Highlights included Bunny’s Hutch, the alternative experimental Tuesday night cabaret from Pantibar’s basement, getting its first big stage exposure. Cuckoo Savante rocked the joint with a gravelly exuberance – and surf-pop outfit The Pulpit’s Laura Lovejoy oozed class. Alexandra Burke has an easy, unpretentious manner, but she got ‘Hallelujah’ out of the way early, in a fairly perfunctory way, reassuring us she was there to party, not sing slow songs. Sophie Ellis-Bextor raised the bar, with a polished elegance and luxurious sound. But there was a worrying tendency for practically all the female pop acts to bring on and show off some “hot male totty” as back-up dancers to titillate the gay boys (Sam Fox, Bananarama, Burke, Ellis-Bextor). Aren’t they hot enough by themselves? Perhaps not.
There was a curious lack of queer in the festival – the only edginess was supplied by bawdy drag queens and their scatological humour, or perhaps the burlesque acts, such as Sade O’Sapphic. Next year, building on its impressive debut, Milk hopes to expand to two days. It needs to decide whether it wants to keep tame enough to appeal to the general Irish festival-goer (which it should have no problem doing) or it could go queer enough to take full advantage of the fact that it’s Europe’s only LGBT open-air music festival, and create something that would tempt the party-boys from Vauxhall, the Dutch Dykes on Bikes, and the Berlin leather bears.
But, the music is the most important thing, right? Transcending all categories, Róisín Murphy was worth the price of the ticket alone. On stage, behind her two Powerbooks, and in front of a huge psychedelic screen, Murphy was in her element, the epitome of cool. She picked up a mic and started singing, in her effortless, mesmeric way, and the effect was hallucinatory. The gays may have given the world disco, but Momma Murphy showed us how amazing it can be.