Some haggard, others haphazard, by the time 10cc take to the Main Stage to power their way through the viscous powerchord-infested glam of Rubber Bullets (shot down midway through as a generator huffs and puffs its last), swoon through The Things We Do For Love, and croon impressionably through I'm Not In Love, even a dubious, quite incongruous cod reggae rendition of Dreadlock Holiday does little to dampen the unabashed elation that plasters over the passive aggression brooding within the sun-kissed multitude. Sheltering from the sweltering climes in the curiously (un)branded Bread & Roses tent, endearingly gangly Orcadian Gawain Erland Cooper rallies his supergroup-of-sorts troupe Erland & the Carnival through giddy folk rock despondence, clattering away to a glorious Springtime on a battered Silvertone. The intricate yet subtle reverb-strained guitar lines of a peripheral Simon Tong and a thunderous lower end add further facets to already wholly accomplished songsmithery, Nightingale sounding like a glimmering lost nugget of '90s beneath wilting tarpaulin. From wilting bodies to vaguely euphoric wingeing and wining on the Main Stage, Ben Gibbard's Death Cab For Cutie sound forever more like their own death knell and when it sounds something like Meet Me On The Equinox, it's one best resounding in a vacuum. They inevitably air the likes of avant garde-ish I Will Possess Your Heart and flickering Crooked Teeth, although in blistering heat, with flailing fingers shielding foreheads, the setting is unfortunately altogether inappropriate for angst-ridden anthemia best saved for bedroom solitude.
Altogether more celebratory is Bryan Ferry, whose sundown show is bordering on bloated with covers, from a sassy take on Screamin' Jay Hawkins' I Put A Spell On You, to his gratuitous, sumptuous guitar solo-hefty take on Lennon's Jealous Guy. Doing little to rekindle the lukewarm response his latest solo LP Olympia garnered last year, despite its release a mere eight months ago its melodramatic contents are all but entirely neglected in favour of the energetic but suave Slave To Love and Don't Stop the Dance. As Ferry glides nonchalantly from withered heartthrob stage-centre to ebony and ivory twinkler stage-right, guitar lines intertwine as majestically as Canadian acrobats, before Roxy Music cuts Love Is The Drug and Let's Stick Together sway the floating voters in the favour of his unashamedly debonair demeanour.
Friday's headliners the Eagles then emerge before a typically exotic backdrop of palms resting on an azure sunset, before electing to throw Hotel California to the baying throng instantaneously as if it were merely some raggedy indie offcut, butchered from the NME index and left to fester on the dust and dirt underfoot. Thus having unceremoniously discarded the magnum opus, and with Life in the Fast Lane the other side of a setlist crammed with myriad covers, it's a short hop (one so short you could quite literally hop or even on one leg) over to the inspirationally entitled Big Tent for The Human League. They get the Auto-Tune out on opener Never Let Me Go, although it's not until The Sound of the Crowd and The Lebanon that any real tunes are actually encountered, with material grafted from trashy new record Credo proving particularly enervating. Philip Oakey stalks the background shadows in some dubious sci-fi paraphernalia, looking equal parts disinterested and disbelieving that the likes of Love Action, Fascination and effervescent denouement Together In Electric Dreams haven't aged quite as drastically as he himself, before taught tensions fray and an inexplicable brawl breaks out beneath the sound desk. Fleeing the flying fists of Kent, the hour comes to drift into the cold, frozen night.
If Friday's line up is teeming with acts that may conceivably be "passed it", Saturday's is heaving with the varied voices of multiple generations. A Brit bunch that inevitably view themselves in such a light are Slough's Viva Brother who, having recently adopted the pretty heinous 'Viva' prefix, haven't yet altered the unfathomably psychedelic drape they peddle their brand of boorish "gritpop" before. In desperate need of orthodontia and lengthier guitar leads, everything from the Blur-esque New Year's Day to all their other grotesquely Oasis-indebted numbers is distinctly abhorrent. The only truly special moment is the grimace that diffuses across rent-a-frontman Leonard Newell's face upon witnessing the many looks of disdain that line the meagre turnout.
