Pukkelpop Festival

For twenty-three years the Pukkelpop festival has been a cornerstone event both for live music in Europe and for the life and culture of Belgium. What began in 1985 as a small event limited to a handful of names from the international musical underground is now an event of international scope, capable of mobilizing music fans from all over Europe as well as the local population, with a mass participation in the life of the festival that is unheard of for us Italians (then again, we're talking about Belgium, a country with a centuries-old culture of fairs and festivals).

Three days of festival, two hundred and ten artists involved, an immense campsite, 152,000 attendees, a massive deployment of police forces, caterers and staff handling every necessary service: these are the figures for this edition of the festival, proof that Pukkelpop is now a mass phenomenon and no longer an alternative event. The music? By now Pukkelpop can satisfy every taste thanks to eight themed stages (from the dance hall to the small stage with grandstand, from the tent dedicated to heavy music to the main stage for the more mainstream acts) on which niche and famous artists alike performed, with this edition featuring Metallica, Killers and Sigur Ros as headliners.

Trying to stay true to the festival's philosophy, I booked the full package, attending all three days and sleeping in the dedicated campsite. Glossing over the sheer difficulty of surviving in a campsite with tens of thousands of people and thirty showers (not to mention the brawling drunks I managed to annoy!), looking back I can describe it as a magnificent event, organized with unrivalled precision and efficiency. Free train and bus travel from all over Belgium, schedules always respected, enviable acoustics on every stage, very few technical problems, and above all a satisfying selection of live music mixing old rock glories with rising young talents: I can say I don't regret the 135 euros I paid for the ticket.

Thursday 14th

The first day of the festival was by far the best in musical terms: a sluggish morning made up for by an extremely intense evening that had me flying from stage to stage so as not to miss a second of the shows I had planned (because with 70 bands a day, you need to be sharp at catching the "coincidences" between set times and stages). At noon, Triggerfinger warmed up the atmosphere, a Belgian band getting on in years but not in sound, since they played a rather lackluster retro hard-blues; nothing terrible compared to what Amy MacDonald played, born in 1987, a rising star of Scottish pub-rock. In forty minutes she played her ultra-polished songs (apparently more acclaimed in the Benelux than at home), sung with an accent so forcedly northerner that I wondered whether she really was Scottish or just an impression of a Scot!

Finally, at ten past three, the real music began: it was time for Soko, an indie-pop singer-songwriter of French origin, known across central Europe for the modest hit "I'll Kill Her". Her lo-fi pop would be nothing special if it weren't for the fact that she's utterly incapable of reproducing it live! Soko sings off-key, loses the beat, stops songs halfway through out of sheer emotion (as she herself admitted, she's used to playing shows for ten or twenty people, and the sight of two or three hundred spectators was quite a shock), for a laugh, or even for a little burp (!), making the songs as unpredictable and deliberately, studiedly ugly as those of the Shaggs. Amid this comedy of errors, the banter between her and her guitarist, and her nonsensical lyrics, I can say I witnessed one of the most entertaining shows of my life — whether it was a concert or a cabaret matters little.

One of the day's standout shows was British Sea Power. I was fairly disappointed by their latest album, but I was confident it would work live, and my trust was well placed: rarely have I come across a band tighter and more assured on stage, able to conjure endlessly evocative, epic atmospheres. The set covered their entire discography, especially the latest "Do You Love Rock Music?" and its more "stadium-sized" tracks, which fit perfectly with the packed festival crowd. Their stage presence was remarkable, with the members — surrounded by flags and dressed as sailors — swapping instruments, and the guitarist, after throwing his pick to a fan, improvising a stagedive, only to find himself without a pick just as he had to wrap up the song. That, too, is rock music!

Time to eat, and I make a quick stop by Ian Brown, fleeing at full speed once the former Stone Roses frontman starts singing "Waterfall", showing everyone exactly what he's become: the emblem of the fallen musician, a caricature of himself. Luckily there are Hot Chip, who may be a bit tacky but are absolutely capable of shaking a few thousand backsides with their direct, no-frills techno-rock; just one stylistic slip at the end, when they deliver a mediocre cover of Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing Compares To You", but given how they set the dance hall alight, it's easily forgiven.

Just to kill time before the next show, I head over to Henry Rollins, engaged in a spoken word set. He stands on stage in all his bulk and, with just two lights trained on him, talks about burning issues (Hurricane Katrina, apartheid…) with his usual cynical irony, keeping quite a few spectators glued to the spot in front of him.

