Friday
Drizzle welcomed festivalgoers on the first day of Governors Ball, with Elle King on the main stage doing her best to engage soggy fans. Her 2015 single Ex’s & Oh’s does the job, with the poppy rockabilly and King’s louche stage presence leading to a mass singalong. Elsewhere, Alicia Bognanno and the rest of Bully impressed fans on the Big Apple stage with their 90s alt-rock piercing through the poppier strains of Meg Mac on the adjacent stage.
Tracks such as I Remember, Trying and Too Tough jolted the early crowd into action, with a small circle pit forming and disbanding in unison with the band’s loud-quiet compositions. On the main stage, Christine and the Queens delivered a theatrical performance that was part am-dram and part pop party. In a grey suit, Christine entertained listeners with Michael Jackson-style dance moves accompanied by her backing dancers, and covers of the Prince-written Chaka Khan hit I Feel For You and Kanye West’s Heartless.
Years & Years delivered their dance-pop from the Honda stage, with lead singer Olly Alexander battling with a damp keyboard to get through covers of Katy Perry’s Dark Horse and Drake’s Hotline Bling. Action Bronson was probably the most raucous act of the weekend. At one point, he threw a watermelon over his head, narrowly avoiding his DJ, the Alchemist, before shouting out to fans from Queens who had made the short trip, offering the stage presence of an ornery shopkeeper after the end of a long week. Tracks like Action Silverado had the crowd singing along and laughing at the same time.
Now more than ever, the Strokes evoke that sliver of time in New York between the death rattle of grunge and 9/11, at the fore of a post-punk revivalism that brought forth acts like the White Stripes and the Vines. All but three songs from 2000’s seminal Is This It? were worked into Friday night’s exhilarating headlining gig, a dramatic if not wholly unexpected departure from a Tuesday warm-up gig chock full of deep cuts in nearby Port Chester.
That’s not to say the coolly dispassionate Julian Casablancas and co – who took the stage 25 minutes late (in sunglasses, natch) – didn’t include a surprise or two during an 80-minute set. Between album-perfect renditions of erstwhile singles The Modern Age, Someday, Under Cover of Darkness and Juicebox came a cover of the Clash’s Clampdown that had been on the shelf for more than a decade. There was also the tender dedication of Electricityscape to the Canadian artist Brett Kilroe, a friend of the band who designed several of their album covers (as well as the cover of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers), who died of cancer in March.
Two new tracks from the just-released Future Present Past EP blended seamlessly with the old material. Yet it was the signature moments – including Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr trading hilly, melodic guitar lines on Last Nite – that turned Friday’s finale, only two years after the band last headlined here, into a rollicking New York City hit parade.
Saturday
A humid Saturday afternoon, and all seemed well midafternoon as festivalgoers chugged away on 24oz cans of Miller Lite gently warming in the humidity. They were watching the excellent Thundercat, whose real name is Stephen Bruner. Bruner’s impeccable musical pedigree goes from playing bass in Suicidal Tendencies to performing with Erykah Badu; from putting out two genre-shredding albums on Flying Lotus to becoming a pivotal part of Kendrick Lamar’s musical team on To Pimp a Butterfly. He was unashamedly muso, but never self-indulgent, stretching out songs like Lotus and the Jondy into a head-tripping explorations of psychedelic soul. “Is this Governor’s Island?” he inquired at one point. “Are we still in New York?” Thundercat has the ability to take us into a whole other zone.
Over on the main stage, LA folk-rockers Lord Huron tiptoed the line between beguiling beauty and earnest blandness in a slot that seemed a bit too big for them. It was time to head over to the opposite corner of the festival, where De La Soul were about to teach some lessons. “Who’s under 30?” demands their DJ, Mason, adding to the cheering crowd: “I love your energy, but you’re going to learn some shit today.”
