Amadou & Mariam + Vampire Weekend at Hyde Park
The first of two reviews of the support acts during last week’s Blur concert (on the 3rd July)…
Given the glorious sunshine that Hyde Park was bathed in, in hindsight, there was no better band all day to open up for Blur than the African rhythms of Amadou & Mariam. Despite both Amadou & Mariam being blind, their musical talents are impressive and their charisma is, whilst not entirely perfect or expressed through English all the time as they tried to work up the audience speaking in their own native language whilst everyone else was wondering what they were saying, relatively infectious as the crowd swayed and jigged along. It was all going so well until their set was cut abruptly short by the organisers, which ended up being a bit farcical really, much to the disappointment of the crowd.
The only support band I was looking forward to seeing, and in all honesty they were slightly disappointing. In fairness they were hampered by some poor sound mixing as on some songs you could hardly hear the synths but even that can’t hide a lack of showmanship as Ezra Koenig’s banter to the crowd was more mumbled and forced than anything. On the positive side, the setlist was peppered with most of their debut album (including all of the best cuts like Mansford Roof, One and Walcott) and the crowd was pretty into it right up until two thirds of the way in when a mass bottle throwing fight ensued. A couple of promising new songs were also played, but the set in general had a missing spark and hopefully they’ll be better at Reading.
See pictures of both Vampire Weekend and Amadou & Mariam on my Flickr.
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Posted on July 9th, 2009 by Max
Filed under: Gigs, Reviews
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