Sigur Rós at Latitude Festival: mesmerised by Iceland's magic elves

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/07/2008

 

The strangeness of Sigur Rós and some daring theatre stood out from the samey guitar bands at the Latitude Festival, says Bernadette McNulty

Despite selling itself as being about more than just music, Latitude still stands out for pulling in a number of exclusive UK festival appearances. First up: Friday night headliners Franz Ferdinand.

The Scottish indie rockers have taken their time coming up with a third album, and it was intriguing to see which new direction the art-school four-piece would unveil.

At first, the answer, worryingly, seemed to be none. The rakish Glaswegians sounded like they had been frozen in time, firing out old song after old song. The delivery was still punchy, but the jauntiness of Do You Want To and Matinée sounded faded and plodding.

The crowd bobbed along politely but, like Nadal beating Federer at Wimbledon, you couldn't help but feel that lead singer Alex Kapranos had been usurped by the younger Alex Turner and his more intense, dynamic Arctic Monkeys.

Yet mid-set, they audaciously played their best song, Take Me Out, and suddenly a gear shifted. Finally, new material appeared, and the palette expanded from spiky guitars to spooky Tomorrow's World synthesisers and layered melodies. It looks like there might be more to Franz Ferdinand yet.

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Latitude has, in some ways, set itself up as the anti-Glastonbury, courting an older, middle-class, family-orientated crowd, with few attempts to lure the young.

As a result, the stages were overloaded with what Americans would call college-rock - basically, boring guitar bands. It is snooty towards pop, hip-hop or anything weird; 50-quid man or Jeremy Vine might have picked the line-up.

Thankfully, there were some rays of light. Yacht are a boy-girl duo from Portland, Oregon, who are like the Ting Tings, but with less sugary pop in their porridge and more electronic weirdness.

They casually tripped on to stage, pressed play on their laptop and then displayed the best expressive dancing since Napoleon Dynamite. Later, Sebastian Tellier, France's left-field Eurovision entry, brought some much needed eroticism to the show with his throbbing guitar and panting lyrics.

Saturday night headliner Sigur Rós finally pulled off the ideal Latitude trick of being all things to all people: men were playing guitars, but they did so oddly with bows, backed by a symphony of other sounds: strings, music boxes and a brass band.

They sang in their weird, elfish mix of Icelandic and their own made-up language, but for all you could tell, they were reading off a map of the local area: Saxmundham, Walberswick, Eye and Diss. Whatever it was they were singing, it sounded beautiful, emotional and dramatic; full-moon lullabies for adults and children alike.

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