The rap trio’s 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising expanded the parameters of hip-hop with a dazzling sampladelic style, surreal humour and a lyrical refusal to be hemmed in by the macho tropes of the time. Almost three decades later, songs like Say No Go still sound inspired, while later work like Ooh Ooh Ooh and A Rollerskating Jam Named Saturday have a technicolour vigour that delights the crowd, even those too young to remember their “daisy age” heyday. “Everybody on crack right now, make yourselves known,” they joked from the stage, absolutely confident in their own dextrous ability to conjure a party out of thin air. They might have been sandwiched between Thundercat and Miguel, but De La Soul proved that they still sound ahead of their time, their kaleidescopic sonic palette having barely dated.
Miguel himself was wearing a psychedelic poncho, but the rain gods nevertheless seemed displeased – it bucketed it down so hard that a good chunk of the crowd fled to underneath the nearest tree to get some shelter. The rain continued to hammer down right through Miike Snow, the collaboration between the Swedish producers Bloodshy and Avant (famous for hits including Britney Spears’s Toxic, not to mention their EDM project Galantis) and the American songwriter Andrew Wyatt, who has collaborated with a bewildering combination of people, ranging from grubby indie types (Carl Barât, the Big Pink) to perky pop stars (Pixie Lott, Bruno Mars). As if to showcase their songwriting versatility, their set ranged from the sleek, strutting pop of Genghis Khan to the fuzzy Swedish pop of Sylvia, concluding with the 21st century Sting of Animal. This genre-hopping also meant their performance seemed more like a somewhat dilettante DJ set than the work of a band with a specific identity, though the faithful sopping-wet moshers at the front of the stage clearly couldn’t have cared less.
The first fat drops of rain fell only minutes into Miguel’s late-afternoon set on Saturday at Governors Ball and quickly graduated to a full-blown summer storm, but those who braved torrential conditions that might have spelled disaster for lesser performers were treated to a gripping set of genre-bending neosoul that rated among the truncated festival’s undisputed highlights.
Clad in a knit poncho, torn white jeans and heeled boots – like a character from some lost interstellar spaghetti western – the fashion-forward Los Angeles native baptized the crowd with 75 minutes of spacey R&B and that drew heavily from last year’s critical smash Wildheart. After opening with A Beautiful Exit and The Thrill, the skies opened for the coy sex anthem Sure Thing off the Los Angeles native’s 2010 debut, All I Want Is You, immediately sending passersby scurrying for cover.
Yet several thousand fans remained for a 13-song set that seemed to escalated with energy as the conditions worsened – and worsen they did. Midway through, soggy poncho long since tossed aside, Miggy’s white tee was soaked through and torn at the left armpit, clinging to his chiseled abs. “Love the rain!” he exhorted between bars of Coffee, finally tearing the shirt off and powering through the climax. He writhed and gyrated and bopped with verve, delivering lyrics supine, missing nary a note and playing to the crowd with an effortless charisma. A brief cover of 2Pac’s I Get Around offered a crowd-pleasing surprise, while a falsetto-drizzled rendition of Adorn – the Kaleidoscope Dream smash that earned him a Grammy in 2012 – left the crowd in awe.
“I’ll never forget that time we danced in the rain together,” he said near the finish before launching into a show-closing How Many Drinks? – the club banger powered by liberal samples from Kendrick’s Swimming Pools – that saw him descend from the stage and deliver a note-perfect climax surrounded by wild-eyed listeners. At the front of a festival-hopping summer that includes stops at Bonnaroo, London’s Wireless Fest, Pitchfork and Outside Lands, Saturday’s rapturous reception augurs well.
The Killers closed Saturday with an hour-and-a-half set of their safe, overwrought pop rock, drawing exclusively from their back catalogue despite rumblings of a new album in the works. A predictable laundry list of their greatest hits (Mr Brightside, All These Things That I’ve Done, Read My Mind, Somebody Told Me, Human), peppered with covers of Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love and Obstacle 1 by Interpol, showcased an act at the height of their vapidity, which is saying something. Had only the storm proper come one day earlier.
