Live Review: Hard Rock Calling - Day One

Finding yourself in a field, surrounded by the smell of weed and cheap yet wonderfully overpriced burgers, and the general feeling of being tired while delightfully half-soaked would maybe throw your world off balance and fool your senses into believing you were in the middle of Yorkshire, or at some other remote countryside festival locale. Basking in the great outdoors, miles away from civilisation, maybe? One quick glance around the horizon though and you’re brought back to reality; you’re in the middle of London. Gosh.

What Hyde Park does is trick you into believing you’re at a ‘real’ festival, which is no disrespect to Hard Rock Calling; if anything it’s a glorious compliment. While Glastonbury raged with what we all hoped was unfathomable rain, a few thousand people descended unto Hyde Park for three consecutive days of good, clean British-style fun. It’s not quite Blissfields, but darn it, it’s still rock ‘n’ roll.

Early, exceptional band Chew Lips does their beating hardest to rattle the slowly expanding crowds, but it’s not until Echo and the Bunnymen coincides with the masses clocking off time does the line-up for the huge event seem more impressive. As most of central London for some defencelessly bizarre reason watched The Kooks on the main stage, to the sound of whiney, tinny teeny-bopper indie schmindie nonsense, Liverpool’s second best export showed their legendary colours.

It’s a shame that more people didn’t venture into the Pepsi tent to catch the highlight of the day as Ian McCulloch slowly, and attentively paced through legendary anthems ‘Seven Seas’ and ‘Dancing Horses’ before he dryly landed ‘The Killing Moon’. A slender microphone malfunction stopped the track mid-verse and instead of rescuing it, the Bunnymen moved straight on into the dazzlingly near-perfect pop of ‘The Cutter’ before re-treading the Donnie Darko soundtrack after sharply winning back the crowd, post their sonic faux-pas. His inter track banter is shrewd, comical and slightly tongue in cheek. The music is relevant, exciting and enthralling. All the while Echo and the Bunnymen show themselves as a genre defining band, though they seem to still be overlooked by the masses.

The Killers led the night of course, headlining the main stage to a packed Hyde Park audience. The day had been so hideously hot, but beer in hand most of the crowd had enough energy to bash out a dance step or two for the Las Vegas showmen. Not as significant as they once were, the band flung new material out with as much glitz and glamour as we’ve come to expect from the foursome. Brandon Flowers is clearly more comfortable in his skin fronting the band, certainly more so than he was a few short years back. He’s roaming the stage, climbing up monitors and inviting the audience into their warm, but not overly eclectic catalogue. It’s the older material, like ‘Jenny Was a Friend of Mine’ and ‘Smile Like You Mean It’ which wowed more, getting the biggest reactions with the ever present ‘Mr Brightside’ invoking the broadest sing-along of the day.

Classic b-sides like ‘Under the Gun’ and ‘Ballad of Michael Valentine’ have been resigned to the festival archives, leaving more room for arguably less beguiling but more engrossing newer material. When they’re on stage, full swing of ‘Spaceman’ and finale track ‘When You Were Young’ you can’t argue their prowess as a massive stadium band, but it’s becoming increasingly hard to get excited by them.

Bands finished, you really want to carry on partying and again there’s that feeling you’re at a real, middle of nowhere, festival. You want to grab another beer and head for the dance stage, maybe pick up some random new friends and jump around your makeshift campsite until dawn, but alas you’re once again pulled back into the real world as you realise all that awaits you is the Piccadilly line and cold, hard civilisation.

Day Two...