Live Review: Hard Rock Calling - Day Two

Hard Rock Calling has managed to create a very real festival vibe in the middle of London, which is no mean feat. The atmosphere last night, egged on by a brilliant summers evening, was electric and the festival as a whole is looking to be a really steady contender to Glastonbury. Think of it as a Glastonbury for the mums and dads, or those with mud or hippie phobias. Let’s not forget that the next two nights hold Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen in store, two of Worthy Farm’s very own headliners.

What Hard Rock Calling can’t quite match though is the new band talent of Glastonbury. That is until we’re stood five feet away from Marcus Mumford and his exceptionally endowed gathering Mumford and Sons. Previously the backing band for an equally as startling Laura Marling, Mumford is every bit the future star of folk he’s set out to be. Vocally haunting, every well placed vowel moves you, dragging you into songs like ‘Awake My Soul’ and ‘The Cave’ unremittingly, challenging any pretensions about new London folk you may holster. The intelligent articulation and general, as Simon Cowell would demand, likeability of Marcus allows his music to draw every bit of your attention, building it up and exploding it into a battering wall of serene noise with an epic sense of emergency and drama.

From there to Seasick Steve. Believe the hype people, this guy’s a genius. He does nothing more than play simple three-string blues the same way countless thousands have before him, across the length and breadth of America. He’s an aging, old school rockabilly blues player with a bottle of JD in his hand, playing songs about getting bitted by bugs in the long grass of Missouri. However, when he combines this solemn style with an acute sense of melody, he creates bluegrass you can dance your indie loving socks off to. Simple, nostalgic and quirky, his eccentric storytelling and apt for lyrical poetry does acrobatics with dirty bass lines and guitar riffs Jack White would blag.

Steve’s hillbilly sonic aerodynamics aside, it was time for the most decisively awesome new band of the day to take the main stage. Fleet Foxes album was one of the most surprisingly inspirational pieces of music that 2008 saw, and contended Vampire Weekend and MGMT for album of the year amid many scribes. That said, they’d been built up by media and peers alike into a breathtaking, Arcade Fire like live experience, so needless to say when a band fails to even make the slightest of impacts you’re left feeling slightly disheartened and just the tad disenchanted by the record you‘ve so gingerly clutched for the past twelve months.

When we say Fleet Foxes failed to make an impact, we mean fans were leaving. Bored to complete oblivion, it took a good four or five songs to play anything recognisable and even when the big album tracks did come out it was still so massively, disappointingly underwhelming. Their usually charming vocals seemed lost in the big arena and their songs wishy-washy and drab, bland and unconvincing. With the whole stage to take advantage of, they seemed almost invisible and didn’t the audience just know it. Surely if there ever was a time to pull the best gig of your life out of the hat, supporting Neil Young at Hyde Park would have been it.

Such was the tedium we shot across the park for some Magic Numbers. Okay, so it’s hardly rocket science what they do, but crikey they’re good at doing it. The psychedelic, charming rock was a sunny breeze of music to our now fatigued ears. They’re a superb live act that’s surely never going to be as huge as they potentially could have been before walking off the set of TOTP, but they’re definitely a British institution to some people.

Neil Young is a man we don’t need to introduce or blow wind up. He’s maybe the second biggest rock legend to come out of America, after The Boss, in as many decades. His set was an all encompassing hit fest of mammoth Americana, folk and pop, soaring into an incredible rendition of ‘Heart of Gold’, his voice as steady as ever, though his fans not quite as sprightly. Looking around, we realised we were maybe the youngest people here without our parents, which asks the question as to whether or not Neil Young is appreciated by the new generation as much as his catalogue deserves to be.

Of course all that’s extraneous when as his show reaches climax, and he begins Beatles cover ‘A Day in the Life’, he’s joined by Paul McCartney himself for the final verse. All bets are off. What a sight; two of music’s most celebrated symbols performing such an iconic song together; we were really spoiled. Spoiled by Hard Rock Calling who know how to stage an unbeatable rock moment. Beat that Glastonbury!