The cultural figureheads then clamber out the woodwork for an evening that flitters between ebbing acousticalia and visceral Raw Power. Up first is Patti Smith, who's backed by the likes of Patti Smith Group man Lenny Kaye and, bemusingly, Patrick Wolf. Even more astounding is that Wolf's not in any way inebriated, quite literally playing second fiddle. Seeing the boy happy, and seeing Smith amble through a rambling reworking of Because the Night, betters all that precedes her (the perpetually dishevelled Newton Faulkner unquestionably included), before she gets a little carried away with the peace, love, understanding and soliloquy, embracing a few of the front row.
Now famed for temperamental live shows revolving around gruesomely engineered guitars and a backing band the size of several Velvet Undergrounds as much as he is for his astounding back catalogue, Lou Reed always promises a devastating experience, although whether that be positive or negative is seemingly all but arbitrary. Tonight, as he stumbles onstage, aided, an opening gambit of Who Loves The Sun suggests the spectacular, even if the sound is as mudded as Worthy Farm following one of its inevitable and incalculable downpours as four guitars, a brass section and an upright bass vie for utmost attention. A peculiar setlist is peppered with a fairly mindlessly reconfigured Smalltown, Reed equating Hop Farm to the proverbial "small town" that you hate, "want to get out" of, and "know you have to leave". An acoustic interlude including Sunday Morning and a distinctly disappointingly, dreary Femme Fatale follows as Reed et al. cluster around his mic as if sat singing beside a campfire in Pennsylvanian woodland; Sweet Jane, stripped of crunching barre chords, is butchered by Reed's lackadaisical drawl as he barely hits any sort of discernible note. Disaffection, dismay and the sullying of a glowing legacy lamentably outweigh any so-called enjoyment.
If Reed provides little to No Fun, Iggy & The Stooges are the first band you'd want booked on your bill were you to inherit more money than Iggy must have had noncommittal concubines in his countless years of gyrating, pelvic thrusting and heartbreaking, and decided to curate a festival. Jerking about in rubber soles, Raw Power immediately injects a vivacious animation into a previously sedate mass, before the crackling, glammed-up guitars of Search and Destroy intervene. With James Brown sadly no longer with us, the world has its ancient, yet newfound 'hardest working man in show business', and what a show the likes of Shake Appeal (accompanied by inevitable stage invasion), Gimme Danger, and 1970 all rattled out with the vigour of a barrel of seething cobras offer. His skin is nigh on impossible to differentiate from that which conceals the plastic organs of his car insurance-touting, stringed alter-ego as he struts his overly sexual shtick in the photo pit, whilst bassist Mike Watt humps his gargantuan amps into submission. You'd argue that after tonight, few would ever rebuff the proposition relentlessly promoted during main set closer I Wanna Be Your Dog, as Pop purveys himself as the yapping, rabid animal of the evening.
Vehement vegetarian and tonight's headliner, Morrissey, would presumably rather feast on Pop's pliable flesh than go anywhere within sniffing distance of the Australian sandwich bar at the back of the arena, yet his hour-plus is dishearteningly light on diatribe, disappointingly short of gladioli. But, and it's a far from inconsequential but, when he blusters through I Want The One I Can't Have, You're The One For Me, Fatty, and Shoplifters Of The World Unite as if the lives of a few Friesians depended on it, or at least as if U2 were to swiftly follow his departure, the lack of badinage becomes extraneous. New material in the form of the whirring, instantly anthemic The Kid's A Looker and the gloriously morbid Action Is My Middle Name have Starcasters cranking out melodrama as star-crossed lovers serenade one another beneath stellar skies, whilst erstwhile You Are The Quarry triumphs Irish Blood, English Heart and First Of The Gang To Die still thrill. Smiths hits There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, Meat Is Murder, and a stab at Lou Reed's Satellite of Love lend an impression of the glorified pub singer to proceedings, with This Charming Man all but defiled, Marr's jangling guitars exchanged for hocks of grubby powerchord. Yet whether voicing his spirited dislike of George Alagiah or belting out Panic, his quintessentiality to British culture, and to this year's Hop Farm, is highly palpable. Viva Morrissey.
