PREVIEW:The Electric Picnic caters for fans seeking music that is eclectic and experimental
IT MIGHT seem as if the promoters of Electric Picnic are gilding the lily a tad too much by continuously adding acts, events and happenings to the bill. But you can't deny that in doing so they are further enhancing the most sophisticated music festival Ireland has yet produced.
The odds and ends are peripheral, however, to the music, which once again spreads its wings wide and far to encompass a line-up that is as eclectic and experimental as it is innovative and exciting.The first major coup the promoters have surprised us with is bringing to Ireland for the first time the Sex Pistols, once the scourge of the establishment but now yet another reformed band on the nostalgia circuit.
The difference, of course, is that the band are not trumpeting new or substandard material, but will be playing most if not all of their seminal debut (and only) studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.
Such a title should spook neither the authoritarian figure nor the thought police; ingrates back in 1977 and now, the UK band, featuring London-Irish singer John Lydon, still retain the power to irritate. For a rock band of fiftysomethings, this is no mean achievement.
The second major coup is signing up regrouped Irish act My Bloody Valentine. In the early 1990s, My Bloody Valentine were one of the country's Great White Hopes; they made amazing rock music that influenced generations. But then they disappeared in a haze of reclusiveness and recrimination. Like the Sex Pistols, there is no new material, but rather a re-envisioning of the music on their two classic rock albums, Loveless and Isn't Anything.
Yet the Picnic is more than mere retreads (however brilliant they may be). If anything- and what makes it radically different from Oxegen, Ireland's other major open-air music event - it is about thousands of people engaging with music that isn't necessarily commercial.
You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a handful of acts on the bill that have sold as many albums as, say, recent Oxegen headliners REM and Kings of Leon.
Electric Picnic, then, is a niche festival for a broadening audience of people who have left behind them the notion that success equals record sales, and that to be engaged with music doesn't necessarily mean you have go down the route marked "lowest common denominator".
The other notable character of the festival is in its cross-cultural, cross-referencing of music, literature and debate.
Oh and there's the event's debut of celebrity chefs.
ON STAGE: Gig Highlights
Among the acts to be featured at Electric Picnic are:
Friday:Sigur Ros, Joan As Policewoman, Christy Moore, Dawn Landes, Fovea Hex, Jape, Late of the Pier, Tinariwen, The Gutter Twins, Wallis Bird.
Saturday:Duffy, Crystal Castles, That Petrol Emotion, Ra Ra Riot, Ulrich Schnauss, Cathy Davey, Lisa Hannigan, Soha, The Kills, The Flaws, Tindersticks.
Sunday:Sex Pistols, My Bloody Valentine, Florence and the Machine, Gemma Hayes, Emmy the Great, Hercules and Love Affair, Leila, Grinderman, Adrian Crowley, Conor Oberst.
