The last Lollapalooza of the this decade is in the books and despite, what on paper, looked like a less than impressive lineup, it turned out another weekend of exciting and memorable moments just as in years past. Every year going at Lolla, one is expected to battle oppressive heat, but on Friday this year, Mother Nature decided to throw in a little something extra - a rain storm that only seemed to pick up steam throughout the day. The showers fizzled out by nightfall, ushering in the heat and wind for the rest of the weekend.
Due to a lack of veteran artists in the middle of the lineup, this year’s festival allowed many relative newcomers to strut their stuff in front of large amounts of festival goers. Miike Snow brought their debut album to life at the Vitamin Water stage while wearing Phantom of the Opera-esque masks for the first third of their set. Despite being a new band, they worked the crowd with the confidence of a group with much more experience. They worked through much of their album only to jam out and turn it into an electro-dance party by each song’s end - the advantage of having two fantastic producers in the band. Passion Pit and Lykke Li were thrown on the small Citi stage, only to draw impressive crowds and put together equally impressive sets, with Passion Pit’s set having one of the more energetic crowds during the entire festival. Dan Deacon and Of Montreal were the only other bands that I saw that were able to rile up their crowds in a similar frenzy…
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It’s easy to criticise giants, and T in the Park is definitely a giant - the first batch of 40,000 ‘early-bird’ tickets in 2008 selling out in just over an hour; definitely not, as one of my previous English employers described it: “some crappy hut in a field to keep the Scots happy.”
It seems like a year doesn’t go by where there are choruses heard of “the lineup for T’s Shiite this year” – Usually from people who haven’t managed to get any of the sought-after tickets, and who use the lineup as an excuse to avoid paying the inflated tout prices after the fact.
The truth is that T in the Park gets a bit of a bum rap for their headline acts. It’s not difficult to see why, when the majority of this year’s main-stage Acts – the Killers, Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon have all filled major slots on the very same stage in previous years. It’s an easy target, and one which is repeated so frequently that it’s worth giving a bit of a defence to. Those that complain about the larger acts consider themselves to be ‘good’ music fans – enough to reject the mainstream, yet who lack the insight or knowledge to see the other side of what T has to offer on its smaller stages, or during the day. There’s plenty for an Artrocker to see at the fest, provided that they’re willing to get up a bit earlier or seek it out a bit harder.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O
photo by Kirstie Shanley
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