Festival Weather

Montenegro lacks anything resembling a live music scene, and I was suffering serious withdrawal symptons as a result of spending too long up a hillside with only the livestock for company. On the other hand, when you’re surrounded by cows, the one thing you don’t need is more cowbell. So I went to Zagreb for the VIP InMusic Festival, arriving just in time to catch the first day’s acts.

I also arrived just in time for the weather to turn festival, with a thunderstorm that turned Jarun into a mud pit in about 5 minutes flat and delayed all the performances. Musicians are feeble - if they’re worried about electrocution, they should just wear rubber shoes. Electrifying performances! Oh, I do make myself laugh. There were plenty of Croatian acts, but I didn’t drive for half a day to see them - so I apologise to my one Croatian reader. Everybody I saw was great (I have good taste in music, anybody can tell you) but some were greater than others. In ascending order, but I wouldn’t click on any of the links below unless you really, really love Flash animation and MySpace.

9. Sons & Daughters. I knew nothing about them when I arrived, and I still don’t. Scotrock, good stuff, not much barnstorming, they probably featured on the cover of NME at some point.

8. Amadou & Mariam. Disappointing - even A&M’s inherently sunny dispositions couldn’t dispel the rain this early on. The music was fine, but there was no energy on stage - it was like watching a really high resolution DVD that consists of a static shot for an entire hour.

7. The Prodigy. If you’ve seen them once, you’ve seen them. I’ve seen them more than once, so I’ve definitely seen them. Nothing much has changed for the Prodigy since about 1996, but why should it?

6. Nick Cave. I admit to being fully mystified by the deification of Nick Cave. I was pleased that his onstage persona is nothing like his recorded persona - he talked with the audience between every song, and there were jokes, too. Imagine! His songs feel too much like cock rock in goth drag, but I can see why people like him. (Iza tells me that she loves the way he moves his body - I can’t see it myself.)

5. The Go! Team. If pogo was an Olympic sport, the Go! Team would be the UK representatives.

4. Seun Kuti and Egypt 80. The worst thing that you can say about Seun Kuti is that he isn’t his dad, but neither am I, so I can’t really hold that against him. The Afrobeat revival has taken everybody by surprise (including me, who insisted on playing Fela Kuti to drunk rugby players at Birmingham University at great personal risk) and while Seun is always going to be one step behind older brother Femi, for some reason I prefer Seun.

3. Hot Chip. Okay, I’ll admit - this surprised me as well. Hot Chip? Aren’t they just Kraftwerk wearing a pair of plastic breasts who’ve watched Stop Making Sense too many times? Well, maybe - but they also ripped up the soundsystem on the main stage and gave a walloping performance despite the rain. It’s just a bunch of guys tapping on various mini-synths and electronic doodads while one of them sings nerdy love songs over the top, but somehow it works. Perhaps I was suffering from undiagnosed electropop withdrawal, but they’ll be pleased to hear that I’d pay money to see them again.

2. Tinariwen. The reason why I came to this festival in the first place. I’ve missed seeing Tinariwen about three times in different countries, and I was determined to see them this time around. Their whole desert blues shtick isn’t as fresh as it was when they first appeared, but it still sounds more elemental than pretty much everything else going. You get more for your money as well - at least eight people on stage at all times, and if somebody isn’t a-singing or a-playing, they’ll be a-dancing. Surprisingly there was a huge and appreciative crowd for them - who knew that the Tuareg freedom struggle would play so well in Croatia?

1. Dreadzone. I didn’t even know that Dreadzone were still around - I thought they’d died in a terrible dubplate accident in the mid-1990s. I remember buying their first album and thinking it was pretty average, but clearly I didn’t know what I was talking about back then. Watching MC Spee do robotics on crutches while the soundboard mashed up Chase the Devil and the band gave shouts out to South London was priceless. Hands-down the best set of the festival, which makes it the best gig I’ve been to in the last year.