Exit Festival - Saturday

Saturday was all about one man, THE artist who stole the weekend from all who came before and after him.

Unfortunate enough to precede were Juliet Lewis and her ‘Licks’ who were well and truly licked despite the American wrestler style salutations to the crowd upon the end of her pedestrian set.

Manu Chao, the iconic Paris born pint sized world music artist who sings in Spanish. English and French, from came on to truly unite the nations and cultures, as around 30,000 of the 45,000 present crammed into the grassy main stage area, clamboured up trees, perched on shoulders and embankments upwind of the portaloos just to catch a glimpse.

With creschendo after creschendo of ‘eh oy oy oy’, Manu and his 6 piece Radio Bemba Soundsystem doled out an infinitely energetic maelstrom of raggae, flamenco, ska & cubano carnival sounds with an air of freedom and a political lyrical edge, finding time for a tribute to ‘the world’s greatest terrorist, George Bush’. As the 2-hour mark was closing in on his set Manu had to be literally dragged from the stage beating his heart with the microphone as every single hand and voice in front of him exalted.

Things could only go down from there, but funnily enough they could not have gotten much worse. We had a feeling Afrika Bambaata may be a little ‘iffy’ but the old hip hop adage of ‘how low can you go’ was never better demonstrated as an appalling MC duo didn’t even introduce their reason for being there, and then set about destroying the evenings proceedings with crap rapping and crowd baiting above the most obvious set of old hip hop samples played in decades. It really was a parody of a sound. Jive bunny does rap. Everybody say hoooooo. Clash say noooo.

Nooooo was also the scream on the way home, as Clash’s rebellious taxi driver decided to joyride across the wrong way of a one-way rail bridge, playing chicken with a freight train, before being booked by the police and then taking us on a guided tour of the riverside slums bombed heavily in the war, all of course to help fill any cultural holes in our story.

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