As gaggles of adolescents attached to backpacks filled with plastic waterproofs and dismayingly permeable macs head for Richfield Avenue and Bramham Park over the August bank holiday weekend bender, a brief and bleary-eyed glimpse around the Eurostar departure lounge on a chilled Friday morn suggests forever more buccaneers of Blighty are heading for Parisian banlieues and more precisely, for
Rock en Seine. With the aforementioned iron horse depositing festival goers slap-bang at the beating heart of the French capital in approximately the same time as it takes to reach Leeds' railway gateway, the festival offers the foreign festival experience that grows in stature and revere annually (untried and untested biscuits and booze as standard), while proving as effortless as the neighbouring village of Saint-Cloud is quaint, and it's Sylvain Chomet cliché quaint. Geographically, the site sprawls over a spindly edge of the Parc de Saint-Cloud narrower than many a leg that struts the Parisian catwalk come October/March, and its four stages are scattered amongst washes of the perturbingly autumnal and ostentatious fountains arranged by Louis XIV's landscape artist, Le Nôtre.
First to grace this year's new addition to the ranks, the Scène Pression Live, is Alex Ebert, the patently messianic foreground figure of
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.
Looking as though he's just overcome a 40-day starvation-struck spell in a wearying wilderness that's subsequently incurred a form of calming delirium, from the opening humbling thrum of Janglin' both sound and scenery become increasingly evocative of the contents of the loony bin being emptied out onto saraband scuffle. Carries On seems more appropriate to campfire croon-along than mid-afternoon mumble-along beneath foreboding greyness, its live reconfiguration intermittently sounding disconcertingly akin to U2's stadium-lashing tedium, although of course by the time a gracefully euphoric Home swings around all are seemingly converted. The forever-endearing Jade Castrinos here takes to the fore to juxtapose her crackling, almost prickly vocals with Ebert's weathered trill as the pair then get swept away on waves of lovestruck elation, haphazardly translating that spectacular chorus into French, belting it out to fade. Given the lowly billing of Scot cock rockers
Biffy Clyro on this year's affiche, you'd be forgiven for presuming that their X Factor-indebted FM omnipresence was yet to be broadcast over yonder beyond la Manche yet their Scène de la Cascade set is rapturously received, and from a vast mob too. If
their inaugural major festival headline shift at July's Sonisphere was all but devoid of the slithering, visceral prog that initially turned heads and ignited ears yonks ago, tension or perhaps pressure imposed on the trio in the UK is seemingly eased today as a devastating Stress on the Sky lines up alongside the customary chart fodder of Many Of Horror, Mountains, and God & Satan. A good band gone bad perhaps, although this afternoon implies that they're still capable of the excellent, besides their bad and ugly moments of late. Very much living for the present are
Odd Future, who may conceivably no longer be around/alive by the next edition of Rock en Seine. Tyler, The Creator beams and boozes from behind a black veil for a while, before hobbling out to the ribcage rattle bass of 64. He's soon being tossed about atop the crowd despite nursing a broken foot; he's then spitting Yonkers with enough vitriol you half expect to see crimson blood dripping from his vulgar cakehole; he then excessively name-checks his genitals. Visually, it's all a little like watching a Kindergarten class for ADHD-addled, attention-seeking minors as Domo Genesis, Hodgy Beats and Tyler trade dubious dance manoeuvres and no-longer-startling obscenities with one another during Sandwitches, Transylvania, and numerous false-started cuts. If Tyler represents Hector, the first of the gang with a gun in his hand, the first to do time, the first to die etc., Mike G meanwhile would be last to tick said boxes as he sanely shimmies through the sultry, downtempo vibes of Everything That's Yours. However now stripped of shock factor and with Tyler harnessed by his black walking boot, the future now seems as unpredictable as it ever was for the Californian collective.
A minuscule campsite bizarrely inhabited by as many boardgames as human beings sits beside the Scène de L'industrie, and more bizarre still is its carpark-like layout, with each tent assigned a pitch demarcated by the sternest of white lines. It's from this aural vantage point that
Funeral Party frontman Chad Elliott can be heard to profess to have "smoked too many cigarettes". A poor excuse if ever there were one for kicking sand over a grim reality of a set filled with too many duplicate shards of substandard indie.
Kid Cudi too embodies substandard, albeit within the parameters of a different genre, and on a different stage. Kanye West's protégé has evidently been taking notes on his master's dark and twisted postgrad fantasies, and arrives heinously late to more of a fizzling ripple than the frantic roar he's evidently awaiting. Cudi's brazen, and evidently believes the hype as he swizzles a garish red mic stand into which he delivers persistently wonky, wrongly pitched vocals. He's a pauper's West, and after a dismal forty-five even the usually excruciating Guetta collaboration Memories, stuffed into a shoddy medley, sounds revolutionary, before it morphs into a split second rendition of his only discernible "hit", Day 'n' Nite. Don Letts and a visibly ecstatic Mick Jones later lead
Big Audio Dynamite through The Bottom Line, BAD and Rush with whimsical abandon. Jones looks as though it'd take the news of a punctured lung to wipe away the grin that's smeared across his face, and it's comprehensible considering E=MC² provides not merely a highlight of BAD's early evening turn, but also of both Friday and of Rock en Seine 2011.
When in Paris, were you to do as the Parisians do, you'd wind up watching hometown heroes
Jamaica who pack out an entire wing of the festival come nine. If on record they sound like Phoenix by way of Justice's more histrionic moments (Xavier de Rosnay mucked in on the debut, hence the inherent nod) then live their baggy aesthetic and Fender Mustang sheen is deflating. It's like being taken out for dinner, only to trundle up to a rotisserie chicken caravan in a grotty abandoned car park, and When Do You Wanna Stop Working seems to drag on for about the same amount of time it takes to dismember and devour an entire poulet rôti too. Thank fuck, or the Gods of rock, for the
Foo Fighters then, whose 20-song setlist sees the rawk behemoths administer a relentless dosage of adrenaline and distortion-led anthemia. Opening with the chugarama of Bridge Burning from latest LP Wasting Light blunts their initial injection of Gibson angst and agitation somewhat, before they go on to rip through Rope as if discarding as many awkward newbies asap, impetuously bolting for the following hat-trick of The Pretender, My Hero and Learn To Fly. A live tour de force, Dave Grohl and Chris Shiflett exchange blues licks amidst the constant splurge of power chord, the immaculately coiffured Pat Smear largely immobile stage-left beside a bewhiskered Nate Mendel who rocks around on his heels like a push bottom toy in the hands of a sadist. Stacked Actors is positively monumental even in its lounge jazz verse breaklidown, whilst Monkey Wrench is the sound of poster-plastered adolescent walls jolting to vibrant life. A cover of Mose Allison's Young Man Blues is convoluted, bloated with more noodles than Wagamama dispose of daily, before wrongs are righted by a denouement revolving around All My Life and Everlong. With no encore to hack up the intensity, respite is required following on from two unremitting hours with Grohl et al., and the dirgy electro rock of
Death In Vegas, for all their discombobulating vocals and undulating bass arpeggiation, beneath dampening downpour, leaves a diminishing multitude wet, and equally cold.
