Free Festival Fun!

It's festival season out here in Europe, and London had a big one this week at Hyde Park, culminating tonight with Goldfrapp and Depeche Mode. Tickets were a bit pricey for us poor students, and I've been zapped on concerts before, usually getting horrible seats. Many is the time that I've gone to a show only to be so far removed from the action that I scarcely would have been able to tell the difference if Darth Vader and Chewbacca had been onstage instead of my favourite stars. But because the festival was in such a massive, sprawling space, it was enough to simply sit outside the main wall and listen in to a live performance, with surprisingly good audio quality for the price we paid (hint: nothing).

I'm not sure how familiar Goldfrapp is to people in the US, but she is enormously popular in Europe, especially in her native England. From what I hear, her most recent album has started to hit big in the US, and she really looks like Madonna minus thirty years; she's got a very unique sense of style and a magnetic presence. If you haven't seen much of her, and even if you have, actually, have a flick through her website for some of her audio and video clips. It's a bit wonky navigating through there, but it's absolutely worth it.

But I'm guessing most people here have heard of Depeche Mode. (Side note: My friend, who has dual citizenship in Lebanon and Sierra Leone, has never heard of DM, but listens to Celine Dion and Savage Garden. Ugh. And when I mean he has never heard of them, I mean that literally, not in the sense that he has never heard their music. He really has never heard the words Depeche Mode in his life. Jesus.) This being a festival, I was expecting a fairly truncated set from them, especially given that Goldfrapp only put in about 45 minutes on stage. I was pleasantly surprised to see (or rather, hear) that they went on for almost two hours, putting on a full concert-length show. They played a mixture of some of the best songs off their latest album along with some of their greatest hits from the past. The highlight was probably a piano only version of Martin Gore singing "Shake the Disease." Superb.