Corporate Festival London

15 June 2007

Wireless – sorry, that should be “O2 Wireless Festival 2007 London” – is quite a strange little festival.

On the one hand, it has a great location – slap bang in the middle of London – but on the other hand it’s strangely soulless, feeling (accurately, I imagine) like some suits in a boardroom decided they should put on a rock festival that the kids would like so they could sell some phones.

Oddly, it sort of works.

It would have been much better had Modest Mouse played, but they had to pull out at the last minute. Quick tangent time: I hate it when people can’t be bothered to update their website. Take a look at the Official Wireless News page – don’t you think that mentioning that one of the bands have pulled out would be news worthy?

Anyway, it was more then made up for by the combined might of Queens of the Stone Age and The White Stripes – you couldn’t ask for two better bands to play in my opinion. I’ve already talked about the White Stripes enough this week I think – they were, again, excellent, and it was nice that they played a completely different set to Tuesday.

Queens of the Stone Age were brilliant as always, although they certainly could have done with more time – they only played for 50 minutes, and they have to many great songs in their back catalogue. They played quite a lot of their new album, ‘Era Vulgaris’ which I think is another great addition to the Stone Age cannon; it’s interesting to see them take a slightly more experimental approach, using more layered sounds and electronic elements which I think takes their heavy rock sound to an interesting new place.

As ever, here are some photos from the day:

From: Articles

15 June 2007