photo taken by yours truly
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS
AND
EMPIRE OF THE SUN
LOVEBOX FESTIVAL 2010
VICTORIA PARK
LONDON, UK
17 JULY 2010
The sun was out and an uncharacteristic warmth filled the British skies as the 7th annual Lovebox Festival played out over three days in Tower Hamlets' Victoria Park in East London. Me and 49,999 of my closest friends had spread ourselves out over 40 acres of music, art, food and booze and soaked up the atmosphere on an electric Saturday afternoon. The Lovebox Festival is a three day bacchanalian fiesta of the senses that was launched in 2003 by all-around badass electro-cats Groove Armada, was this year boasting such acts as Roxy Music, Dizzee Rascal, Grace Jones, Mark Ronson and the Business Intl., Paloma Faith, These New Puritans, Hot Chip, Cut Copy, I Blame CoCo (Sting's daughter), Midnight Juggernauts, and Empire of the Sun. It was freaking brilliant, it was.
In between fabulous carnival rides (The Swirly Sea was particularly awesome), drag disco cabarets, over-priced festival food and drink, bumper cars, a Royal Navy helicopter dressed up like a menacing ogre with earth-mover legs, and a giant tree house with sparkling lights, there was actually time to see honest-to-goodness live music! For your reading amusement, I'd like to review the impressive sets delivered by Australian bands Midnight Juggernauts and Empire of the Sun. Yes!
Midnight Juggernauts
picture: messandnoise.com
May 28th of this year saw the release of Midnight Juggernauts' second album, The Crystal Axis - a hypnotic and soulful hybrid of 70s glam, soaring Ennio Morriconesque soundscapes, and spacey synths that would fit quite comfortably in anybody's music collection. It really is quite a lovely and majestic record that, I learned Saturday afternoon, lends itself very well to a live performance. I'd never seen Midnight Juggernauts live before and was, as I tend to be from time to time, rather curious as to how it would all play out. My curiosity was rewarded, and then some, by this Melbourne, Australia trio who proceeded to blow our minds at the Gaymer's Stage near the massive Tree House tucked into the tree-line. Singer and keyboardist Vincent Vendetta began by apologizing to the audience: "Sorry if we seem rather harried - we were stuck in some serious traffic and just got through the gates fifteen minutes ago!" No worries, mate. Your alleged harried-ness did not appear during your magical 80 minute set.
Launching into my favorite song from the new album, "Winds of Fortune," Vendetta, drummer Daniel Stricker, and bassist/guitarist Andrew Szekeres sounded fresh, vibrant, and completely in charge of the mood-making. To paraphrase Brian Ferry, Midnight Juggernauts let loose with a rhythm of a rhyming guitar, distinctive drumming, and sleek, trance-like synths; every note was resplendent with lushness and beauty. "Shadows" and "Road To Recovery" from their debut album Dystopia were alive and even more dynamic than their studio mixes. New songs "Cannibal Freeway" and "This New Technology" tickled the imagination as to where their music is headed - and it sounds like a wonderful, mythological place indeed. They closed their set with "Into The Galaxy," and as beach balls and straw hats (from the Cuervo Fiesta Hall) flew through the air and young women sat on their boyfriends' shoulders, everything came together with a psychedelic luster that hung invitingly in the air long after the last note was played. As Vendetta sung, "Floating to the edge of the world, floating to the edge of the sea, floating off the edge of the ocean, out into the galaxy." Well done, lads. The new album is, in my humble opinion, quite a corker. Good work!
