As the sun sets on another too-long summer festival season, let us take a moment to reflect on the Festival Song.
This is the one tune by a band that even the most reluctant festival attendee will know. It is the song producers stick on the TV highlights package for bored insomniacs surfing the red button. It can save a set, turn grey skies blue and get old bones shaking. The Festival Song survives the artist’s critical nadir; it is the musical cockroach that emerges unscathed from a commercial apocalypse. It is the cast-iron guarantee to every festival booker in the land that an act can still bring something to the party.
The Festival Song is the musical cockroach that emerges unscathed from a commercial apocalypse
Not every artist has a Festival Song, but those who have been around the block and back again will, and they treasure it as they would a winning lotto ticket. As they should. It is the four-minute wonder that can sustain a career for decades.
Connect, now in its second year on the fringes of Edinburgh, is a relaxed late-summer three-day event which marries the new and the old. Boygenius stole Sunday night with a generational love-in. They’re fresh enough right now not to need a Festival Song, which is probably just as well.
On the opening Friday night, however, two bands illustrated the strategic importance of the Festival Song. Headliners Primal Scream, arriving on stage to the sight of an audience significantly under capacity, hit the emergency button and opened with ‘Movin’ on Up’, an ‘old Scottish gospel song’ guaranteed to coax people from the bars and burger stalls down to the front. They ended with ‘Rocks’, a stellar Stones pastiche which sent everyone home believing that they’d had a little more fun than perhaps they really had.
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