I rush to the Mercury Rev stage with a dose of skepticism (I feared a setlist made up only of songs from the penultimate "The Secret Migration"), which I would soon abandon. For this writer, these were the most intense sixty minutes of live music of my life, an experience so steeped in magic as to be indescribable. They kept us waiting five minutes, but it was worth it: as soon as they took the stage (five of them: two guitars, bass, drums and keyboard) they opened with "The Dark Is Rising", played in a less ethereal and infinitely more powerful, devastating form, with an incredibly stretched-out, psychedelic finale. Then came two of their classics from the masterpiece "Deserter's Songs": "Holes" (the only track not rearranged, and for that reason perhaps the least surprising of the night) and that gem of symphonic psychedelia, "The Funny Bird", with its crushing walls of guitars. A few previews from the new album "Snowflake Midnight" revealed its electronic, dream-pop soul, which live came across as explosive, with space-rock surges crossed with the delicacy of Cocteu Twins. The highlight of the night was "Opus 40", performed as on record up to an abrupt interlude of bass and guitar feedback, sweet, repetitive and pulsing, before closing with the same song as before, slowed down and sung with the lyrics of… "Once In A Lifetime" by Talking Heads!

Delicacy, fury, poetry, trance, all within sixty minutes; at one point I found myself wondering whether I was watching a show by Hawkwind, My Bloody Valentine, Steve Reich or M83. No, it was simply the same, enchanting Mercury Rev as ever!

Shortly after came another psychedelic experience: Flaming Lips, delivering yet another indescribable show. What they put on wasn't a concert but a pharaonic multimedia spectacle of colours, games and suggestions, an attempt to give visual, tangible form to their bright, garish music. With a toy-box set-up laid out on stage, the band walked on accompanied by dancers dressed as Teletubbies, waves of confetti, smoke, coloured lasers and dozens of yellow rubber balls tossed out into the crowd, which they kept playing with until the end of the show. Not to mention singer Wayne Coyne, who made up for his rather weak live voice by making his entrance inside a giant transparent plastic ball, literally rolling over the delirious crowd! The music itself was pretty good, mostly drawn from the recent hit "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robot" with the odd trip into the past (a gorgeous version of "Mountain Side"), but what really turned the show into an event was the interaction with the crowd, along with the playful spirit that made it, in effect, a hugely enjoyable experience.

Before a well-earned sleep in the tent, I managed to sneak into the boiler room, the festival's club night, and delivered the final blow to myself by dancing to the excellent dj set from Carl Craig, more direct and visceral live than I expected.

Friday 15th

For me, the second day was the least stimulating in terms of line-up, even though it did feature some heavyweight names. What immediately stands out is the spike in population density across the festival grounds and campsite, now packed with metalheads. It doesn't take a genius to work out why: it's Metallica day, and hordes of their fans made the pilgrimage to see thrash-metal's fallen stars, even at the cost of paying eighty euros for a single day just to see one band, since they were nowhere to be seen at any other set, not even those of other heavy bands!

Personal grumbling aside, the morning got off to a mild start with two young bands. First up were Those Dancing Days, an all-female band devoted to a shamelessly retro brand of indie-pop, in look, voice, hairstyles and sound alike. Their set was enjoyable for a few minutes but grew tiresome over time, not helped by the guitarist's shaky technique, hacking away at random with her pick on her Fender. Still, nothing to complain about compared to the following set from Dodos, who, sloppy and unoriginal as they are on record, are simply soporific live: they played acoustic folk with not the slightest attention to melody, and the intimate, cosy setting of the chateau stage (a circus-shaped stage with a handful of seats arranged in a semicircle and some standing room) did little to help.

The morning went on to get even worse, with Cult of Luna playing their plodding post-metal, which I'd hoped might at least come across better live; instead it proved even more aimless than on record, coming off repetitive, dull, utterly humourless and riddled with clichés. Girls in Hawaii, the great Belgian indie-pop hope, also turned in a poor live set, with only a few moments drawn from their promising debut (which still sounds pleasant five years on) and a lot of filler, which nonetheless kept the young crowd flocking in happy.

