Something for everyone at Electric Picnic
ALREADY a sell-out, Electric Picnic 2014 has something for everyone. There’s ’90s slacker rock, stadium hip hop, edgy electronica and glittering chart music. Read on for your ultimate guide to the big names you can’t miss — and the under-the-radar talent you owe it to yourself to check out.
Los Angeles polymath Beck Hansen (inset right) demonstrated the breadth of his talent with two comeback albums in 2014. Morning Phase was a down-tempo strum-along wherein the 43-year-old ruminated on middle age and his peripatetic childhood on the fringes of LA society. On his Song Reader project, meanwhile, he hooked up with friends such as Jeff Tweedy and Jack White for studio performances of tracks originally released as sheet music in 2013. Rest assured his set will be full of vintage material too: on tour this summer he’s performed staples such as ‘Devil’s Haircut’, ‘Black Tambourine’ and his never-bettered 1993 smash ‘Loser’.
A musical glacier, the Somerset trio obey no whims but their own. It’s six years since their last LP, Third — and that arrived a full 11 after their self-titled second record. But while they take their sweet time in the studio, on stage Portishead can be quick and raw: singer Beth Gibbons has a bluesy shriek that occasionally verges on banshee wail; beatmaster Andy Barlow summons intense blasts of rhythm, so that songs that felt throbbing and sad on record are reinvented as tsunamis of digital angst. Through the 90s, the group were caricatured as purveyors of sophisticated mood music — in concert they are far more primal and cathartic.
One of the year’s most anticipated reunion tours, to date the return of Andre 3000 and Big Boi has not been quite the triumph fans may have wished for. They kicked the year off with an underwhelming turn at the Coachella rock festival in California. With both performers wedging in a solo segment into the set some have questioned just how enthusiastic they are about reuniting for the first time since 2007 (it has been confirmed there will be no new material). Still, it is difficult to write off the Atlanta, Georgia pair considering how many stone cold smashes are in their repertoire. More than that, songs such as ‘Hey Ya!’ and ‘Ms Jackson’ feel custom crafted for heaving summer festivals. You can think of no better backdrop for their widescreen rap than Electric Picnic.
He put LCD Soundsystem out to pasture in 2011 — but James Murphy continues to wage an impassioned fight on behalf of good musical taste and bad facial hair. He has worked as a producer (collaborating with Yeah Yeah Yeahs on their most recent LP) and as remixer, giving a cracking repolish to David Bowie’s ‘Love Is Lost’ for the deluxe edition of the Next Day album. At the Picnic, he performs in his capacity as stellar DJ, criss-crossing genres and musical epochs with guile, humour and a peculiar earnestness. Yes, his schtick serves as a dog whistle to hipsters — but don’t let the avalanche of beards and the skinny pants put you off. Murphy knows they are ridiculous too.
Last year’s Electric album saw the Pet Shop Boys restate their musical first principles: it was smart, heaving with gossamer grooves and laced with the pair’s trademark humour. For the first time since 1986’s Paninaro, it also saw Chris Lowe take lead vocals, on the twinkling ‘Thursday’. On tour, you may add to the equation hits such as ‘West End Girls’ and ‘Always On My Mind’ — and a stage show guaranteed to dazzle.
Surely there is no hotter newcomer on the planet than Formerly Known As Twigs, aka English singer Tahliah Barnett. Splicing a mainstream r’n’b sound with an edgy fashion sensibility, Barnett has seduced critics and trend watchers and, with debut album LP1 basking in swoonful reviews, genuinely appears to be on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough. Expect lots of tastemakers to be up the front, tweeting for all they are worth.
Vienna-based British electronic artist Christopher Taylor writes bright, bouncy electro-pop, with smart lyrics and the occasional outre flourish. He’s signed to fashionable 4AD Records — but there is nothing elitist about his songbook, which operates in the same emotion-saturated milieu as Lana Del Rey.
Ex-Rilo Kiley singer Lewis has just put out a cracking, deeply confessional new record, The Voyager, wherein she pokes at the ashes of failed relationships and shoulders her share of the blame. It sounds like a drag — however, Ryan Adam’s gauzy ’70s-tinged production ensures that, even at its darkest, the music is always listenable.
It’s amazing what a blonde frightwig and synchronized dancing can do you for your career. Eighteen months ago, Annie Clark was a waifish songwriter who played a mean guitar solo but was better known for her collaborations (with David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens and others) than her solo output. Overhauling her image on new LP St Vincent, she has become one of the year’s big breakthrough artists, a Lady Gaga for the Pitchfork generation. She also has intelligent things to say about the human condition in the 21st century — the single ‘Digital Witness’ is a plea for human contact in an era of social media run riot.
Singer Mvula doesn’t like to do things straightforwardly — for her debut LP Sing To The Moon she incorporated experimental classical arrangements and stream-of-consciousness lyrics, with results that baffled and dazzled equally. She was promptly handed a Mercury Music Prize nomination, a remarkable achievement given how bravely avant-garde her material can be. If you wish to have your sensibilities gently sent into a tumble, put her on your ‘must see’ list. Known to suffer pre-show nerves, Mvula says that it is her belief in music that keeps her pushing on. “Once it gets going it becomes easier,” she said. “Sometimes it needs one, two songs to reach the point that I remember why I do this.”
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