Sunny mix of music, politics and pride
The main stage faltered at times, but beautiful weather contributed to the atmosphere at Body + Soul, writes
Gimme Fever
Fever Ray’s epically weird stage show on the Body and Soul main stage on Friday night was simultaneously sexy and disturbing. The Swede Karin Dreijer has performed under the name Fever Ray since first springing to prevalence with her brother as electro-pop duo The Knife in the mid-Noughties.
She used to be famously reticent about her personal life, but following a nine-year hiatus, her new album and stage see her opening up about her journey towards LGBT empowerment, with a hefty dose of playful kink.
Fellow female performers gyrated in muscle suits as Dreijer, with a cropped head and facepaint reminiscent of Fester Addams, gave the performance of the night.
A matter of Pride
Saturday’s annual Pride march and Sunday being the 25-year anniversary of the legalisation of homosexuality in Ireland, there was a very strong theme of LGBT visibility running through the whole weekend at the 15,000-capacity festival. The on-site Pride parade on Saturday, complete with samba band and giant rainbow flag, was a colourful, joyous explosion, as flamboyant as you could hope for. The flag found its way down to the Mother DJs Takeover at Reckless in Love after, to be shaken aloft amidst the happy dancers.
Leo and the women
It wasn’t quite Corbyn at Glastonbury, but there was a polite reception for Leo Varadkar when the Taoiseach dropped by the Women’s Podcast at the Woodlands stage on Saturday to discuss women in politics.
“We need to be 50/50, not 22/78,” he said of the gender balance in politics. There was almost no heckling: he fielded one politely worded question on writing a right to housing into the constitution, before heading down to the main stage for the evening, posing for countless selfies along the way. A good day approval ratings-wise, no doubt.
Reggae revival
Jamaican reggae revival star Chronixx was a hit with more than just dreadlocked Rastas on Sunday night on the Body and Soul stage. The son of legendary old-school reggae musician Chronicle, Jamar McNaughton, AKA Chronixx, is a chip off the old block but an entirely new phenomenon in his own right. Blending reggae beats and up-beat, inspiring lyrics with a slick pop sensibility and stage presence that reaches out to beyond reggae’s usually self-limiting fanbase and into the mainstream, Chronixx was playing his first Irish gig and seemed delighted with his warm welcome.
Smaller stages
With the exceptions of mainstage crowd-pleasers Fever Ray, Jon Hopkins and Chronixx, the Body and Soul stage didn’t seem to be where it was at this year, with the young crowd preferring the beats at Reckless in Love and the Absolut bar and a small turn-out for mainstage acts each day until night fell.
There was the usual absolute glut of bands to see, and most of the best of them were on the smaller stages: in the Bulmer’s Lounge, Belfast gaeilgeoir rappers Kneecap, whose song Cearta was banned from Raidio na Gaeltachta last winter, absolutely raised the roof. Dundalk punk poet Jinx Lennon and Sunday night’s closing act, Post Punk Podge, were similarly subversive wins.
Sun, sun and sun
Temperatures in the mid-twenties all weekend added to a relaxed and happy atmosphere. The walled garden, with its welcome patches of shade, was packed for whole weekend, with groups happier to sit around with friends than go in search of entertainment.
Wandering past Louise O’Neill’s chat on the Wonderlust stage on Saturday afternoon, an English accent was overheard: “Irish people are crazy: there’s three tents with people sitting around inside watching each other talking. What the hell’s going on and where’s the music?”Maybe he had a point: there were times when the programme did seem talk-heavy.
Blindboy Boatclub from the Rubberbandits sweated it out for hours inside his plastic bag in The Library of Progress and the comedy tent, talking about everything from the creative process to Brexit; when he was joined by Tommy Tiernan for his Sunday afternoon podcast, a crowd of a couple of hundred who couldn’t fit in to the packed tent sat outside in the sun to listen over speakers.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
