T in the Park review: Friday and Saturday

Published on Friday 9 July 2010 19:41

BOTH the weather and the music on offer got T in the Park's opening night off to a bright start, with just the right amount of established crowd-pleasers and engaging new bands competing for the audience's attention.

• Paulo Nutini brought sunny tunes - and daft dancing- to the T In The Park stage

It was hard, however, to tear your eyes from some of the inventive and just plain ridiculous fancy dress outfits doing the rounds in the spirit of this year's Mad Hatter's Tea Party theme. The following day's mud would put paid to most of them.

Perhaps the most blatant early lunge for photographers' attention was Faithless' vocalist and frontman Maxi Jazz, who turned up in nouveau Highland dress, including a bright blue kilt. He and Sister Bliss' band played a set which was at once a kind of techno cabaret and a definitive exercise in how to rock a commercial dance set for a crowd of thousands, and it included still-popular anthems like Insomnia and We Come One.

Playing in sunshine didn't suit them, though, so perhaps a more credible alternative for discerning clubbers were the tent-based heroics of Hot Chip, who didn't let a ten minute, mid-set power cut spoil some of contemporary pop's most intelligent anthems, like One Life Stand, Over & Over and I Feel Better. Fast-rising Stockport electro-poppers Delphic also played a definitively clubby set under strobe-lit silver parasols.

Two of pop's biggest female stars of late were also in attendance, with Florence Welch and her Machine working twee but impassioned epics on the Radio 1/NME stage while Elly Jackson, aka La Roux, delivered catchy but insubstantial synth-pop to the King Tut's tent, including the hits In For the Kill and Bulletproof, and a quirky cover of the Rolling Stones' Under My Thumb. Main stage headliners Muse, meanwhile, were an indulgent thrill to those whose appetite for bombastic guitar riffs like those colouring Hysteria and Supermassive Black Hole is insatiable.

DAVID POLLOCK

Saturday

If anyone could chase the grey-sky blues of Saturday away it was The Proclaimers with a vigorous. economical set. There were more sunny tunes under a glowering sky from another homeboy, Paolo Nutini, who caused outbreaks of daft dancing with his skiffly tunes, the fabulously fruity trombone from Pencil Full Of Lead and a quick burst of the Benny Hill theme tune.

Bidding to be the next Scottish pop prodigy, Katie Sutherland of Pearl & The Puppets went for the failsafe option of bringing a Saltire on to the T Break Stage. But she could learn a few lessons in how to rock up her hairband pop from Kate Nash in the King Tut's Wah Wah Tent. Call her winsome at your peril – this girl's got claws.

We Are Scientists – as much of a wise-cracking stand-up partnership as a passable indie band – were monitoring crowd stamina at the halfway point of the festival. Verdict? We were good to go. The Coral, in contrast, didn't really have the chat, but they made up for it with some stomping beat tunes.

The electronic sign outside the cumbersomely named Red Bull Bedroom Jam.com Futures Stage was advertising Tent Full, but there was still room to spare during Mystery Jets' chipper set and for Laura Marling, a slip of a girl with a mighty talent, functioning as the anti-Stereophonics, who were still lumbering away in the 1990s dad-rock style on the Main Stage as Marling conjured an eldritch realm of fair but doomed wenches and pastoral reflection more suited to Glastonbury's Green Fields.

The UK has waited seven years for Eminem's live return, so he probably reckoned another 45 minutes wouldn't matter to a restive crowd. When he and his homies did show, he made almost every minute of his wham-bam set count. Though he did squander his catchiest, wittiest tracks, My Name Is, The Real Slim Shady and Without Me, in a medley, as if someone had reminded him there was a curfew and he still had to fit in an encore of Lose Yourself.

But at least Shady's back.

FIONA SHEPHERD