Gig review: RockNess festival

“IS THIS summer in Scotland?” Nile Rodgers demanded to know on Sunday evening, white suit gleaming as if primed to perform at a Caribbean beachfront bar.

RockNess Festival

Dores, near Inverness

****

Someone ought to have told the Chic frontman, guitarist and producer of some of the 1980s’ greatest pop hits that this weekend had seen some pleasant weather going by the standards of a Scottish music festival. At 7pm on the final day he witnessed only the second of two light drizzle showers over the weekend, and his promise to “make it hot” with a host of hits that he had a hand in making chased the rain away just as swiftly.

What originally appeared to be Rock Ness’s token nostalgia act was one of the highlights, inspiring both an orchestrated stage invasion and a hundreds-strong dancing circle amid the crowd during the closing Good Times. Chic were also as good an example as any of the dichotomy at the heart of RockNess, its insistence on taking pure dance music out of the ghetto and thrusting it into prominent positions on the bill giving the festival a character like no other.

In saying that, Friday’s line-up seemed designed to serve as a decompression chamber for those who might still believe 21st century rock music needs multiple players and stringed instruments. Mumford & Sons were a safe choice for main stage headliners, their folk influence resonating particularly loudly in this part of the world, while singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, 21 years old and ludicrously popular among those of his own age and younger, saw the site’s largest tent swamped with fans.

Saturday’s roster across the two largest stages, however, was all about the dance music, which might have seemed like a mistake when the substantially smaller Clash Arena’s headliners, the View, had to cut their set short when thousands more than obviously planned for tried to get in to see them. “They broke the tent,” reported one security guard of the audience. “Just be very careful,” instructed the band once their rescheduled set had filled the larger tent early the next evening, an unlikely note of caution from the Dundonian hellraisers.

Another of the weekend’s finest moments came with the appearance of Justice on Saturday, the French duo playing a set of fluid and utterly banging house music amid a towering, arena-worthy set of LED-flared panels and screens disguised as amps. To those versed in the genre it was a sophisticated antidote to the one-note trance and commercial club music of main-stage headliner Deadmau5, who at least had the decency to bring with him a mesmerising lightshow and a set that seemed to consist entirely of huge digitised video screens.

Sunday, finally, threw everything at the weekend that hadn’t already stuck, including Chic, the View, still-fiery Northern Irish Britpop survivors Ash and dashingly contemporary indie-club outfits Friendly Fires and Metronomy. Ayrshire rockers Biffy Clyro made for a suitably unifying finale to the weekend, attracting its biggest crowd by far and debuting new music at what singer Simon Neil said was their first home-country date in a year and a half. It was a good setting to do so, at a festival that made a virtue of its individuality while alienating no-one.