Desperate, I rushed off to see Caribou, an astonishing show that single-handedly redeemed the whole of Friday. With someone like Caribou you never know what to expect, and once again he stunned everyone, showing up with a four-piece rock line-up and delivering fifty minutes of hallucinogenic psychedelia. Snaith moved from guitar to laptop to drums, joining the other drummer in frantic space-rock jams that reached levels of psychedelic intensity comparable to late-Nineties Boredoms; it was a truly indescribable, invigorating experience. Next up were Tunng, who confirmed the quality of their records, recreating them live in an intimate, magical atmosphere, allowing themselves the odd moment of acoustic guitar-hero showmanship and generally letting the guitar element take precedence over the electronic one.

From here to the end of the night, it was all sure things, first Breeders, then Tindersticks. The former, queens of female-fronted power-pop, managed to preserve all the essence and freshness of their early studio work, sounding fun and powerful, never taking themselves too seriously. Seeing Kim Deal was quite an emotional experience: still sharp-tongued, foul-mouthed and aggressive, she keeps her personality intact even if her voice is now just a faint echo of what it once was; the set was one running joke after another, about her sister, the drummer, a session player, the crowd, and the metalheads who'd shown up for Metallica!

Tindersticks, on the other hand, took the stage accompanied by a string quartet and a brass section and, despite the austere setting, played with unmatched power and emotional charge, running through material from their whole back catalogue with a heavier focus on the more recent songs. The crowd, among the oldest I've ever seen at Pukkelpop, stood spellbound by such a display of class and delicacy, marvelling at the indescribable figure of Stuart Staples, a man out of time and a frontman beyond any category, somewhere between elegant and drowsy (he let out a yawn at one point!), who could barely contain his emotion at playing in front of such a large and engaged crowd.

To close things out, Metallica, for some the highlight of the day (if not the only reason to even be there), for me just a band of tired fifty-somethings playing the same overplayed songs, only venturing out on a limb by slipping in a couple of tracks from their debut.

Saturday 16th

Another explosive day, with fewer but bigger shows, without the Herculean efforts of the previous two days spent trying to catch as many sets as possible. The first band I managed to catch were newcomers Late of the Pier, who absolutely blew me away with a pyrotechnic dance-rock show full of Eighties nods, virtuoso touches (the singer plays three instruments and sings), and sudden tempo changes with only the danceable beat remaining a constant, much to the crowd's delight. The only flaw was the sound mixing, which was lacking on the first two songs, down to a sloppy sound engineer. Still running on adrenaline, I headed over to Yeasayer, a technically flawless band despite a few less-than-stellar songs. Their world-music-tinged pop (somewhere between Talking Heads' "Listening Wind" and solo Peter Gabriel) held a crowd of curious onlookers, drawn in by their Middle Eastern and Indian flavours and the rhythmic acrobatics of the drummer and bassist (picture a big guy decked out like Les Claypool, but playing fretless bass in the style of Mick Karn).

Much to my dismay, I had the misfortune of catching a Manic Street Preachers show: what was once one of the greatest bands of Britpop is now a crumbling monument, an outdated, unwatchable stadium hard-rock act. The nadir was reached with two covers: Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea" and... Rihanna's "Umbrella"! Disgraceful.

Having confirmed the lacklustre energy of Bloc Party on the main stage, I headed to the shelter, the stage reserved for the heavier bands, to catch Neurosis. Their set was one of the most extreme experiences of my life, a majestic display of great live music; the setlist drew on the most doom-oriented material from the last decade of records, with drone/ambient interludes between songs and unsettling black-and-white projections underscoring the grim atmosphere of the whole installation. So far, that might sound like business as usual, except what I heard was a demonstration of absolute sonic power: tortured, heavily effected guitars, razor-steep walls of guitar at unreasonable volumes, and repetitive tribal rhythms that had the crowd swaying like puppets for a full hour. Steve Von Till confirmed himself as a brilliant, all-round guitarist, able to unleash waves of distortion just as easily as he conjures rarefied, tense soundscapes; their stage presence, too, deserves credit.

The last show of this Belgian adventure of mine was M83. The set began with a considerable delay, stoking impatience in the crowd and irritation among the musicians, who let their nerves get the better of them. That affected the length of the show but certainly not the quality of what turned out to be a truly intense set, in which the shoegaze-pop gems from the album "Saturdays = Youth" were sped up and turned into original, danceable tracks, earning huge support from the crowd.

With the only regret being that we missed Fuck Buttons, we head back home, remembering the 2008 edition of Pukkelpop as a tremendous musical experience and an unrepeatable social phenomenon… at least until the 2009 edition.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google