Friday 01/02/08 Big Day Out @ Royal Adelaide Showgrounds, Adelaide

One of the beauties of the Big Day Out, at least here in the Adelaide Showgrounds, is that you can round a corner, nip down an alley, dash through a door, and suddenly you’re in an alternative musical universe, rather like Alice falling down a rabbit hole. After a few false starts, your intrepid reviewer most recently jumped from the rather tasty gallic-flavoured electro of the Midnight Juggernauts, to something resolutely English, resolutely London. There’s a plan – Nash and dash – but the Nash in question, Kate, soon puts paid to it. You couldn’t call her set enthralling – sitting behind a piano in a red polka dot dress hardly makes for a stage show – but Nash’s lyrics are sharp enough to demand further investigation. Being resolutely London, of course, entitles you to a few benefits. You can call on the services of other resolute Londoners any old time you like, so up pops Billy Bragg for a duet on 'New England'.

The next rabbit hole takes us to another London, tougher, harder, and infinitely more muscular. But there’s a hold up. Somewhere near the Boiler Room entrance, a bouncer – admittedly one of the broader-than-he-is-tall variety – has lost his feet on the swell of the crowd, and his head is bobbing around uncontrollably. Seconds later there are people vaulting a security fence and then, for no obvious reason, the Boiler Room suddenly opens up and sucks the rest of the crowd in. It’s an adrenalin-charged start to an adrenalin-charged set. It’s Dizzee, of course: we’ve got the Rascal right here, and he’s pulled in a crowd that’s bursting with passion. His lyrical talent goes without saying by now; what’s surprising is just how much stage presence he has. ‘Dream’, with its cheesy sample from 'Happy Talk', runs neatly into ‘Sirens’, and then there’s a cracking rendition of ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’.

Battles are perched on the edge of the Green Stage as if they want to feel our sunburn, and they’re playing some gloriously discordant noise on top of a deep, funky groove. Dizzee might have been the highlight so far, but Battles are the first act to leave me with that silent laugh, when the sheer joy of the music just swells up inside. They’re one of the few acts here to inspire the feeling that they might take music somewhere it hasn’t been before. They don’t quite manage it – a lot of what they’re doing harks back to the glory days of post-punk – but sometimes the feeling is enough.

Elsewhere, Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine – more formally known as The Nightwatchman – is playing a solo acoustic set and referring to himself in the third person. But he also tackles AC/DC’s ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’, reworked with added politics, and the huge audience clearly approves.
Time to face up to the big day’s big question: what the hell is it with Arcade Fire? Some details first. Today we get ten of them, but I’m not even going to try to give you names and descriptions because they’ve got their own rabbit hole thing going on. Just when you think you’ve got their line-up down, someone vanishes and reappears somewhere else. They open with ‘Wake Up’. Their musicianship can’t be faulted. Between the ten of them they’ve got the stagecraft to handle this size of crowd and make it all look fairly effortless.

After that, there’s nothing much to say. They’re just dull. There’s one moment when they soar, partly due to the inherent structure of a song that builds and builds, and partly because their live performance of it far surpasses the recorded version. It is, of course, the best moment on Funeral, ‘Neighborhood #1’, which they still seem to be coming down from. They follow it with a moment that’s truly great – and truly liberating – taking less than a minute to play the refrain to the Pixies’ ‘Wave Of Mutilation’. Liberating because in that brief interlude they manage to prove that although they can play brilliantly, even when they’re rather half-hearted about it, they’re nothing particularly special. A single line from ‘Wave Of Mutilation’  trumps everything they’ve done. Easily. Which clearly means that it’s time to stop worrying about them. Yes, yes, Mr Fan, it could well be that I’ve got cloth ears. But here’s another thought: maybe they’re just overblown and over-promoted. It happens.