Idles playing Live At Leeds 2018 (Gary Mather / Live4ever)
Whatever the original idea, Live At Leeds continues to grow beyond it.
The sheer scale is impressive as ten thousand punters at more than twenty venues – official or otherwise – could this year choose from a combined roster of 200 artists, way beyond the imagination you guess of even the most optimistic promoter.
Or even the most optimistic weather forecaster. On the city’s hottest day of the year the hordes of crispy pink-skinned wristbanders swarmed all over the place like ants, taking in less orthodox performance spaces such as Hyde Park Book Club – a former petrol station with the stage downstairs in the old storage tank – and new bands such as Sheafs, Sheffield boys gone north with their bratty, New York Dolls goes Zep brand of power rock n’ roll. True, it’s all been done before, but there’s still something cool about so called undergrads skipping the wait and playing like they’re being inducted into the hall of fame. Ones to watch out for.
Next up were Southampton’s Wild Front, a slightly more sedate mix of diaphanous indie pop in the vein of Deep Control or Wild Nothing, and a quartet who they reckon ‘aim to pair the unrestrained emotions of music with the capricious nature of life’. There’s a boldness to that statement which their performance never quite backs up, but they land their keynote tune Rico perfectly as the pavements outside sizzle.
Peace were probably not expecting the 2,000 capacity Academy to be bursting at the seams for their 3.45 slot, but uncomfortably full it was and, rather than be sardines, we headed to The Social for a fine acoustic set from Mumbai-based Nikhil D’Souza, who despite a lengthy career performing material for Bollywood hits gave an appreciative crowd a highly personal take on a songbook notably influenced by, amongst others, Jeff Buckley.
There’s something about The Magic Gang, a quality that’s impossible to pin down. It’s not that they’re inexplicably so popular with their largely teenage audience despite looking like the IT department of a small university, or that their slightly saccharine take on noughties indie is as cute as it iss stuffed full of hummable melodies. Anyway, whatever it is, they’re more popular than chips at the moment, even if to be honest we don’t really know why.
The goth pop revival has us fairly stumped as well, but Glaswegians The Ninth Wave are more than happy to give faking it wimps like Pale Waves what they deserve, singer Haydn Park emoting puckishly through the likes of Swallow Me, A New Kind Of Ego and Collapsible People, before donning elbow length red plastic gloves as if he was about to go do the kinkiest washing up ever.
Now, at Live4ever we know our music, but we’re not infallible. So after ruling out an attempt to take in The Vaccines, we ended up at the Church venue only to be confronted with Bad Sounds, brothers who presumably failed an audition as CBeebies presenters before deciding on making the sort of Year 10 Hip-Hop which probably soundtracks ‘Rad’ fringe events for the Young Conservatives. Time for a well deserved cold drink it was.
They preceded a headlining set from The Horrors, who’ve gradually transformed from trust funded counterfeiters into almost too polished closers of the deal. True, the slightly weary crowd took a while to be enveloped by their black clad hosts, but by the ecstatic finale Something To Remember Me By even the tired and emotional hordes are gently coaxed into losing their collective sh*t.
We save the best ‘til first however. Opening up the festival – in every possible sense – punk hippies Idles had fans queuing round the block for their midday show and, for the lucky few hundred that made it in, there was further support for the claim that they’re Britain’s finest live band.
In the flesh their debut album Brutalism loses much of its aggressive distortion, singer Joe Talbot giving a meaning to its songs as signposts rather than jabbing tell/do missives from the ego. Summing it up is almost impossible, but the crowd surfing, explosive mosh pitting, Mariah Carey covering mess was such glorious chaos that our only instruction is to go and see these beautiful, compassionate and brave souls before the machine gives them stylists, spokesmen and suits.
It maybe could’ve closed there, but Live At Leeds kicked on for another eleven hours, with all the city a stage, but all the men and women more than just players.
