The White Stripes
02 Wireless Festival
Something feels slightly askew at the O2 Wireless Festival. The four-day event in Hyde Park aims for the authentic, with warm beer in paper cups and stalls touting raver tat, and attracts a surprisingly hedonistic all-weather audience, many dressed in trainers, band T-shirts and cagoules. But it has a kind of civilised, everyday atmosphere that never completely vanishes. Men wander past in work suits, ties in their jacket pockets; the site's under a busy flight path; families tuck into M&S dip selection packs; shoppers lug round purchases from TopShop and Fopp. You never forget that Oxford Street is five minutes' walk away, which makes the typical festival amenities on offer seem crude. Basic food and facilities seem fine when you're somewhere in a field in Hampshire, but not when you know that Selfridges is just round the corner.
Coupled with Wireless's wee dimensions - you can see from one side of the site to the other - this feels like a historical society re-enactment of a music festival. Everyone here plays their part, but the real world keeps encroaching. The five stages are too close together and the bands compete against one another to be heard. It's hard to focus on the Thrills in the Xfm tent because I'm trying to work out whose bassline is drifting in from the main stage. I overhear a girl tell her friend that the Thrills are 'the Irish Keane'; I feel I've heard enough. Later, Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme hams it up on the main stage, egging on two girls in the crowd to lift their tops for all to see on the big screens. 'Four breasts for the price of one,' he crows gnomically, before thundering through 'The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret'. The most poignant moment comes at the Bandstand from woefully underappreciated folk singer Findlay Brown. Watching him perform the brilliant and sadly appropriate 'Losing the Will to Survive' to an audience easily contained by 34 deck-chairs and 3 picnic tables - one punter is actually reading Time Out - is faintly tragic.
Luckily this evening's headliners are no strangers to grabbing attention. The White Stripes' new album Icky Thump is out tomorrow - Jack and Meg White's sixth in 10 years - and this is their third and biggest London performance of the week, coming after a gig at the Rivoli Ballroom for an audience that included genuine pearly kings and queens (a nod to the British inspiration for Icky Thump's artwork), and a concert for bemused Chelsea Pensioners in the State Apartments at the Royal Chelsea Hospital.
The band are masters of this kind of quirky media stunt. Previously they've played a week-long residency on the US TV chat show Late Night with Conan O'Brien and sanctioned a limited run of 3,333 CDs of an avant-garde orchestral recording of their back catalogue. References and performances that would seem pretentious by virtually any other act seem right for the White Stripes: they are po-faced enough to carry them off with aplomb, and they have the songs and the solid musical ability to rock any occasion. Tonight's festival set may be a more straightforward affair than their first two London gigs, but it's almost certainly no less thrilling.
From the opening 'Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground', the leaking noise from the other stages and tents seems to fade. The crowd is rapt. It's hard to work out how two performers can dominate a vast stage in a way that a typical four-piece can't. But just as writer Raymond Carver paints his protagonists' whole lives with deceptively stark sentences, the White Stripes manage to fill the whole of Hyde Park with just drums, guitar and words of heartbreak. It's a horrible shame that the colour control on the big screens has been altered to show the action on stage in some weird red and white Stripes-o-vision, because it means vast swathes of the audience simply can't see what's happening, and so lose the intimate interaction between Jack and Meg.
They play only three tracks from the new album - title track 'Icky Thump', and two slower tracks, 'I'm Slowly Turning into You' and 'A Martyr for My Love for You' - but it's reassuring how snugly these new songs fitted in alongside the Stripes' more established work. The latest album affirms Jack's ability as a pleasingly consistent songwriter. There's a familiarity and cohesion to his work, which may sound like faint praise, but Jack White is a one-trick pony in the mould of, say, Ferrari cars or Moet champagne.
And, anyway, a festival isn't really the place to try out new material, as the crowd's delighted reaction to such favourites as 'I Think I Smell a Rat', 'Hotel Yorba' and a ground-shaking 'Ball and Biscuit' proves. Roars of approval also greet Meg, cute as ever in striped scarf and polka-dot top, when she steps up to the mike to sing 'In the Cold, Cold Night'.
As the sky finally darkens over Hyde Park during an encore that includes 'Blue Orchid' and 'I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself', a joyous crowd-singalong version of 'We're Going to be Friends' proves to be one of those moments that you only get at a festival. A proper festival. For much of the day, the Wireless Festival struggled: it took a band as transcendent as the White Stripes for it finally to find its feet.
