Bramham Park.

Prologue:

There’s at least one voice of madness under the stars of Saturday night and it belongs to modernmusicreview.com

“Clap, you ****ers, ****ing clap.”

The girls who were here earlier today as part of the rites of passage for GCSE students which Leeds Festival has become partly over the past five years have disappeared into the night as if the school bell had called them back to their tents.

The lone voice goes on, clapping to himself while the mainly male crowd around him stands there silenting waiting for their birthright - the return of the headlining band to play an encore.

“****ing clap, you ****ers, ****ing clap. (pause) This isn’t a tea party it’s a ****ing rock and roll gig. This is ****-ing Radiohead. ****ing clap.”

The angry tirade continues. Gradually people round the modernmusicreview.com writer start clapping, too, and there’s a roar from the fans at the front in the far distance as the band returns to the stage.

Friday:

What on earth are the Arctic Monkeys doing?

Unveiling tracks from their new album as if they were the Rolling Stones in the mid-1970s, thinking they could persuade fans the future was going to be just as good as the past?

Having dispensed early with I Bet She Looks Good on The Dancefloor, the surprisingly long-haired Monkeys try to repaint their short back catalogue in a darker shade than the ‘cheeky northern chappy’ guise they made their name with three, short years ago.

It’s not that the Humbug tracks are bad, just a bit boring for the dark of the closing moments of the first night of Leeds Festival.

Whether their subtle strengths would work better in a more intimate environment isn‘t the question; right here, right now they’re boring their audience.

When, at last, the still young Sheffield band deign to return briefly to crowd-pleasing with the opening chords of Fluorescent Adolescent, they bravely, or foolishly, slow the pace halfway through in a fit of artistic adventure.

It’s as if boyish, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, I’ve got long hair but I have it carefully coiffeured, lead singer Alex Turner no longer believes in the very things which made him famous.

Even more alarmingly for the Arctic Monkeys’ future, he seems to lack faith or patience in his own fans’ capacity to warm to his new persona, to grow with the band.

Perhaps it’s merely a sign of an even greater creativity to Alex Turner than we expected? Or is it ego?

Earlier on the same day in the guest area after watching The Ruling Class on the BBC Introducing Stage, the smallest stage on site with the exception of the ‘tent Djs’, we bump into lead singer John.

After a year tucked under the wing of Fierce Panda’s management, something’s already changed.

“If you’re going to do the studied cool thing on stage in your wraparound shades, you need to care less about what the crowd thinks if you’re really going to make it,” I tell him.

The would-be new Ian Brown bristles. “When we make it,” he tells me, suddenly cooler than I’d expected.

At least The Ruling Class are a serious band, as were the Arctic Monkeys. The outfit that proceeded Turner and co on the main stage on Friday, The Prodigy, perhaps the more appropriate headliners for the occasion, are pure pantomime - and everybody absolutely loves them.

People of all ages, from 16-year-olds boys and equally young girls to greying late 30s, recognise all the tunes; not just the spiky hits from the 1990s, the inevitable Firestarter etc but all the new tracks off Invaders Must Die, too.

Singing along to every spat-out word, leaping along to every drum thud and snarling stab of electronic dance-punk; it’s all very enjoyable and about as dangerous as Aladdin.

If Friday’s line-up is full of bad singers (Ian Brown), insincere singers (You Me At 6) and dull singers (White Lies), Saturday sees a significant improvement.

Saturday:

The checked-shirt brigade have arrived from the US and Canada; Vampire Weekend, Passion Pit and their UK cousins Metronomy, adding preppy intelligence, a quirky pop sensibility and a catchy, partly electronic dance ethos to proceedings like the bright start of a balmy summer’s morning.

Older schools of music fight for attention before tonight’s headliners.

Noah and the Whale attempt to resurrect the melodrama of 1980s Echo & The Bunnymen but, ultimately take themselves too seriously. Not all break-ups are special.

Broken Records bring an inappropriate politeness to their otherwise enjoyable raggle-taggle marriage of Arcade Fire and The Waterboys meaning they don’t quite capture the magic of either of their raggle-taggle predecessors .

White Denim make a lie of what you knew about them from their genre-hopping but warmly melodic garage-rock records by turning into 60s power trio Cream - virtuoso blues rock; impressive but as heavy as sludge.

Lethal Bizzle is a typically thick-set big, black rapper, though his sidekick is slimmer and younger-looking, Junior Bizzle perhaps. Aggression forever at boilng point, for 20 minutes, Mr Bizzle spits out his likeably hook-laden, old skool rap in the manner of someone permanently on the verge of planting one right on your head.

Unfortunately at the peak of his set, playing the hit, the one which samples The Clash’s Police on my Back, he invites the mainly teenage crowd of good boys and girls with good grades to shout out “*** the police”, which they do, which is obviously ridiculous.

Radiohead should be about to bring the day to a close on a downer but, in their post-In Rainbows frame of mind, their iciness of the past has melted.

Neither attempting to re-educate their fans like the Arctic Monkeys, nor suck up to them like The Prodigy, instead they play the coolest tracks from all their albums from OK Computer onwards plus a brand, new track, These Are My Twisted Words, and, thankfully, no Creep as we heard they‘d dug up for the graveyard shift the night before at Reading.

It’s not that the band have become fun, exactly, even if the do play a few tracks off fans’ perennial favourite The Bends.

What’s changed over the past decade is that Radiohead no longer bring that sense of alienation to everything they touch.

In their hearts they are more mellow; Thom Yorke has become a warmer individual, and that warmth seeps through not only in the mysterious beauty of tracks from In Rainbows but into every other song they play, too.

There’s no sense of Radiohead having to work to achieve this effect.