And so to Sunday, as an army of day-trippers coated in varying shades of purple stream through the festival gates, many toting homemade cardboard cutouts of tonight's headliner's wordless once-moniker. With the originator of slap bass and up-and-coming mainstream soulster Aloe Blacc on the bill, the day could quite conceivably be rebranded the funk/soul day etc. Blacc's up first, looking predictably dapper in a rather gaudy shirt and clashing waistcoat as those congregated in the proverbial pews before him are teased with the opening few piano plonks of that song. He then slides seamlessly into the wah wah shimmy of Hey Brother as horns blare stage-left. You Make Me Smile is far too saccharine, like an Al Green LP dripping in smouldering caramel, before Green Lights veers precariously towards the realm of the ecclesiastical as paragliders pass by nonchalantly overhead. A misjudged, Hollywood-esque bastardisation of Femme Fatale proves cumbersome, although the reptilian guitar slides of Miss Fortune rectify things somewhat, before a foreseeable degree of pandemonium greets I Need A Dollar, Blacc's ticket aboard the soul train of timelessness. If he's at his most formidable when upping the tempo and tapping toes then he can be tenuously paralleled with ATP-approved cut and pasters The Go! Team who pack out the Big Tent with the scatty Sonic Youth-meets-'80s hip hop scat of T.O.R.N.A.D.O. and the siren-spiked, Sly Stone-indebted Grip Like A Vice. Keeping things in the Family, Larry Graham & Graham Central Station soon follow on the Main Stage, as Graham thumps and plucks his ostentatious, glaring white bass beneath the best of the weekend's moustaches. Many resent Graham for turning the pintsize funk pixie that's to follow into a Jehovah's Witness, although greater indignation should surely be reserved for the interminable bass solos and unabating Hammond organ hues that pervade his highly self-indulgent set...
Tinie Tempah's 'Pass Out' may have been lauded the Best British Single of 2010 and the 2011 edition of the Hop Farm Festival may have one of the most remarkable line ups of these estival months, but the two go together like garlic and grapefruit: Tinie's in typically boisterous form, bounding about as if stuffed with Ritalin whilst experiencing the likes of Written In The Stars and Wonderman for the very first time, although much of both his Intro and the segueing Simply Unstoppable is lost in the dirgy end of the mix, and his jocular R'n'B-heavy DJ/band battle is cut short in favour of a rather limp take on Miami 2 Ibiza. That the aforementioned "best song of 2010" is thrown away abruptly a couple of tracks in, and that Labrinth doesn't get round to featuring despite having appeared in the Big Tent earlier on in the afternoon, further debases Tempah's trip out to the South East. Whilst he may, geographically, have branched out exponentially in his ongoing mission to "disturb", it seems the sleepy fringes of Kent aren't to be jolted from stupor to the sound of Tinie Tempah.
Disappointment is but mild and temporary however, as the arrival of Prince for his first show on British soil in four years and his inaugural UK festival appearance is imminent. There's a lengthy delay however, as he allegedly awaits a limo to transport him all of approximately 32 steps from his dressing room to his purple piano. Yet the prospect of nigh on three hours with any one man, particularly one bursting with more noodling than a Wagamama, is a daunting one, particularly once he's yelped those immortally mortifying words: "We Live 2 Get Funky". However a mere few minutes later all is forgiven, and all are seduced by a rambunctious hybrid of Let's Go Crazy and Delirious as Prince Rogers Nelson, adorned in glistening platform shoes and satin flares goes on to belt out hit (1999), after hit (Little Red Corvette), after hit (Nothing Compares 2 U, the one that he unashamedly affirms bought him his house). Amusingly, such is the latent sexuality of the once-nymphomaniacal apostle of funk that several canoodling strangers bemusingly relocate to more intimate localities quite swiftly.
Running with the theme of the weekend, a smattering of elongated, somewhat superfluous covers of anyone and everyone from Dylan to Jackson follow, before an exultant Purple Rain rounds off the main set as flaxen ticker tape glints under violet spotlight. The first of three encores is far and away the strongest, as Prince writhes about atop his grandiose purple grand piano to Kiss, before wielding retina-singeing lasers for Controversy. It's then on to a fairly straight-edged take on Wild Cherry's Play That Funky Music, and on into the suspect second, Larry Graham-featuring encore. Centred around a couple of Sly & The Family Stone versions and a unnecessarily lengthy Come Together, he disappears once again only to reemerge moments later to bolt for the three-hour benchmark he'd set for himself, the one allegedly scrubbed out by Vince Power et al. On tonight's evidence Prince could entertain for thirty straight hours, and on that of the weekend, the future of Hop Farm ought to be safeguarded for at least as many years.
