Hurricane 2007 Sunday¶
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This is about the first day of the Hurricane festival 2007 in Scheeßel. See also: Hurricane Friday, Saturday and Roundup – or all Hurricane pages here.
After Saturday’s flood of good bands and the breathtaking Arcade Fire gig, I didn’t expect much for Sunday’s programme. Most of the bands they scheduled didn’t particularly appeal to me and my plan was to just get out of the festival without too much harm or rain. No rain came and just my feet hurt towards the end, so that was great. Around noon we packed up our tents, so we could leave quickly at the end of the night and then we went to have some food and see some bands.
The first were Juliette & the Licks whom I wasn’t too impressed of. On the other hand, I was able to get some crêpe for lunch while they were playing, so I wasn’t particularly unhappy. This kind of collateral listening is nice and relaxing (or would have been if I could have sat down on the ground).
Then came the only gig I really wanted to see for the day: Kings of Leon. I quite liked their first album and its two successors had at least a few good songs on them as well. Yet, I thought they were a bit too cool when seeing them at Haldern three years ago, so I wondered where that had gone. In total I thought they were better this time, though still very stiff, particularly their singer. And they didn’t play my favourite songs, yet again!
Then the Editors came on. Just as last year I thought they were all right but not overly exciting.
Afterwards: Sonic Youth – another band, household name band if you wish, which I never really got into and who sounded quite old fashioned.
Then I went to see The Five O’Clock Heroes. A band whom I hadn’t even heard about before. But I liked the T-shirts they were selling, so I decided to watch them in the hope of getting an excuse to buy a T-shirt (ah rejoice for silliness!). They are quite young and played a fine gig. Not sufficiently my type of thing to go for that shirt, though.
The next gig we saw was Placebo’s. I used to quite like Placebo many years back but somehow that wore off. And I found their newer albums a bit dull, with one or two decent songs at best, so I wasn’t that enthusiastic to see them. But they played all right – much better than three years ago – and also included many of the older songs. Kudos to Brian Molko for actually saying a few sentences in German to his audience rather than the garbled ‘Dankeschön’ which is the best that many other people can do.
And things went downhill from here. First we saw Pearl Jam whom I completely couldn’t relate to and then German hip-hop act – I dare not say band as I couldn’t make out much music there &ndash Deichkind played. They played some electronic beats and spoke repetitive not-so-funny lyrics to it. All right I just don’t like the whole hip hop and beat thing. And their ‘entertainment’ with people on stage wearing tetrahedral helmets and rubbish bin clothes while others use trampolines or pogo sticks to jump around is mildly amusing at best. But that wasn’t even my main issue. The really bad thing was that loads of people really dug it and they were all jumping around. Like I’ve been at a festival where a number of good and great bands played and everybody was civilised to the extent that they seemed bored. But once a band that I’d locate more in the realms of trash TV comes on, people are going nuts. Made me think I was in the wrong place.
Half way through their gig we rushed to the car so we wouldn’t be stuck in the traffic jam of everybody else leaving and at least make it home by midnight.
Next: Roundup
