SCORCHING sunshine, streamlined funk and a family-friendly atmosphere combined to show Glasgow at its well-behaved best at the first of the two-day Fiesta x Fold festival at the city’s Kelvingrove Park on Saturday.
It was so well behaved that you found yourself carried away with the sheer happiness of the day. Not everything was perfect. The queues for drink were at key times too long, the food too scarce. But nothing could dent the feelgood factor generated by the weather and the friendliness of the stewards.
Indeed, at some points you had to pinch yourself to believe this really was Glasgow. The city loves a party but it rarely gets a chance to strut its stuff in sweltering heat.
The music was hot too, curated by Chic mainman Nile Rodgers and showcasing, on the first day at least, names from the era when disco ruled the world – the mid to early 1980s.
Not all the main players have survived since those heady days. The Pointer Sisters performed with just one of the original trio who had a string of hits such as Automatic, I’m So Excited and Jump (For My Love).
Chic’s legendary bassist Bernard Edwards died after appearing in concert in 1996. And headliners Earth, Wind and Fire lost their bandleader Maurice White in 2016.
Not that the line-up changes affected the enjoyment of what was an incredibly diverse crowd at Kelvingrove Park, ranging from toddlers to those able to remember these bands at their peak.
When De La Soul split the crowd into different age groups and asked each to cheer it was noticeable how much louder the 46 and over section was.
De La Soul were relative newcomers here, releasing their classic first album, the hip hop masterpiece 3 Feet High And Rising, in 1989. Despite their own continual, self-deprecating references to their veteran status, they’re the only major band on today’s bill still making vital, contemporary new music.
Despite the enthusiasm De La Soul generated from the crowd it was the disco hits the audience had come to the festival to hear. Given that few if any performers have a back catalogue so stuffed with those as Nile Rodgers, it was no surprise that Chic’s performance was the hit of the day. Tunes such as the band’s own Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah), Everybody Dance, Le Freak and I Want Your Love would have been impressive enough but add in Rodgers’s collaborations such as I’m Coming Out (Diana Ross), Let’s Dance (David Bowie), Like a Virgin (Madonna) and Get Lucky (Daft Punk) and a Chic set is a disco juggernaut.
Sound problems which rattled the normally beatific Rodgers stopped the set from reaching the heights of Chic’s ecstatic performance at Kelvingrove Bandstand last year but for sheer festival joy there’s little on the planet to touch even a slightly under-par Good Times as it segues into The Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight, with a delirious audience going nuts.
That was such a showstopping performance that even disco legends Earth, Wind and Fire struggled to follow it. Their brand of bombastic funk was expertly played and presented with stadium precision but it wasn’t until Boogie Wonderland that it all added up to more than the sum of its parts.
The world is a very different place to the one in which Chic, Earth, Wind and Fire and others first mounted a revolutionary challenge to the more reactionary element of rock. It’s a testament to these musicians’ dignity and resilience that they can emerge from personal problems and the painful loss of friends and colleagues not only with their dignity intact but clinging on to the belief in the unifying power of the dancefloor. On Saturday they made us believe that too.
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