REVIEW: Wireless Fest, Jay-Z [Festival Fever]

REVIEW: Wireless Fest, Jay-Z

Posted on July 7, 2008 3:52 PM
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Wireless Festival
Day 1 - Thursday 3rd July 2008

James Hamlin checked out the Main Stage for Jay-Z's post-Glastonbury performance. Did the big man cut it?

Last night saw the final act in the Live Nation annual summer take over of Hyde Park as the O2 Wireless Festival kicked off in fine style. O2 Wireless is a strange thing, it wants to be a festival but can never really be one – it has far too corporate-a-feel for that. What it does provide is big acts and a chance for Londoners to come down to Hyde Park after work and have some festival style fun on their doorstep. The opening night's headliner doesn’t get much bigger than certified New York city hip hop don, Jay-Z.

The storm in the tea cup that was the Glastonbury Jay-z headline show was now firmly in the books and this was a chance for Hove to put on a real show for his ever passionate London-based fans.

A late afternoon downpour delayed our entry to Wireless but when we showed it was safe to say that we hadn’t missed much. A basic head count showed that those in attendance had come to see Jigga with the rest of the enclosed area looking pretty bare (I don’t know if the scheduled acts even played but if they did it would have been to five men and a dog). I have to give props to Hyde Park; whilst not the best surface to play football on, you wouldn’t have known that there had been a virtual monsoon hours earlier. This added to the fun and throughout the reasonably hip crowd, trainers stayed nice and white.

We arrived and thankfully missed most of the Mark Ronson show, okay, that’s a little harsh – but the half hour or so we witnessed was more than enough. As usual, guests were the norm for the Ronson band and it was particularly good to see Wiley get a better response than Lily Allen. Wiley jumped ship from Hot Chip, who incidently played earlier in the day, and joined a bigger headliner for a version of “Wearing my Rolex” which went down a treat. Lallen was rubbish as normal – fag in hand whilst singing – bad look.

Hove himself hit the stage about 9ish and from there it was all perfect again. His set was similar to his Glastonbury set but his Wonderwall intro was replaced with the club destroyer and the only track he will probably ever play live from his American gangster LP, “Roc Boys”. The man is a master. Plain and simple. An effortless hour and a half followed of hit after hit after hit with no filler whatsoever – there wasn’t a track that the crowd didn’t know which kept the energy high and people engaged through out. Posse cut appearances were thrown in to good effects and his verse on “Umbrella” was dropped to a site of a thousand umbrellas held aloft. Nice.