David Emery OnlineReading Festival 2007: Saturday
30 August 2007
Right, on to day two of my Reading Festival 2007 roundup! The theme of the day was most definitely ‘indie dance’:
12:00 Dance Stage: The Teenagers
I quite like The Teenagers on record, but their performance at Reading was disappointing. The songs just sounded slightly pathetic, with no substance, and in all honesty I felt slightly embarrassed at times. Hopefully they were just having an off day – I’ll have to catch them again soon to make a definitive conclusion.
13:30 Dance Stage: Does It Offend You, Yeah?
Now this is more like it! I’d only heard one track by Does It Offend You, Yeah? – which is receiving heavy rotation on Zane Lowe’s Radio 1 show at the moment – but they seem to have much more in their arsenal. Live, they were exactly what I want from an indie dance band ( don’t call it nu-rave ) – loud, chaotic and full of fun.
14:25 Dance Stage: Dan Le Sac/Scroobius Pip
You can’t have escaped ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ – introduced as their ‘one hit wonder’ – which saturated the airwaves a couple of months ago; luckily for them Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip have plenty more songs in the bag and were one of the highlights of the Saturday line-up. The gig thing they bring to the table is doing something different, melding good solid hip-hop beats with almost spoken-word rap delivery. I say almost, but half way through the set Scroobius Pip performed a piece of spoken word poetry, and low – it was good!
15:45 Carling Stage: Foals
I’ll be honest, I was slightly disappointed by Foals. I’m a big fan of the couple of singles they’ve put out, but they didn’t seem enough to carry the whole set – it all came of as slightly same-y. I have a sneaking suspicion that I might be wrong though – the tent was absolutely rammed, more so then for any other band I saw in there. What do I know?
16:30 Back Sage: The Noisettes
While wondering back through the back stage area in search of food we bumped into an acoustic performance being filmed for the BBC of The Noisettes (you can see it here). Unlike almost everyone else I know, I really quite like The Noisettes – they bring something a bit different to the normal indie crowd – and this little performance was nice to catch.
20:05 Radio 1 Stage: Biffy Clyro
Biffy Clyro were utterly disappointing. Up until their latest album they were one of my favourite bands, but their latest effort is appalling – full of sub-Foo Fighters MOR dirge. I was really hoping that they would play a set with plenty of old stuff, but they didn’t – we only got 3 old (good) songs, the rest being the new rubbish.
Biffy seem to have made a conscious decision to stop innovating in their music, to follow the established rock conventions and try (and succeed) to sell more records. To epitomise this fall to conventionalism, at the end Simon – the lead guitarist and singer – set fire to his guitar. How rock and roll. How exciting.
21:00 Dance Stage: !!!
!!! (pronounced chk chk chk) were one of those bands that I’d heard of, even checked out a couple of songs, but never really got into. After seeing them at Reading I’ve realised that’s because they are a live band – maybe not so great on record, but massively good fun in person. It’s really all brought together by the singer, who’s dance moves are amazing – not necessarily in a good way, however, as he a slightly overweight American wearing a tight t-shirt and shorts.
22:15 Dance Stage: UNKLE
UNKLE are a band that I’ve only just started listening to, with their latest album ‘War Stories’, even though they’ve been around for ages. It’s a brilliant album, and they played a large amount of it at Reading to great affect. I’m a big fan of dance music (or dancy-y music) played live with instruments – the Dance Tent at Reading on Saturday offered a lot of it, and I think UNKLE were king of the hill. Simply put, they have great songs and they play them really well.
