Extreme heat can provoke strange reactions. People lose the ability to fret over pointless dilemmas. Such as: do I watch New Order or the Super Furry Animals? Or, when are Audioslave on and is there time to visit the loo first?
Normally at rock festivals, these are the issues that nag at you constantly. As the shutters come off and Oxegen 2005 cooks in what bears suspicious resemblance to a proper summer, a truth abruptly dawns – it doesn’t really matter!
Festivals, you realise, are both more and less than the accumulation of their individual elements. Shared experiences – for example, 50,000 souls swooning in the warmth – surpasses anything happening on stage.
Even in the blistering conditions, there are inevitable exceptions of course. This year it is The Killers, whose early slot provokes scenes of mass-mobilisation. In the dust-bowl swelter, the moment suggests a deleted episode from the Book of Exodus (watch for it when the DVD comes out).
Yet no promised land awaits: instead, a band in the throes of creative rigor mortis, trying (but not too hard) to breath freshness into an album they’ve been hawking without pause for 18 months.
This is a little harsh but then, The Killers are a little dull and that hasn’t prevented their being proselytised as Artists of Great Importance. What they are in fact is Artists of Great Self-Importance, with four essential songs and lashings of artful dreck.
Confronted by an audience yearning to be won over the Las Vegas quartet fumble and stutter and goof their way through their set. That is, when they aren’t stifling yawns and forcing ominously dreary new songs down the collective gullet.
Away from the slowly-roasting masses, a game Josh Ritter (Ticket Stage) is wondering where his fans have gone. You lack the cruelty to shout back: “they’re off at the The Killers – and they’re rubbish”. His dad has come all the way from New England – it would have been cruel.
Earlier, in the Dance Tent, the ironic Euro-pop of Norway’s Annie manages to clear an arena, which, moments before, is a throbbing turmoil of men with dripping Celtic shirts wrapped around unfeasibly hairy torsos.
They are well...dancing, I suppose, to Silicon Soul, whose unique attraction is a buffed cheerleader in Speedos, getting jiggy to the hi-NRG beats on stage. Scheduling Annie after an orgy of low-brow trance is about as useful as holding a poetry-slam at a Wolfe Tones concert. That said, Annie does herself no favours by dressing, and warbling, like a dental nurse at a hen party.
Faced with an equally disinterested crowd at the New Band Stage, London’s Tom Vek carries the hour, largely by filching cheerfully – and elegantly – from Talking Heads. To underscore the similarity, Vek junks his guitar and performs a jerky jig that would look better in an oversized suit.
The fanbase of Doves, penultimate performers on the Ticket Stage, is divided between sweaty, tattooed blokes keen on shouting and punching the air and elfin young women who wished they looked a little more like Winona Ryder. Together, they present a peculiar proposition . However, so do Doves, a Manchester trio whose songs manage to be at once anthemic and anemic. Imagine a moderately less talented Radiohead. Divide by two – that’s Doves.
The poodle-metal shtick of Foo Fighters has its place but it’s not somewhere you want to tarry very long.
The band’s frontman, David Grohl, famously drummed for Nirvana. This, it seems, is to be his get-out-of-jail card for life. No matter how crass, obvious or grindingly dull the Foos' music, he’s entitled to our sympathy vote. While the Foos shuffle and chug through an enervating, bombast-laden set, nobody, therefore, is inclined to recognise the obvious: they’re rather pants.
It falls to New Order, revitalised relics of the new wave, to rescue the evening. Their renaissance has been a peculiar thing, though not exactly a surprise. Singer Bernard Sumner and bassist Peter Hook always wore the demeanour of grumpy old sods. Now, staring into their fifth decade, the pair have grown into themselves.
None of which excuses Sumner’s dancing, a rhythmic lurch that puts you in mind of a homeless person taking ecstasy for the first time (lose the trucker’s cap, Barney). Yet, as New Order dip into the songbook of their previous band, Joy Division, you are less minded to laugh, more inclined to swoon.
A bleak, frantic ‘She’s Lost Control’ opens the encore. Despite the heat, something like a shiver trickles down your spine.