Hop Farm, the Kent festival set up by live music behemoth Vince Power, scored a major coup by landing Prince as the headline act for last night. But would he turn up?
The purple royal from Minneapolis decided to forego the usual superstar helicopter and took the car. Did he know how snarled up the A20 can get of an evening? A very large crowd waited in hope.
Dated 1980s videos by bands on Prince’s Paisley Park label heralded his arrival: at one point a computer icon came up on the giant screen, as if a geography teacher was displaying a Power Point he hadn’t quite mastered rather than one of the world’s biggest stars getting everyone in the mood.
Then he arrived, a not unreasonable 30 minutes late, dressed in white robes, and blasted into guitar-led funk, his female-dominated backing band keeping it tight. As they did Let’s Go Crazy and followed it up with 1999, and it was hard to believe these songs were 30 years old: they sounded as fresh as ever.
“This is real music,” said Prince, as if we needed telling. Talent like this is evergreen. He even managed to get the audience to sing along to Little Red Corvette.
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This festival has sometimes seemed dedicated to the adage that no one rocks like an old rocker. Prince, the Stooges, Lou Reed and The Eagles seem bent on proving that rock’n’roll is wasted on the young.
On Friday, the first day, The Eagles and Bryan Ferry offered smooth rocking: nothing too heavy, but enough guitar to make you feel that you weren’t at the Proms.
Ferry did some extremely polished cover versions, the Velvet Underground’s What Goes On among them, alongside the songs that made him famous: Love is the Drug, Avalon, Jealous Guy (John Lennon may have written it, but it’s been Ferry’s ever since Jerry Hall left him for Mick Jagger). Straight after the set, Ferry zipped off in a helicopter to play at Kate Moss’s wedding.
The Eagles came on to Hotel California to do what they’ve been doing since 1971: taking the pioneering country rock of the Byrds and Gram Parsons and making it into palatable, middle-of-the-road pop. They are cheesy, but they’re so good at being cheesy, especially with such mellow classics as Peaceful Easy Feeling and New Kid in Town, that it is hard to dislike them for it.
A new song about being the oldest swinger in town, accompanied by comedy duck walks and comedic facial expressions, pushed the cheese quotient beyond the digestible, but they redeemed themselves with Funk 49, a funk-rock classic from guitarist Joe Walsh’s old band, the James Gang.
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Lou Reed, who appeared on Saturday, is not the kind of a character generally relied on to bring good cheer to a festival crowd, but he did begin with the Velvet Underground’s Who Loves the Sun, which seemed appropriate.
Wisely, he didn’t say much. Actually, he didn’t say anything. He just looked stern and led a tight band through songs from Berlin, The Raven, and other albums marking the strange, angry journey Reed has been on since the early 1960s and which, on evidence of his set, shows no sign of ending.
You have to admire a man who does so little to make a crowd feel good. His music remains distinctly unfriendly, but tender versions of the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning and Femme Fatale showed a gentler side to this most remarkable songwriter.
On the opposite tack was Iggy Pop, who took the Stooges through an incendiary set. With James Williamson back on guitar — he left after making the band’s masterpiece, Raw Power, in 1972 to became a software engineer — the band were on fire. Andy Mackay’s sax, Pop’s manic energy and the band’s constant beat found the missing link between free jazz and punk, and all this from grizzled rockers who never got their dues first time round. “We love you, you’re all we’ve got!” Pop told the crowd. Looking at the Stooges, who appear to be men who have been through quite a bit, you believed him.