Panadola Diction

While Morrissey stole the show (can a headliner steal a show? Probably not…) at Wireless last Friday, there were plenty of other things to point my ears at too. Here’s a summary of what I saw/heard.

• The National. I had pretty much written off seeing The National at this festival, due to their partial clash with Beck & Morrissey, the fact that I’ve seen them twice in the last year and the fact that I’m tired of their album-milking, but I was nonetheless pleasantly surprised when a girl with wings grabbed myself and Lady R just as we had entered the festival at 3:00pm and told us that The National were doing a “secret” 15 minute show soon on the 02 stage. So we wandered over and saw a fine condensed National performance of four songs, including my old favourite, ’Mistaken For Strangers’ and ‘Fake Empire’. This satisfied any National-needs that we had for the day, and we were more than happy to ignore them later, in favour of getting a good spot for Moz. I don’t care how good anyone says they were (apparently they put on a good show), screw the (talented) milking bastards.
• Dirty Pretty Things. We sat on the grass with a plastic bottle of Tuborg and listened to these fellows. It was grand, samey, grand.
• Guillemots. The first song ‘Get Over It’ was grand, then he started dribbling on about the next song being about ‘loving’ and asked everyone to kiss their partners, or if you had no partner, to just watch the others kissing. Mulchy wet bastard. I haven’t been so appalled since The Great Athlete Incident*.  We got up and went for noodles.
• Siouxsie Sioux. I’d been looking forward to seeing this quite a bit, though more out of legend-curiosity than musical interest - I hadn’t been impressed with her last Jools H performance. But I was very pleasantly surprised. Her voice has changed over the years, due to a million cigarettes or whatever, but she clearly still enjoys herself on stage, and gave an energetic performance in her silver catsuit. The band sounded fantastic, opening the set (to my delight) with Banshees classic ‘Israel’, and including ‘Happy House’ later. Again the vocals did little for me, but the band sounded huge. Great stuff.
• Beck. This was strange. I love Beck, even though he’s a loop-the-loop Scientologist. He played what was, on paper, a fantastic set with most of the classics, but it was like he wasn’t there at all. Just some robot-Beck. Or a dull man dressed as Beck. There was no interaction, no energy, no show, nothing. It was just like a sound-check. It sounded fine. Strange. Presumably he wasn’t in the mood. But it’s his job to be in the mood. I hadn’t seen him for eight years, and I love almost everything he’s ever recorded, so this was disappointing. There was nothing from Midnight Vultures either, presumably because you couldn’t play any of that whilst acting like a scarecrow with a guitar.

And that was all. Follow all the above with Morrissey, and you get a happy Jusk.

*This deserves a blog-post of it’s own, sometime in the future.