After have been to the totally brilliant and amazing acoustic Foo Fighters gig on Wednesday, I was sooooo looking forward to hear them again, but fill full power. Before I left the flat on Saturday I was literally jumping around with my acoustic guitar playing Foo Fighters songs.
Mattias, Willow and I arrived to Hyde Park around 3 p.m. The sun was hot and the weather beautiful. We had inner-circle tickets, which, according to our entrance gate (x16), meant VIP (by far the biggest VIP area I have experience, but I guess if you put it in proportions to the entire event it was just “normal size”).
Think we all were a bit surprised that the first band on stage turned out to be Juliette & the Licks and not Queens of the Stone Age.
Juliette & the Licks
The full name of the Juliette in the band name Julliette & the Licks is Juliette Lewis – the actor. Now I don’t know if any actors so far in the history of music have actually managed to pull of being a actor/musician (no Jennifer Lopez did not pull it off (but was she and actor before being a “musicianâ€?? or is she just an “dancer”? Or just a greedy business women?))… Either way – Juliette will not go to the history books for being the first to pull this off. They were shit. So bad. Ridiculous.
Please get of the stage.
Angels & Airwaves
I said we were a bit surprised to see Juliette and her “band� being the first one up. Most say I was even more surprised to see that Angels & Airwaves was the second act.
I have never heard of Angels & Airwaves. But before the singer even mention it (after the first song) I did notice – and understand – that they are a side project to Blink 182.
The music was very similar to some of the less punky Blink 182 stuff. The sound was more like “arena� rock – a lot of echo and reverb.
A bit like I would imagine an U2/Blink 182 think would sound like.
It wasn’t to bad – but I wouldn’t call it good. The singer,Tom DeLonge, obviously had a sore throat. He kept drinking water all the time, and grabbing his throat. He also made a lot of expression indicating that he was having a hard time singing… but not ONCE did he mention it. Why didn’t he just stand down and explain to the audience he had a hard time singing today? I’m willing to bid £100 that the set they played was shorter then they had intended it to be, because of the sour throat they never mentioned.
This throat business may also have been the reason he always wanted the audience to sing along to a lot of vowels. Aaaaaaaaaaa, oooooooooo.
Beside the sore throat, I think Mr DeLonge need to do some reading about culture and different countries. This is not California. This is not America.
Early he said that Angels & Airwaves is not meant to be music that people sing along to while driving their car… and then started a long monolog about “brothers and sisters”, the twin towers, wars in Iraq etc and so on; please sing this song with me - this is the lyrics - ooooooooooo (vowels).
Overall they didn’t make a good impression on me. But I’m definitely gonna listen to them and give them a chance. Their sound was very “arena” and is probably very nice on a over produced cd.
And I do believe if Mr DeLonge throat was ok - it would have been less vowels and better delivery.
Queens of the Stone Age
First of all - Joshua Homme is not ginger anymore. He has dyed his hair black. He looks like a combination of Green Days Billy Joe Armstrong and Elvis Presley (a swollen Billy Joe basically). Now, the look of the front figure don’t mean that they have to do a bad performance…
They were horrible. The sound was horrible. It was horrible.
Everything had so much distortion that nothing came through. It was just a big mass of sound.
Whenever Mr Homme sang in falsetto the song disappeared totally.
The tempo of the songs went way to fast. Especially “No One Knows”. So did they also lost the buggy woggy feeling.
To sum it up - I wished I didn’t need to experience this.
Motörhead
Respect. They have been playing music and touring before most of the others even were born. Respect.
Foo Fighters
“About six months ago somebody said to me, “Do you wanna do Hyde Park next summer?”. I said, “How big is it? It’s pretty fucking big right?”. He said, “It holds 85,000 people but even if 30,000 turn up that is still the biggest gig Foo Fighters have ever done”
First: No - it was not as good as the intimate acoustic gig. But that doesn’t mean that it was not good.
“There is one place that treats our band like royalty and it’s this place.�
And it was big - huge!.
Even too big.
I wanted to feel more energy. More pure aaaaaaaaaa. But since Hyde Park is huge and that there is nothing to keep the sound waves from not “escaping”, it never really reached that.
But they are so good.
They have so many good songs.
The “extras” for this gig was that Lemmy from Motörhead came on stage and did a song with them. So did Queens Brian May and Roger Taylor.
The setlist ran:
- In Your Honour
- All My Life
- Best Of You
- Times Like These
- Learn To Fly
- Breakout
- The One
- Shake Your Blood (Probot song preformed with Lemmy)
- Stacked Actors
- My Hero
- DOA
- Generator
- Monkey Wrench
- We Will Rock You/Tie Your Mother Down (preformed with Brian May and Roger Taylor)
- Everlong
Before Dave played Everlong, all by himself, at the end of the catwalk that stretched all the way to the end of the inner-circle, he said:
“I’d like to thank you for making this the most unbelievable show of our lives. We will always be there for you guys.”
Dave - your more then welcome.
Photograph captured by Jaypeg
Photograph captured by Greg Reed
Photograph captured by Marc Davies