The Picnic prides itself on bringing an eclectic mix of old and new to music fans - and this year holds lots of promise.
While it's always worth seeing the veterans teach the new kids how it's done, taking in some homegrown talent and an inimitable diva will also ramp up your musical experience several notches this weekend.
Blur
Their comeback album The Magic Whip was the surprise of the year. We’d heard they had recorded together again, but only over the course of a few unexpected days of downtime when a gig was cancelled during a show. And we knew Graham and Damon didn’t really get on that well any more, so expectations were low. But how wrong we were. It is an uneven album, but only in so far as it's not all great, but the bits that are great, are Blur at their best. The album was polished in post-production, but it polished up well because the basic songs are just so good. Blur have always been great live, they have the back-catalogue and now, an unexpected and welcome shot of adrenalin to push on with.
The Boomtown Rats
There will be cooler acts on stage at the picnic, bands that it’s good to name-drop, or at least pretend you saw. But there will be none with the track record of the Rats. From playing in Moran’s Hotel in 1975, a bunch of hippies really, to sensing punk rock wind’s of change and writing songs like 'Mary of the 4th Form' and 'Looking After Number One'. 'I Don’t Like Mondays' was a game-changer for Irish bands. These guys really were the first Irish band ever to make Top of The Pops their home. Bob has done stuff since, but if asked ‘profession?' going through passport control, he still answers ‘song-writer’ in a heartbeat. This is what he really does.
Future Islands
The Letterman appearance is now the stuff of legend. It had so much going for it: A truly brilliant uplifting song, probably the song of the year, and then a man dancing; A man dancing because he loved the music and he needed to move to it. And he loved the song and he needed to express those feelings. And he’d been dancing like this and singing like this all his life and he didn’t care if it looked cool or not. And he didn’t employ people to tell him if he looked cool or not, because he didn’t care. And we all saw that, and we knew. And we loved it.
Grace Jones
Grace Jones is a force of nature. They didn’t want her to sing 'Slave to the Rhythm'. They wanted to give the song to Frankie Goes to Hollywood as the follow up to 'Relax'. But after being told to go away and learn to sing, Grace went away and learned to sing. And when she came back they all said ‘wow you can sing now!’. Some of you will have seen the YouTube video where she performs the song whilst rotating a hula hoop effortlessly around her waist. It beggars belief. The picnic will be meat and potatoes to Grace. It’s not a case of is she big enough for the picnic, its more a case of is the picnic big enough for her?
The Bleeding Heart Pigeons
It is beholden upon you to see one new band at each festival and this year I think you should check these guys out. They are from West Limerick and been together since school days, a period of about eight years. For the last 18 months they have been signed to Virgin Records, and amazingly have not been pressured to change direction, hurry up or fit in. They remain wonderfully experimental and their latest EP, their second, has a main track that clocks in at 8 minutes and contains shades of Pink Floyd. They rehearse, they tell me, in their parents' shed. This is the kind of stuff you could only dream your children would get up to in said shed.
Be sure to head over to the Newstalk Lounge at the Mindfield Arena for some live action from George Hook, Tom Dunne and Off The Ball #NTLounge
Richie McCormack also gives his alternative top picks for EP.
