Parklife 2016: The Review

Four years since holding its housewarming in Manchester’s northern suburbs, Parklife Festival is finally beginning to look wholly comfortable in its new surroundings.

When it first made the jump from Fallowfield to Prestwich back in 2012, it did so to howls of derision amongst its traditional support base, with no shortage of raised eyebrows. Having morphed out of the fledgling Mad Ferret Festival at Platt Fields Park, the festival represented more to its attendees than just the summer wing of the city’s clubbing behemoth, The Warehouse Project; in an area densely populated by students and held the same weekend as exams wrapped up, Parklife had become an end-of-year party. The atmosphere around Fallowfield that first weekend without it in 2012 bordered on funereal.

But, in the end, a move had always been on the cards. The event was quickly outgrowing its surroundings in the inner-city suburbs, and ten miles up the road, the biggest municipal park in Europe was calling. Backed by The Warehouse Project’s considerable marketing clout and uncanny ability to curate world-class lineups across the dance, electronic and hip-hop worlds, the step up to a bigger venue as it attracted an audience well beyond the universities that nurtured it was an inevitability.

Parklife 2016

Initial teething problems with the arena layout have now been all but stamped out; a few tweaks this year aided traffic flow between stages, and last year’s decision to retain the Temple stage initially built specifically for Disclosure’s 2014 set was a masterstroke, providing the festival, effectively, with two main stages.

The one variable well outside of the organisers’ control, of course, remains the Great British Leveller – the weather. The Saturday sees persistent downpours that ensure the site is a mudbath all weekend, even with the Sunday largely dry; it’s a shame, because on the line-up front, Parklife feels as if it’s going from strength to strength. It has a clear sense of its own identity now; the best of the Warehouse Project world, spanning dance and electronica, is intertwined with hip-hop that comprises both US legends and up-and-coming British stars. Some big-hitting Radio 1 names across pop and indie rock lend a touch of star power, too. For a festival that remains a notch below the British big boys, the sheer scale of the diversity is impressive.

That statement is particularly true on the hip-hop front; Parklife has always had serious pull with the heavweights, as evidenced by the swift replacement a couple of years ago of Kendrick Lamar with A$AP Rocky when the former had to pull out at short notice. This year, the booking of Ice Cube and Busta Rhymes seemed to lack the clout of, say, Nas running through Illmatic in full at last year’s instalment, but both veterans pull it off.

Ice Cube

On Saturday evening, Ice Cube is in commanding form on the main stage. Sets over backing tracks with just a hype man in tow are always going to require an energetic turn to offset the lack of a live band, and Cube delivers; he manages to marry the furious, more socially conscious cuts from his early solo career (Natural Born Killaz, Why We Thugz) to the out-and-out party efforts that he’d later turn his hand to – You Can Do It goes down particularly well, as does a slew of N.W.A. classics. What’s most arresting is how little the power of his voice has diminished; it’s still one of the most forcefully emotive in hip-hop.

Later on, topping the bill on the 2xtra stage, Pusha T serves up a timely reminder of just why he’s one of the most underrated rappers of the past couple of decades. This proves to be the hip-hop highlight of the weekend; both Cube and Pusha are in fine fettle, even if the latter’s set feels a touch lightweight on the big hitters by way of comparison to Cube, but both are perhaps too heavily reliant on nostalgia.

Pusha, meanwhile, is a man who has always had one foot on the next page. He’s a key player on Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music label, and drops solo renditions of some of his biggest collaborations in front of a packed tent (So Appalled, Runaway, New God Flow and Mercy amongst them). The lack of Clipse material (only Grindin makes the cut) is offset by a host of thrillingly vital tracks from last year’s outstanding King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude LP.

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Between Pusha and the litany of British talent on display, this is a forward-thinking hip-hop offering from Parklife. Novelist is relegated to a mystifyingly early slot on the 1xtra stage on Saturday afternoon, but – aided by the weather – still draws a near-capacity crowd, and provides hard evidence of why he’s currently one of grime’s hottest properties.

It seems as if he’s largely preaching to the converted, too; this is clearly a crowd well-acquainted with the teenager’s work, with the tent moving almost as one as the join the Brockley native for a word-for-word rendition of Endz to close the set out.

Over on the main stage this year, there’s hard evidence of grime’s resurgence; Skepta plays second from the top of the bill on the Sunday evening. His rise to near-mainstream prominence these last couple of years has seen him ubiquitously labelled as the scene’s poster boy, but as he’d tell you himself, he’s been one of the genre’s finest ambassadors for the best part of a decade at this point.

Skepta

He fires through material from last month’s imperious new LP Konnichiwa with verve and assurance, and finds room for some classics too; he brings out Shorty, Frisco and Jammer for Detox and Too Many Man.

Earllier on the Sunday, De La Soul fall victim to the classic curse of the new record; it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the clutch of new tracks that they drop from the forthcoming ninth full-length, And the Anonymous Nobody, it’s more that the crowd inevitably tune out when presented with so much new material and never quite seem to fully rouse from their slumber when the trio start airing the standards, energetic as Me, Myself and I and Eye Know might be. 

One of the most fruitful collaborations that Parklife has entered into, pretty much from day one, has been with Now Wave. The self-described – and not inaccurately – ‘promoters extraordinaire’ have risen to prominence with a similar trajectory and over a similar time period to the Warehouse Project, transforming Manchester’s indie scene in the process, and they pull out all the stops once again with their tent this year – right down to the fabulously psychedelic canvas that hangs over the audience all weekend.

Saturday afternoon on the stage sees an assured turn from Jamie Woon, even though his second album, Making Time, flew bafflingly under the radar late last year. There’s a delicacy and poise to the way the Londoner delivers his vocals that seems to have permeated every aspect of the live show; the new cuts meld gorgeously in and out of each other, with Movement and Thunder genuine highlights.

Flume

Todd Terje follows close on Woon’s heels, second from top on the Saturday; the organisers were at pains to point out that this is a live set, not a DJ turn from the hirsute Norwegian, and with good reason. The man is a revelation live, and so well suited to a Saturday night crowd in search of a good time; he runs through a gloriously eclectic set with a full band, drawing heavily from 2014’s superlative It’s Album Time and dropping what sounded like a couple of new songs too, heavily indebted to electro. Terje, in a lot of ways, is the quintessential Parklife act, bridging the dance and electronic worlds to glorious effect.

Not that there isn’t room for a handful of out-and-out rock bands, too; in that respect, it’s Wolf Alice who lead the charge, tearing through a thoroughly-honed set on The Big Top on Saturday. The group look set for another exhaustive lap of the festival circuit, having hit all of the big ones last summer, and you can tell; far from sounding worn down by their heavy touring schedule behind My Love Is Cool, instead they sound as sharp as they ever have, Ellie Rowsell snarling her way through You’re a Germ and Moaning Lisa Smile with real menace.

The festival closes, on the Now Wave stage at least, with a headline slot from Jamie xx. His is a peculiar case; you can’t help but think that The xx's four-year studio absence has more than a little bit to do with just how stratospherically their beat man’s solo career has taken off.

Accompanied by a fabulously understated light show, he runs through most of last year’s terrific In Colour, having taken the stage to a nod to his surroundings; Joy Division’s Atmosphere blasts through the PA. It’s a crowd-pleasing turn, with everything from Drake’s One Dance to The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me dropped, and feels like a neat way to bookend the weekend – a forward-thinking headline set at a forward-thinking festival.