In the John Peel Centre in Stowmarket there are a couple of fully grown women giggling between themselves like small children. Nowt so odd about that. What is odd is that they are both dressed like small children as well, as if they are going to an Enid Blyton-themed tea party in 1934, all pinky child-style dresses and perky bows. It’s like seeing a rather chipper Grayson Perry down your local chippy, but then again these are real life baby queens who are here to pay homage to BABY QUEEN.
Sadly Baby Queen didn’t get the tea party memo, as she is a grungey South African who is in town as part of the Primadonna Festival, a weekend devoted to workshops and panels and music generally bigging up the female of the species. She’s still reassuringly young at heart though, funny and empathetic and emboldened by some terrifically chunky alt.pop singalongs. On the Sunday afternoon in the grounds of The Food Museum the young at art vibe strikes again as BETTY BOO bounces onto the stage in a Mary Quant-esque mini-dress and regales the dancing children and slouching hay bales with breathless renditions of her ’90s hits. It’s not all retro a-go-go though, as she plays a new track which doesn’t so much sample Human League as throw a new top line over ‘Love Action’.
To Glasgow for more outdoor pop fun, this time in the company of COLDPLAY, who finish off their latest run of European stadium shows with a huge hoedown at Hampden Park. An instructive backstage chat with drummer Will Champion reveals that back in 1999, when they first played Glastonbury, they stumbled across the star-spangled showbiz box of tricks that is the Flaming Lips lighting up a bedazzled festival crowd and thought: “That’s how WE want to make people feel!”.
And so, 23 years on from their first single and that first look at Wayne Coyne’s coyly-delivered exuberance we find the Coldplay band in globe-straddling, meta-crowd-thrilling mode. True, they lack the Lips’ zorbs and inflatable robots, but otherwise the show is a cosmic cavalcade of glitter, explosions, warped visuals, luminous wristbands, balloons and loony tunes. Much like the Lips, there is also a sincerity and emotional depth lurking behind the showbizzing sheen, not to mention a welter of belting tunes running from the, uh, evergreen ‘Yellow’ to the hologrammed duet with BTS. Local hero Edwyn Collins is the blushingly underplayed special guest, and they casually play to 51,000 people pretty much like they used to bulldoze the 200-capacity Bull & Gate back down in Kentish Town, chipper of melody, chatty with the crowd (early producer Ken Nelson gets a lovely shout out) and humble to the final fruity finale, which is one heck of a star-spangled trick to pull off.
To Edinburgh for some rather more leftfield lurching. It’s the middle of the Fringe chaos, the febrile comedic vibe only augmented by the piles of rubbish lying around the city, but the Pandaman finds musical salvation in Sneaky Pete’s where BIKINI BODY take the alt.rock template outside for a fag and a chat and the singer leaps into the crowd to scream about young dads in a most invigorating punkoid manner. Headliners PRESSURE RETREAT are no less gnarly on the sonic front, a surly knock off of ‘Take Me Out’ giving them a similarly caustic allure to Vlure.
To Shoreditch for some indoor alt.rock chaos, this time in the company of A VOID, three grunge-tastic kids from Paris and London who are in the process of tearing a new hole in the rear end of the Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes venue. All three of them are wearing female clothes, but one of them, the bassplayer, matches his frock with a tidy moustache. The music is similarly sly and slinky, ostensibly a Hole lotta grrrrl-fronted rock transported from ’93 to the beer and now, yet there is a raggedness and a gothic passion and a casual instinct behind their last chance power drives which should make Pale Waves weep tears of mascara-maddened sadness. Really terrific stuff, topped off by singer Camille throwing herself and her guitar into the drumkit just as the bassist encourages calls for an encore. “I wish you’d said that abit earlier,” sighs a ragged Camille, crawling from the wreckage.
To Dalston for yet more indoor alt.rock chaos, this time in the discomforting company of the exquisitely-named MOIST CREVICE, who are playing their first London show at the Shacklewell Arms. Theirs is a predictably fraught sound, driven by shattered Banshees guitar and fronted up by an extraordinary shrieking character in lashings of make-up topped off with a bonnet, like Little Bo Peep gone seriously creepy and running away to join Jane’s Addiction. Can we type Grayson Perry Farrell here? Yes, yes we can.
PANDAMAN’S TOTAL: 238
Feature image: Coldplay playing at Hampden Park, Glasgow
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