White Stripes and Queens of the Stone Age

Over the next couple of weeks this will resemble more a music site than a space devoted to politics. Bear with me.

The “Wireless Festival” in London is sponsored and controlled by mobile phone company O2. Yesterday, like much of the rest of the audience, I was reflecting on the commodification of what’s branded as a rebellious art form watching bands with an advert for a telecommunications firm plastered across the stage. If you had an O2 phone you were allowed into a special enclosure and if you weren’t you could watch someone burbling on about how great O2 is on the big screens between bands. The good news is that I was able to pick up a VIP credit card with a very reasonable APR while on my way to the toilet from a handily located stall. Readers who cut their musical teeth with punk will appreciate the true awfulness of this.

Arriving in time for an outfit called Satellite Party made me wish I’d been delayed at work a bit longer. I’m guessing it’s what you listen to in Idaho before you are old enough to join the Army. An appalling sub generic thrash it drove me to the tent where the Thrills were playing. Or, as the XFM 1am to 6am DJ insisted on calling it, “the XFM tent at the O2 Wireless festival”. He probably wouldn’t have got paid if he’d forgotten the advert. The Thrills are in that unhappy musical position of having two pretty good songs and a lot more that soar to the heights of “it’s OK but I wouldn’t pay to hear it”. A lot of bands are like that.

The Queens of the Stone Age aren’t one of them. As you can hear from the little video they were first class, slightly rude, hard rocking muthas. That version of Feelgood Hit of the Summer was worth the price of admission alone. If only I’d been younger, drunker, able to dance and not wearing brown corduroy trousers I’d have hit the dance floor. Their music has a lot more sublety than is apparent at first hearing and it made a lot of people very happy, including this reviewer.

The object of the day had been to see the White Stripes. They took their obsession with the colour red to an unwelcome new level by showing the whole of their set on the big screen only using shades of red and white. It added nothing to the performance and quickly became an irritation. You want to see real faces with reactions and the interplay between the musicians, not some silly gimmick extended over the whole set. Judging by what they played the new album is likely to be less melodic than the previous ones. There was a lot of heavy guitar with long discordant solos. Perhaps just a fraction too much. This was compensated for a a singalong version of Dolly Parton’s Jolene and a version of my favourite the Ball and the Biscuit which was pretty faithful to the album and very wonderful.

I caught the tailend of Air who did a crowd pleasing greatest hits set, which meant most of Moon Safari and were better than a studio based band should have been.