By Michael MacLennan
“So are we going to have it or not?” asked Lily Allen before her early evening NME Stage set.
Well no, apparently not. Not that there was anything tremendously ghastly about her appearance, but it just seemed a bit lazy in comparison to yesterday’s fellow pop starlets Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.
The laconic singer said that as she’d played 12 festival shows in 14 days she was planning on getting drunk that very day, and even during her cover of Kaiser Chief’s Oh My God and Littlest Things there seemed a visible lack of effort, as though she was saving her energy for later. Perhaps there was a limbo contest in the artist area us common sorts weren't along to? Who knows.
Still, Lily declated that “T in the Park will always be my favourite festival”, as it was exactly four years ago at Balado that she found out Smile had become her first number one single. She obviously had good reason to celebrate, it was just a shame the rest of us couldn’t join in…
Lily could certainly learn a thing or two from frenetic six-piece Danananakroyd who were headlining the BBC Introducing Stage, the raucous mob so full of life that it was hard not to be carried along by their sheer enthusiasm.
Duel drummers flailing away and the duel vocalists leaping about, it was little wonder that one of the singers had already broken his microphone by the end of the first song. That little mishap didn’t stop him, but you suspect the indie-rock troupe would have carried on even while a giant tornado carried them off into the skies far over yonder hills. Not only that, by I suspect the audience would still have had a whale of a time following them to their doom, and rightly so.