setlist
Winds of Fortune
Shadows
So Many Frequencies
Vital Signs
Tombstone
Cannibal Freeways
This New Technology
Road To Recovery
Into The Galaxy
And so that was that. My friends Michelle and Peter and I then proceeded to meet up with my girlfriend, who was watching Paloma Faith on the Main Stage. En route, we stocked up on some canned Tuborg and Gaymer's and then hit some of the carnival rides. One in particular, The Swirly Sea, was quite brilliant. Here's a pic:
The sun's final trip towards the Western horizon was well under way as I parted ways with my companions and headed back to the Gaymer's Stage for a show I was very much looking forward to: Empire of the Sun. When Emperor Luke Steele released his multi-faceted and innovative debut album Walking on a Dream in late 2008 (early 2009 for the US release - we always have to wait a bit longer, don't we?), it was almost as if the entire audacious idea had been hatched in the fevered dream of a long-extinct elemental deity. Sadly, Steele's partner in aural crime, Luke Littlemore, had left Empire of the Sun to return to his band Pnau late last year, but that didn't matter here.
At approximately 9:10, the spectacle began! A drummer wearing a bright blue mohawk helmet with LED lights, a guitarist all in black, and four nubile female dancers with skin-tight body suits of powder blue with large half-cubes perched on their heads took to the stage. With heavy drumbeats and an ominous synth score, two of the dancers stood on a raised dais with a golden tiger head at the rear of the stage, in front of a video screen, holding up giant black Japanese fans. As the thematic music, "The Emperor's Heart," came to a thundering crescendo, the black fans were thrown down, revealing the Emperor Steele himself, dressed in shiny black samurai's panoply threaded with silver bands and wearing his trademark sunshine headdress. The opening surf-rock guitar strains of "Standing On The Shore" floated effortlessly outward, and all of us present were thrust headfirst into the realm of the Empire of the Sun.
Empire of the Sun
photo by me
We were putty in his hands. The audience knew the words, note by note, and were more than happy to bellow the lyrics at the top of their lungs. Even for "We Are The People," the crowd was willing and able to hit the high notes of the chorus. More beach balls, straw Cuervo hats, and hula hoops flew through the air - all of which, I might add, are FAR preferable hitting you in the back of the head than, say, the half-empty plastic bottles employed by the audience at the far rowdier Wireless Festival in Hyde Park two weekends ago with LCD Soundsystem, 2ManyDJs, and Snoop Dogg.
The video screen accompanied Steele and his musical disciples with a charged display of trippy galactic visuals and fractal patterns, pausing in between songs to show detailed images of the various planets and moons of our solar system. From time to time, the dancers would run offstage and return, costume changed, as other "characters" from Empire of the Sun's videos. There were the golden-masked green vixens, the "blockheads," and then the shiny black beetle-like sentry warriors with the prisms for hands. Alas, the swordfish girls did not appear.
The space-age surf rock of "Standing On The Shore," sported an intense and extended bridge that was simply electric. "Half Mast," with its sleek, propulsive synch arrangements and driving drums, really got the crowd jumping - the urgency of the lyrics ("Hear me now, I'm down on knees and praying though my faith is weak without you") really shone in a live setting. The weird psycho-funk of "Swordfish Hotkiss Night" throbbed with menacing sensuality, Steele's dulcet falsetto filling the nighttime air with its primal energy. (No dancing swordfish girls, alas.) "King's Cross hotshot, Jesus Christ on web blog," intoned Steele darkly. The sad and bereft heartbreak of "Without You," the set's only slow number, just felt right. But when the opening acoustic chords of "We Are The People" began, the crowd went certifiably apeshit. Everybody - and do I mean everybody - sang along at the top of their lungs; even, I'm proud to say, managing to hit the high notes of the chorus: "I can't do well when I think you're gonna leave me, but I know I try - Are you gonna leave me now? Can't you be believing now?"
It was a magical evening - a flood of plain brilliant music performed with heart and passion to an enthusiastic crowd that believed in this particular Empire. Emperor Luke Steele is onto something special here, and I'm a believer. With a (rumored) second album coming out later this year, I myself cannot wait to see where the Empire is headed.
setlist
The Emperor's Heart (Intro)
Standing on the Shore
Breakdown
Half Mast
We Are The People
Swordfish Hotkiss Night
Delta Bay
Without You
Tiger By My Side
Walking On A Dream
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