Hey Sunday, how you holdin' up? The super-talented James Balmont of Three Beams and I ventured off to Parklife over at Heaton Park and had fun in the sun as I mentioned in my last post- we collectively made our notes through the form of selfies next to stage signs and Snapchats, duh, PROFESSIONALS! Our review is now live here at Crack so get clicking on over- I've also included the original, un-edited and more lengthy version below, if you want all the no-holds-barred details...
Parklife Festival 2013 @ Heaton Park
Having made the noble transition from hosting previous years
of Parklife over at student Summer hub Platt Fields Park, the ever-growing
gratification for increasing renowned artists and DJ’s alike saw this year’s
team behind Manchester’s Warehouse Project expand to mecca-site Heaton Park for
a two day extravaganza, involving one of the Summer’s most sterling bills of
the season. Did they manage to pull off the mega spectacle or was it simply a
case of too much too soon, in upscaling?
Boasting an array of stages, tents and pop-up mini settings, there was
certainly no shortage of acts to catch, as broad stances from drum &
Bass veteran labels and promoters such as Hospitality and Metropolis, bought the
hundred-and-one-miles-an-hour pace of unforgiving bone-pummelling sets, right
over to Hot Creations infiltrating the air with swathes of funky house- all
aiding in ushering in the Summer at an alarmingly exciting rate. The likes of
icon in the game Andy C, as well as
fresher faces SPY and Friction, lay down their own personal live improvisations
and a whole haul of edits ranging from TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’, over to an eye-brow
raising yet admirable drop of Usher’s ‘Climax’ and classic floor-fillers such
as Robin S’s ‘Show Me Love’. It seems that not every set was as rigidly set in
stone as audiences may have envisioned…and a rife welcome addition across the
turntables, at that.
Over at Now Wave’s hand-picked congregation, Four
Tet’s
re-invention as a modern dance musician might seem a shame to those who thrived
on his past albums – once dubbed ‘folktronica’ by the press – but it would be a
crime to criticise it as his supremacy is untouchable. With 2010’s anthem ‘Love
Cry’ ending the set in euphoria it is easy to see why Kieran Hebden is invited
back to the city and to play such heralded slots, so frequently. A similar
story could be told about Dan Snaith’s Daphni alias also, as Jiaolong
favourites ‘Yes, I know’ and ‘Ye Ye’ divulge the audience with
disco-meets-industrial peaks and old school Altern 8 vocal samples bring it
right back to the heart of the rave.
Disclosure topped
off the night with a headline performance in celebration of the most astounding
of feats – the confirmation that their debut album had gone straight to number
one in the UK album charts. And with performances like this they simply cannot
be faulted. Boasting possibly the most precise and clear sound of the whole
festival, they dominated their audience with a rich and plentiful set that
featured collaborations from both Jessie
Ware and Sam Smith,
with the canvas-topped fun also rolling over into the festival’s second day. Hidden out over at one of the site’s far-flung corners was one of the
loudest and messiest stages; both the Drop The Mustard tent and David Rodigan’s
RamJam collectively over the two days, placed at the foot of a rolling hill
that seemed to serve as a gigantic naughty-step for its tenacious audience. As
one of the few scenic and spacious corners of the festival, it seemed fitting to leave it to a living
legend such as the reggae connoisseur by the end of the weekend, although we
can’t help but feel that the less than effective ten-out-one-in system
overshadowing Dusky’s swelteringly charged set, left many frazzled and faded
after queuing just for entry the majority of the afternoon. Yet, it’s not all
burnt shoulders when it comes to DTM’s primary local Manchunian pickings, as revellers
searching for some of the true blossoming talents of the city couldn’t have
done better than to stumble across Sian Bennett’s set inside the
appropriately-titled Mirror Mirror tent. The tightly-packed dance space offered
a sublime atmosphere in a relentless deep house set that dropped and dropped, ultimately
providing itself as one of the festival’s greatest reflections of the city’s
glorious nightlife- and Parklife certainly didn’t forget about other local
‘little men’ bookings alongside world-class acts…
One of our favourite LuckyMe Family, Hoya: Hoya residents and strictly
all-vinyl femme fatale Éclair Fifi was handed the honourable opening slot over
on Hudson Mohawke’s curated stage once the hangovers had crept across Heaton
Park come Parklife’s second day- and for a petite blonde bombshell of a figure
bopping across her colossal setting to an unfortunately miniature crowd, those
wise enough to attend were alleviated with techno Kelly Rowland tracks and
high-octane pure pop Cassie cuts, assisting in initialising some questionably
feral (yet fabulous) dance moves for a Sunday lunchtime. And the Hoya love
didn’t grind to a halt there, as Manchester’s very own dons’ Krystal Klear and
Chunky bought the dynamism to stand-out stratums with sudden mixes embracing
MK’s II dub remix of Storm Queen’s ‘Look Right Through’, glorifyingly
streamlined into Chic’s ‘Everybody Dance’ that within five minutes of entering,
have the tent immediately animated with hands-in-the-air classics and
foot-stomping vigour, pouring right out onto the surrounding fields from every
safety exit viewable.
Oh and those big guns we were referring to? As one of the most hyped
acts of the weekend, Jurassic
5 were unsurprisingly triumphant on their first U.K. performance
since splitting in 2007. The hip hop troupe paraded around in the most ecstatic
of fashions, integrating a comically-oversized turntable prop as much as
possible into a hit-laden set that featured the likes of ‘Concrete Schoolyard’,
‘What’s Golden’ and ‘Quality Control’. Also performing a special appearance over
the weekend was the honestly candid Danny Brown, rolling out his twanging spits
of ‘Blunt After Blunt’ and ‘Lie4’ that propelled him into being noticed as
something of a new classic within modern rap- it was just a shame that
timetabling errors (which were amended over the festival’s social networking
sites yet minimal signal meant that many were left uninformed…) were not
highlighted to attendees, with Brown being just one in a long list across the
festival’s 48 hours that were switched and changed without reasoning or explanation.
It seemed a great shame that, for all the work put in to making the
festival bigger and better, Parklife left behind a shedload of the character
and personality that it had in previous years. No longer does it feel like
there’s a stage round the corner waiting to be discovered – the mazes of
greenery and open grass are abandoned here in favour of an open, singular
space, with stages arranged in a less-than-exciting fashion. Despite the
multiple problems faced with entrances, organisation and wrongly-advertised
stage times that should, due to the festival’s up-scale, have been ironed out;
make no mistake that the Parklife Weekender 2013 managed to still provide an
excellent event full of rememberable performances and sun-soaked debauchery
thanks to top-class bookings and individually-curated bills. This is the
music-lovers inner-city festival of the North and not one live set nor
performance we saw over the weekend disappointed in the slightest. Here’s to
2014 and hoping that the team will return greater and improvingly formulated
run.
Words by Yours Truly & James Balmont / Images all by Daniel Watson X
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