BILBAO BBK LIVE
Bilbao, Spain | July 11th-13th
DAY ONE: To get to the festival itself one has to take a minibus-assisted misty mountain hop, ending up perched on the glorious peak of Kobetamendi. From here, one is free to soak up the natural beauty of the Basque country with a beer or two. It’s gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous.
The main stage double whammy of Alt-J and Editors got things off to a slow start: the latter’s pseudo-gothy indie sounded worn out and the former drifted over the crowd. Knowing that main stages aren’t usually all that, we meandered down to the Live! Stage, catching Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes do their ramshackle-folk thing in front of a crowd whose admiration was bizarre and slightly unnerving. The woozy euphoria radiating from them might have something to do with the fact that the air suddenly smells quite strongly of hashish.
Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires popped up on the same stage shortly after and were a revelation. Bradley, a former James Brown impersonator, was imperious: a strutting, microphone-dry-humping, bodypopping showman, whose voice sent songs like You Put the Flame on Me and Crying at the Chapel into a zone of wailing intensity, his primal screams sounding both unbearably human and weirdly transcendental at once.
We trailed off back to the main stage with a beer in each hand and a smile on our faces as we joined the crush and slipped in mid-crowd to watch Depeche Mode. Sadly, any momentum they were gaining was lost when four songs in a misfiring bit of kit sent the set into technical meltdown. Things never really recovered after that and their inadvertently campy techno-goth-pop pounded away unsatisfactorily for a few hours. It’s difficult to comprehend how Biffy Clyro went from being Evening Session also-rans to a genuinely Massive Band in the space of a few years, and while their set on the Heineken Stage left the gangs of 15-year-olds who’d spend the entire night camped out by the barriers waiting for them in raptures, the appeal was lost on this listener.
DAY TWO: Friday night started badly: as sheets of never-ending rain pelted down, thunder clapped like the hammer of the gods and bolts of lightning criss-crossed, we piled into an unbearably hot tent where the only sources of diverting one’s attention from the sweltering climes were craning one’s neck and tip-toeing in an attempt to see some bloke slide down the newly-muddied hill or wriggingly an arm away from your sweat-stuck side to sup on a rapidly warming beer. Still, it meant the Vaccines set was cut short so there were no real complaints.
The rain, as rain normally does, abated, leaving us free to rip ourselves off damp astroturfed benches before wandering down to see Klaxons. Glowstick-sharing families huddle with fists aloft, putting on politely brave faces during the newer material and responding to the classics with an evangelical fervour that suggested one part of northern Spain hasn’t consigned nu-rave to the shamefaced footnotes of cultural history just yet. Being a small festival, there were times at BBK Live when when one was happy forgoing the bands themselves in favour of having a wander around the site’s perimiters, gawping at mountains, counting the amount of dudes rocking the Obi Wan Kenobi one-dread, and sipping litres of red wine and Coke.
So enjoyable was this combination of alcohol, people watching and natural beauty that even viewed from afar Kings of Leon’s megaset felt, and sounded, like an imposition. For what seemed like an eternity, they joylessly ploughed through three hours worth of hoary, bloated … nothing. Their songs are just nothing. Festival highlight 2ManyDJs were up next with a set that deftly swung from grotty hardcore (Chimbo Bayo’s campily brutal A Si Mi Gusta A Me (X-Ta Si, X-Ta No) sounded transcendental) to jackin’ house and Paul McCartney’s Coming Up via a few of the tricks we expected the Belgian boys to pull from their gorgeous sleeves. Monolithic stuff.
DAY THREE: With Green Day set to headline later that night, the fesitval’s population seems to triple. While this lends the evening with an uneasy feeling that one may be crushed by the rampaging, bikini-babe stuffed Jagermeister cars that circle the site, it also means that the likes of The Hives – who, it turns out, are so good live that they make a pretty convincing case for being granted their main stage status – are proffered to the baying, excited masses.
Beers are sunk, time passes, Twin Shadow does whatever it is that Twin Shadow’s meant to do as this writer drops a hot dog and nearly bursts into tears. Having gotten over the hot dog, hotfooting it back to the main stage to standing with initially-folded arms watching Vampire Weekend was on the agenda. Their tight, preppy, breezy songs win us all over and we’re not even surprised at ourselves when we realize that, yep, we’ve joined in with the mass singalongs.
As was becoming the norm by this point, the arrival of the evening’s biggest act was a signal to sit at the highest vantage point in the valley and watch the throng from above and beyond. Green Day must have played everything they’ve ever written, got a child to sing with them (at least once), a medley that included songs by the Rolling Stones and The Doors (which is as about as much fun as it sounds) and still this writer would struggle to tell you anything about it. The teenagers loved it. Our time in Bilbao ends with a few hours of Fatboy Slim playing the kind of bolshy big-beat you’d expect.
Now, if this review sounds somewhat moany and pessimistic, let us reasure you of one thing: we had the absolute time of our life. There were moments when we felt a sense of happiness rarely experienced before. It didn’t matter that the majority of the bands didn’t appeal; enthusiasm is infectious and the BBK Live crowd had it in abundance.
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Words: Josh Baines
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