After a decade of self-conscious experimentation, the band now make blending electronica, hip hop and rock sound as natural as the cooling soil beneath our feet.

The band have simply grown into a great musical ensemble.

Combined with stage props as clean and clever and arty - but unthreatening - as this new, mature version of Radiohead themselves, and the end result is stunning - perhaps the best headlining show Leeds Festival has ever had the luck to host.

No one goes off home to the tent or the car or the bus jumping or singing or tra-la-la-ing but everyone leaves impressed, not depressed.

Not everything is on show or thrust in your face, unlike Sunday night’s penultimate act on the main stage, the Kaiser Chiefs.

Sunday:

As impressive as lead singer Ricky Wilson’s Duracell battery energy levels are, and his new long hair does suit him, there’s always the feeling with these Leeds’ favourites that such a performance is essential to make up for the paucity of the material.

Once you have heard the Kaiser Chiefs’ hits; the seven or eight good tunes, you have heard it all.

It’s a problem once shared by headliners the Kings of Leon, who remain a less interesting band than the following from Sunday’s line-up:

Bombay Bicycle Club (quirky guitar art-pop from the UK, not quite quirky enough).

The Horrors (annoyingly gothic look, great swirling sound, great woozy feel, a real ugly racket, few memorable tunes).

Placebo (not many great melodies but they have become over the years such a believably serious band).

They also remain a more interesting band than the following:

Fall Out Boy. Alexisonfire. Madina Lake. Why do emo-ish American ‘punk rock’ metal bands with teen appeal always have old-looking lead singers who seemed to have snuck back into classes at high school long after graduation?

The great Little Boots v Florence and the Machine debate:

Shut your eyes and Little Boots; the determined blonde girl ex-Blackpool, ex-Leeds, has fairly good pop tunes, albeit more Euro disco than the arty electronica circles she once mixed in.

Open them and she’s like Kylie Minogue without the charisma or, at least, the smile.

Every move on stage in the packed NME tent seems thought out, every turn of her head or turn of phrase to the crowd rehearsed.

Standing there like bottle of champagne without the fizz, dressed to impress in a striking cream dress with power shoulder pads; power is what Little Boots is about.

Her unspoken attitude is “I’ve made it and your job, dear people, is to worship me” - and this after just two hits!

Maybe it’s to cover up her nerves, perhaps she is a nice person off stage, but it’s slightly alarming when she brings her whole family to join her in the applause on stage at the end of the set.

Who does Little Boots think she is? A presidential candidate at the end of a successful party convention? Is this a show or a coronation?

There’s no such lording it up for the equally striking, equally pop but altogether less stiff Florence and the Machine.

Shut your eyes and the tunes are not quite as memorable; powerful but not as instantly catchy.

Open them and behold a woman possessed - possessed by style, possessed by character, possessed with a belting voice.

Swigging from a cup of booze between songs, she launches herself into each number like that old war horse from the late 1960s, Janis Joplin.

The passion is real, the ambition for more than hits and when she tells the crowd at the end that her time is up and she’d really like to do another song but can’t, you do believe her.

It’s easy to believe in Kings of Leon or it was until lead singer Caleb Followill’s not first, not second, not even third or fourth speech about how “great the fans in Leeds are” but the fifth stab at such embarrassingly, possibly semi-drunken fawning to the crowd like a Las Vegas singer whose just had his gambling debts wiped off by the house.

Kings of Leon used to be a half-hour band with a one-trick approach.

If you saw them on their UK tours for their first and second albums, early delight at their subtle skills at squeezing the maximum effect from tiny changes in the playing of simple, old-fashioned guitar pop - with a slight Deep South r’nb rock slant - always turned to tedium as they ran out of memorable material to work their miniature magic on.

Now, after the growing success of albums three and four, they have become an hour band with a two or, sometimes, three-trick approach.

What’s done this for them, what’s made last year’s Only By Night the bestselling phenomenon it has become from HMV to ASDA, is the toughening of the sound and the injection of late night atmosphere a la Where The Streets Have No Name era U2 - those epic build-ups and swelling synth washes adding poignancy to their very manly approach in all other matters.

At their best, bathed in reds from the stage lights under a black sky, Kings of Leon transcend their redneck roots and less than intellectual lyrics by dint of their brooding, sweating sound and gut level emotions.

Their songs conjur up images of a man lying awake at night, beads of sweat on his forehead, trying to get to grips with the impact and tangled morality of some indiscretion he’s committed earlier in the day with some girl he shouldn’t have with.

At their worst, as their sound has gotten larger and darker, they threaten to lose the last of the charm from the early tracks on Youth and Young Manhood.

Their show, rapturously received at first, a little less so by the end, poses the question whether Kings of Leon have anywhere left to go musically.

News had filtered to Leeds about how unhappy the band were at their reception from the Reading crowd the night before.

Even so, career-wise, Caleb’s final utterances about how he only ever thought of fans in England when he wrote songs (“I never write songs for America”) and how they owed everything to the UK, may be tempting fate.

Fans in the fashion-conscious scene here are very fickle; acts go from small to huge to small in a frighteningly short space of time.

I’d also like to confront them on the new, abbreviated version of their name; those KOL banners on stage, the KOL T-shirts for sale at the merchandise stalls.

In the months and years in the late 1990s leading up to the emergence of the Kaiser Chiefs as the first band to ‘make it’ for a good 20 years or so, one man out of many trying to make a difference to the indifference to the world outside the city stood out.

David Procter was in so many bands at the same time, had so many fingers in so many pies, by dint of enthusiam and sheer ligging power, that, in 1999, I named him ‘King of Leeds.’

He has been signing off his emails to me ever since in this manner: kol

Graham Chalmers

Modernmusicreview 2009