Electric Picnic Day One Review

“Thought I’d see 25 people including two of my cousins!”
If Podge McNamee really thought HamsandwicH’s Stradbally Main Stage debut was going to be a low-key affair he was mistaken with a huge crowd suddenly emerging from the campsites.
In many ways it feels like a coming of age for the Kells combo whose ranks are swelled today by the addition of sumptuous brass and strings. They’ve got the lush, bittersweet pop thing pretty much perfected at this point with ‘To Replicate’, ‘Apollo’ and ‘Fandango’ all prompting mass singalongs among fans who’ve encountered them many times before in the smaller venues they’ve graduated from.
Niamh Farrell’s little lad Oscar is watching them from side-of-stage making it a touchingly family affair.
Your correspondent’s Electric Picnic 2015 had started four hours earlier with a cheeky glass of Cote du Rhone courtesy of the Newstalk lounge where Sean Moncrieff was doing a spot of Friday afternoon wine tasting.
The whole MindField area was buzzing, not least the Hot Press Chatroom where the Booka Brass Band were first through the flaps, and parped out a joyous set before busking their way round the festival site.
There was a real sense of Chatroom anticipation as Mark and Steve from Ride appeared publicly together in Ireland for the first time in over 20 years.
Alan McGee spiking their champers with pharmaceuticals, Japanese madness and mayhem, Primal Scream, Kevin Shields and Noel Gallagher all featured in a lively interview and Q+A which will be appearing soon on hotpress.com.
Security had to be called when a member of the crowd produced a bootleg Ride cassette (remember them?) from back in the day. In the end, we decided to let the chap off, and Mark autographed the naughty tape in question.
The pair also revealed that thanks to fancy new-fangled (to them!) in-ear monitors they can now actually hear each other properly playing live. This accounts for the celestial harmonies when the rest of Ride join them on the Rankin’s Wood Stage, which they have exclusive use of for the night.
With no over zealous stage manager breathing down their necks, they deliver a full headline-length set starting with versions of ‘Leave Them All Behind’ and ‘Like A Daydream’ that remind me why we dreamed up such phrases as ‘ethereal shards of noise’ and ‘sonic cathedrals’ back in the day.
Being the big formerly in Oasis rock star, Andy Bell changes his guitar every song and peers at the crowd from behind tinted granny glasses. His old pal Liam would most definitely approve.
Whether new material comes out of the reunion remains to be seen - personally I don’t think they’ll be able to resist - but this was awe-inspiring stuff.
Danny O’Reilly is hovering approximately two feet off the ground when we meet backstage minutes after The Coronas have finished popping their Electric Picnic cherry. They’ve been to Stradbally numerous times before as punters, but to grace the Main Stage at Ireland’s biggest festival is obviously a huge big deal for the band who are hanging around for the weekend to celebrate. And well they might with ‘San Diego Song’ getting one of the best crowd reactions - and there were some monster ones - of the day.
They’re genuinely up there now with the Coldplays and Elbows of this world in terms of working an arena crowd. The question being, “When will the rest of the world outside of Ireland realise it?”
Check out our video interview in which they hint none too subtly at a big Dublin New Year’s Eve gig!
I’m spectacularly wrong in thinking that Grace Jones might struggle to connect in quite the same way. 67-years young and still as combat ready as she was during her ‘80s commercial heyday, the Jamaican uses every trick at her disposal, such as pole dancing during ‘My Jamaican Guy’ and hula hooping her way through an extended ‘Slave To The Rhythm’, to deliver a theatrical tour de force that will linger long in Picnic memory.
Covered in fluorescent tribal markings and accompanied by a posse of equally Amazonian backing singers/dancers, Jones transforms herself into a bowler hatted human glitterball for ‘Love Is The Drug’ and press gangs a security man into carrying her round the pit during a supremely dubby ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’.
She toasts us all with a glass of red wine before tearing the metaphorical roof off the gaff with a sexually-charged ‘Private Life’. All of this, incidentally, being done whilst wearing gravity-defying five inch red stilettos.
Belle and Sebastian can’t match Ms. Jones for fantasy footwear, but they do play a (minor) hit-laden blinder of their own in the Electric Arena. Less precious than he was in his Stalinist indie youth, Stuart Murdoch has become a thoroughbred rock ’n’ roll entertainer in the Jarvis Cocker mould with ‘The Party Line’ arguably their ‘Common People’.
With so much going on in the main arena, our man Colm O’Regan is sent into the woods to check out the 6pm-midnight evolving sound system presided over by James Murphy and his Belgian 2ManyDJs chums.
He comes back raving about monster speaker-boxes capable of reducing entire continents to rubble with their seismic bass thud. Murphy & Co. will be repeating the multi-sensory Despacio experience on Saturday and Sunday; do not miss it!
Dance legends carrying the Main Stage off into the stratosphere duties fall this year to Underworld who don’t appear to do much beyond pressing ‘play’. Every song sounds like it’s about to burst into ‘Born Slippy’ which is A-OK with the mass raving ranks.
Day One of the Picnic has delivered… and then some!

STUART CLARK