Parklife 2011: Six of the weekend's best

And so, the inexorable rise of the city festival continues. Manchester, of course, already has In The City – and now, with Parklife, it would appear that they have a second genuinely excellent annual event.

Parklife is not, in fact, new. It has been beloved of students for some years, thanks in great part to the fact that it falls on the weekend following the end of exams. And so it was that what appeared to be approximately 90 per cent of the University of Manchester crammed onto Platt Fields, furtively smuggling their wraps past rows of sniffer dogs, while police looked on from guard towers above. I’m not kidding – getting into Parklife feels like A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, except the Soviet guards are replaced with members of the notoriously corrupt GMP.

Inside, however, the atmosphere is rather nicer. Even a raging hail storm wasn’t enough to drown the spirits of a few thousand people intent on getting absolutely lidded in a tent, in a field, watching one of the year’s best festival lineups.

Mount Kimbie

South Londoners Mount Kimbie must surely be nearing the end of their touring commitments for the fantastic Crooks & Lovers and, truth be told, the strain of endless months on the road is beginning to show. About two thirds of the way through the set a dropped guitar note saw looks thrown across the stage of the sort that could render mute those of a nervous disposition. A look so deadly, in fact, that I wondered if the duo might split up there and then.

Despite intra-band disagreements, though, this was as good a set as I have seen Kimbie play. The more textural elements of the record were louder, brasher, less restrained. In fact, the penetratingly loud kicks and the scuzzy guitar lent the set a proper fuck-you attitude, of the sort that is notably absent in so much of today’s ever so polite electronic music.

Kelis

Whoever books for Two Door Cinema Club really ought to get a pay rise. Somehow, inexplicably, the band were headlining – above Kelis. Seldom has more iniquitous a situation been seen in the field of live entertainment. Possibly.

Odd bookings aside, Kelis was a glorious, entertaining surprise. I dragged my unconvinced companions over to the main stage expecting to see a band – you know, of the sort that now seems to accompany most hip-hop acts, with an impossibly gifted drummer and a dreadlocked guitarist. But no. Thankfully, Kelis appeared on a plain black stage, clad in black, with a DJ and nothing else – and she was all the better for it. Her strange huskiness carried beautifully, and even the characteristically misjudged faux-motivational lyrics seemed fun.

DJ Shadow

Where to begin. For most attendees, DJ Shadow was the weekend’s big draw. He has, thanks to the genre-moulding Endtroducing, taken on a semi-mythical status that has somehow abided despite the fact that almost everything he’s released since then has been pretty much dross.

As it happens, his latest live show is so far ahead of what almost anyone (with the obvious exception of Amon Tobin) is doing today, that it pretty much doesn’t matter what he plays.

Shadow’s current show is as much about the structure of the set as it is the visuals or, in fact, the audio. A sphere juts out from the back of the stage, with the entire back wall used for live projections. The sphere itself becomes a different object with each passing second; now it’s some hovering spacecraft, then suddenly it’s a basketball hurtling down towards the court below.

And then, about quarter of an hour in, in a moment of (presumably unintentionally) Spinal Tap-referencing beauty, the sphere opens – and inside is a portly man in a baseball cap, surrounded by black boxes and wires.

Shadow’s set was remarkably heavy on d’n’b drum patterns, but to be honest I was barely listening. Instead, I was completely transfixed by this bizarre, paradigm-shiftingly brilliant stage show. Worth the ticket price alone.

Holden

I can’t help but feel that this wasn’t really the right festival for Holden. Some 20 minutes into his set the tent was virtually empty – a travesty, given that he is truly one of the most entertaining DJs the country has to offer.

Thankfully, people gradually realised that they were missing one of the best acts of the weekend, and gradually shuffled in – only to be assaulted with predictably odd, arpeggiated approximations of melodic techno. The beauty of a Holden set is his complete refusal to yield to the wishes of the crowd. He is a DJ who is unusually unwilling to compromise – and that is precisely why he remains so far ahead of his peers.

Everything Everything

I’m well aware that Everything Everything are unlikely to be friends of The Line Of Best Fit. We have been quite unpleasant about them in the past (although Man Alive remains one of my favourite records of the last couple of years).

Well, I’d like to make amends. On home turf, there are few bands who can touch Everything Everything. In matching, Devo-esque boilersuits they took their already expansive sound and unfurled it even further, with the Marmite combination of falsetto vocals and syncopated rhythms sounding simultaneously beautifully familiar and utterly deranged. With the sun appearing for the first time, and a couple of thousand people coming up in beautiful synchronicity, ‘Schoolin’’ was undoubtedly the most delightful moment of the weekend.

Mystery Jets

It is safe to assume that Mystery Jets will be the next act to be entered into the British musical canon. This untouchably lovely band, who have spent the last five years making the most honest, un-cynical pop music imaginable, are gradually creeping towards that strange status of demi-celebrity – the ‘national treasure’. Theirs was the last set I saw over the weekend, and it was a fittingly rousing ending. Having ploughed through most of 21, the band finished with an extended, arms-aloft version of ‘Flakes’ – perhaps their most perfect song. It was the sort of ending that left the audience smiling wordlessly at each other, safe in the communal knowledge that they had seen something quite wonderful together. Give them five years, and Mystery Jets will be one of our most revered bands.