T in the Park 2010 – Friday

Last year's T in the Park felt like the tipping point for the then sixteen year old granddaddy of Scottish music festivals. Like any successful venture, it had grown and flourished over those years. First the site itself moved from Strathclyde Park to Balado in 1997, then by around 2002 the new army of festival-goers was ensuring that T in the Park tickets were a must-have before even a peep of the line-up was announced. Come 2007 and the whole shebang expanded from two days to three as organisers squared up to the godfather, Glastonbury.

Accordingly the emphasis on the line up changed. From our vantage point at least there have been more ‘crowd pleasers’ who habitually make the trek to Kinross; Kings of Leon and Kasabian spring to mind as indicative of the festivals ‘go to’ headliners of late. Meanwhile the pop contingent, whilst perhaps not growing in accordance (Kylie Minogue did play way back in 1995, lest you forget) has certainly been attracting a disproportionate number of punters. Anyone who witnessed both Lady Gaga’s matinee performance on Saturday last year and Nick Cave’s ‘headlining’ the evening before is unlikely to argue on that point.

We can hardly blame the organisers of course. Who wouldn’t blow an exasperated breath at booking Nine Inch Nails to play to a crowd that numbered in the hundreds, rather than the thousands? Yet whilst it’s disheartening to wonder if such acts will ever grace the NME stage again, we were able to take solace in many other factors this year. The T Break and BBC Introducing stages continued to throw up precious little gems, some we know of all too well and others we’ll be checking out afterwards. King Tut’s tossed out quality upon quality, particularly with Frightened Rabbit, a band destined to reach one of the bigger stages in the coming years or we’ll eat our Unicorn Kid hats.

As for the big hitters? His best may be behind him, but bagging Eminem is proof that T has a lot of life in it yet and whatever you think of Muse, you can hardly deny their spectacle as a headlining act on an evening that didn’t even exist a few years ago. And whilst we may have given Kasabian and Jay-Z the old switcheroo and elevated Hova to headlining status, it certainly shows something of the calibre T has galvanised to get Shawn (as his Ma calls him) to play second fiddle after the Glasto ‘controversy’ of 2008.

Yes, we’ll have a bit of a moan about this and that act, or the piss-flinging contingent at Frightened Rabbit because, well, we like to moan and because that’s fucking gross. But we know deep down that if everything we wanted was handed on a plate we’d be no happier. We need to trek through the shit, quite literally this year, to find the Shinola and when we found it, all the mud, sweat and pricey beers made it all the more worthwhile. Now, I hear tickets for 2011 are about to go on sale...

FRIDAY

With the sound blowing around on an early-evening Main Stage slot, Editors find themselves, perhaps for the first time, in a position where they can garner mild rapture by filling fifty minutes with a comprehensive backlog of singles. For the sake of pride, though, they bookend the performance with their newer, Krautrockier electro-snazz, the crowd seem bewildered, they drink. For the most part, however, Editors hold attention, no mean feat for a band who are literally no-one’s favourite. [mh]

It’s a set of two-halves for Hot Chip who spend twenty sweaty minutes coaxing the crowd into a non-stop frenzy, culminating with an early doors Over and Over, before an unspecified technical glitch kicks the party square in the gonads. Our favourite chic-geeks return after ten long minutes, but the crowd are off the boil and it takes until set closer, a sublime Ready For The Floor, to get the atmosphere back to what it was. [dc]

Of course we expected a good deal of pomposity from Muse, and with Close Encounter-style light emitting keyboards, a double-necked guitar of rawk and Matt Bellamy’s mean looking keytar, we got just that. Less welcome was video montages of smiling children, burning oil fields, cute ickle animals and marching armies that screamed ‘Look what we’re doing to the planet!’ in a manner that would have had Michael Jackson thinking twice. Set-closer Knights of Cydonia better balanced the bands’ ever-growing self importance with a theatrical Man With No Name-style harmonica intro and a computer generated building collapsing at each strum of those bombastic opening chords. Bruce Springsteen once said that you need the ridiculous and the sublime to make a good rock show but surely he meant in equal measure. [dc]

Eleven o’clock on the T Break Stage, and Glasgow’s French Wives have managed to requisition a hundred or so fans (as frontman Stuart Dougan interprets it, “people who know about music”) from the likes of Calvin Harris, The Black Eyed Peas and Muse. Dougan’s aloofness doesn’t backfire, and the band rattle through their chamber-disco set with a compelling, guerrilla nonchalance. As a finale, two hats and around three thousand pieces of confetti are dispatched into the audience, rendering Muse’s lasers and ballistic missiles completely charmless. [mh]