acts as diverse as the Strokes and James Blunt.
There’s Hyde Park Calling, headlining on consecutive
days Roger Waters and the
Who, several nights of the Tower of
London festival, with amongst others Dr John and
Jeff Beck and over ten in the courtyard at Somerset
House, where the highlight is probably Robert Plant
and Strange Sensation. Ken Livingstone is having
his own free festival in Finsbury Park, there’s
the Lovebox weekender in Victoria Park, and Ben
and Jerry’s Sundae, and Get Loaded in the
Park on Clapham Common. You can also enjoy sedate
concert series at genteel historic homes such as
Kenwood House (Art Garfunkel) and Marble Hill (Jools
Holland), four nights of ‘Summer Swing’
at Kew Gardens (mostly the ubiquitous Jools Holland
again), and, as we shall see later, numerous unheralded
musical days out in the park in London’s boroughs
and villages. Altogether you might think we were
over provided for on the music front, and wonder
how some of these events manage to make any money.
But remember there’s no Glastonbury this year,
and the good folk of London seem to have taken sitting
in the sunshine supping lager or savouring Sancerre
and listening to music as one of their favourite
pastimes. Beats soccer hands down.
And as you’ve probably noticed the sponsors
are out in force too, no more so than at London
Calling, main sponsor the Hard Rock Café:
“The
Ambassadors of Rock tour spreads both the music
and the "Love All, Serve All" creed to
music fans everywhere” – whatever that
may mean. |
| Apparently
it’s a round the world merchandising opportunity,
though none of the other gigs seem to have quite
materialised (maybe something to do with the fact
that the chain has been put up for sale by its British
owners Rank Group for a cool £500 million),
with a charity link to the Nordoff-Robbins Foundation,
which provides music therapy to children. It looks
like a huge Hard Rock marquee where you can eat
burgers all afternoon, drink cocktails in 13 ounce
souvenir Ambassador
of Rock frosted glasses (mmm, the Crown and
ginger sure sounds good) and watch the bands on
a massive screen. Elsewhere co-sponsors Brothers
Pear Cider (a Glastonbury speciality) seem to
be outselling Carling in the booze stakes, and it’s
hardly surprising that in 30 degrees of sunshine
heat or more, and with no shade, rubber legs syndrome
sets in all around us at about seven o’clock.
I notice some distant colleagues on a converted
double decker bus selling Pimms by the gallon, and
suspect these must be the coves ensuring that there’s
never fewer than two Smirnoff branded beach balls
bouncing over the heads of the tightly packed audience
at the front of the stage. We’ve taken a slightly
safer spot, dead centre stage and about a third
of the way from the back, where it’s rugs,
chairs and general bonhomie with a very mixed and
sociable bunch, including a sleeping couple who,
it turns out, nodded off the previous evening half
way through Roger Water’s Dark Side of the
Moon – they wake up three seconds into the
Who’s opening song ‘Can’t explain’. |
|
Johnny
Borrel, Razorlight |
| Let
no one kid themselves, and no disrespect to the
other bands, we’re all here to see the
Who, especially after their electric
performance in the same place at last year’s
Live Aid gig. We arrive in time for loud American
retro rockers Rose
Hill Drive, who play like loud American
retro rockers. They’re followed by a rather
sad Ocean
Colour Scene, not too well rehearsed,
or so it seemed, and struggling to break free from
the nineties (“weren’t they the warm
up band for Oasis?” asked someone at the tasteful
open air urinals) – everyone got very excited
and sang along when they played their 1996 hit single
‘Day we caught the train’, and that
was about it. Then came the much vaunted Scally
Scousers the
Zutons. Singer and guitarist David
McCabe suffered from a faulty lead or connection,
and also seemed to have difficulty keeping up with
his own lyrics – overall they failed to impress
as much as I’d hoped and the Photographer
snarled in her fishing chair at their last song,
a sort of faux Santana meets Zappa at Woodstock
thing – decidedly inferior, and somewhat patronising.
The hugely self confident would be kings of stadium
rock Razorlight
followed, starting with their current single ‘In
the morning’, an interesting Talking Heads
meets Tom Petty effort. This London band have shot
to prominence in a relatively short period of time
and quite possibly have the talent to match the
hype, the quickly shirtless front man Johnny Borrell
certainly has the attitude, with the squealing girls
and boys around us not being able to agree if he
was most like Mick Jagger (girls) or Iggy Pop (boys).
Actually he wasn’t like either of them. |
| My
friend Mark was reminiscing the other day about
waiting over three hours at Knebworth for the Rolling
Stones to take the stage (apparently they were struggling
to ‘revive’ Keith); it’s a sign
of how times have changed in this world of corporate
rock that the Who stride onto the stage a mighty
four minutes behind schedule. That, I’m very
glad to say, is about as corporate as the Who got.
They played a blinder – demonstrating the
enduring qualities of many of Townsend’s songs
– something I’ve checked over the intervening
days by listening to Who’s Next, Tommy and
in particular the vastly underrated Quadrophenia.
The band by the way, in addition to those two grumpy
old men of rock Townsend and Roger Daltrey, were
Welsh bass prodigy Pino
Palladino, the fantastic Zak
Starkey on drums, Townsend’s
brother Simon
on rhythm guitar, and long time collaborator and
keyboardist John "Rabbit" Bundrick. The
whole thing rocked from start to finish –
with the two front men displaying an energy and
aggression that belied their years – there
were no compromises here, it was, as the poster
said (and as I recall writing on my pencil case
at school), “maximum rhythm and blues”.
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There’s
a nice gentle slope down the stage, so even the
diminutive photographer has a good view –
but one of the things that makes the set so special,
apart from the astonishingly good sound, is the
digital film show that accompanies each song, displayed
on huge screens to the left and right of the stage,
and for the Who, behind the band too. I can’t
tell you how clever and well thought out some of
these screen sequences were, and as an added bonus
we also get shots of the band playing – it’s
about as in your face as it can be. And that only
serves to raise that question that everyone always
asks – “how does Townsend play the guitar
like that” – because it’s no clearer
how the windmill arms thing works when you can see
it going on in front of you about forty feet high.
Highlights? ‘Who are you?’ (played apparently
in the time it takes a steam train to get from London
to Brighton), ‘Behind blue eyes’, an
acoustic ‘Drowned’ (“here’s
an old sea shanty from Quadrophenia”), ‘Baba
O'Riley’ (simply awesome), ‘Love reign
o'er me’ (ok, I have to concede Daltrey can
sing), ‘My generation’ (sung without
irony), ‘Won't get fooled again’ and
the encore mini Tommy, featuring ‘Pinball
wizard’,
Amazing journey’, ‘See me, feel me’
and ‘Listening to you’.
And that was it – “Goodnight London”.
Well it took several hours before I could even consider
going to bed after that as the adrenalin was pumping.
And to add to my delight an announcement as we were
leaving took me to this
website where you can buy an official ‘bootleg’
CD or DVD of the gig, recorded from the soundboard,
proceeds to charity. So you don’t have to
take my word for it, go out and buy it yourself.
- Nick Morgan (all photographs by Kate) |
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