Rock and Pop: iTUNES FESTIVAL 2010 - The story so far...
Published: 22 July 2010
Round up by ROISIN GADELRAB, DAN CARRIER and JOSIE HINTON
ONE week left and classic rock bands Foreigner and Europe are yet to grace the Roundhouse stage at this year’s iTunes festival.
We’ve seen N-Dubz in a pillow fight, Underworld reinvent the venue as an underground acid house party, Stephen Fry hijack a perfectly good Bombay Bicycle Club gig with his love of Apple – we all know it now Stevie – and marvelled at the mysterious Dorian Gray-like quality of Faithless’s Maxi Jazz.
Still to come are Plan B, whose turn from rapper to club lounge singer has won him many fans, Chipmunk aka MC Jahmaal Fyffe, new darling Daisy Dares You, and Biffy Clyro – will we ever find out the real story behind the origin of the name?
Lesser attractions to come include French alt-rock band Phoenix, X-Factor blonde Diane Vickers and Scouting for Girls – say no more.
In the meantime, here’s what our reviewers made of some of the past two weeks’ choices.
Camden’s own N-Dubz, ever insistent on playing live, tore up the stage with their pop-rap shenanigans. More used to playing the 02 Arena, they returned home for a harmless but highly charged set for their relatives and friends.
The police and knife arches at the entrance added an unnecessary hostility to an incident-free night – although if N-Dubz should be blamed for something, it’s the proliferation of Dappy hats warming heads in these summers months.
Tulisa – who tends to belt out her lines – did well to control her vocals in the Roundhouse’s relatively cosy confines, while Dappy and Fazer bounced off each other as always.
One real surprise was Dappy’s incredibly affecting and rarely exploited ability to sing instead of rap, as seen on their cover of The Script’s The Man Who Can’t Be Moved. The stage needed little dressing, although the huge bed brought out at one stage evolved into a highly amusing pillow fight between the trio.
On Wednesday, Faithless hit the stage. With six albums under their belt, they have branched out to explore genres from reggae and soul to indie. But with their most recent album The Dance they are moving firmly back to the dancefloor. And on Wednesday they did just that. Wearing a shiny green suit jacket over his bare chest, Maxi Jazz, ever the epitome of cool, displayed the energy of a man 30 years his junior, jumping up and down to keep the crowd engaged.
Despite the civilised nature of the venue, the crowd cast aside all inhibition as the room reverberated to brand new tracks alongside the nostalgic sounds of Insomnia and We Come 1.
Even the seating area, where the greying heads took refuge, was on its feet – the most fun I’ve had on a school night for sometime.
On Saturday, it was the turn of Underworld. The Roundhouse is the perfect venue for a gig of this type: whopping great sound system, plenty of room, and the sense, if you narrow your eyes, that you’re not in a corporate-sponsored music venue where beers cost a zillion quid, everything is air-conditioned, and there’s posh talk about “when I was a raver” in the queue for the loos.
Narrow them, squint, and you can pretend you’re in an east London warehouse circa 1990 enjoying a proper acid house rave.
Underworld cut their teeth way back when (the early 80s) and their trancey house music was spun by DJ’s hither and thither. But with success came some frankly unlistenable music: their anthem, Born Slippy, used in Trainspotting, was beyond annoying – an example of what went wrong with electronic dance music.
Yet this gig shows the affection people still hold for this Essex crew. The crowd loved every minute and thankfully they played Slippy right at the end, so the evening was not ruined early on. The music has lost none of its pizzazz and they played other classics – all so seamlessly mixed.
Underworld, judging by the response of those there, have a core group of loyal followers and judging by their consistently fresh approach to doing it live, it’s easy to see why.
Then on Sunday, Bombay Bicycle Club took over. Having nearly completed an acoustic tour in support of new album Flaws, there was apprehension among the audience over what to expect from the former UCS pupils. And having listened to a drawn-out Q&A session with Stephen Fry (resembling an Apple press release) the audience were somewhat distracted when the band finally came out to perform two acoustic numbers.
Dismissing south London as the “servants’ quarters” of the capital, Fry introduced the band as being from north London, the “best bit of the best city”.
The atmosphere was transformed when they lost the chairs and swapped acoustics for electrics. Not known for being a big talker, frontman Jack Steadman said no more than 20 words through the entire gig, but this didn’t seem to deter the head-banging teens who could be seen crowdsurfing and grabbing cups of water from staff to avoid heat exhaustion. Not exactly momentous, but it hit the right tone for a Sunday evening.