Unstoppable Kaisers rise to the occasion
Jon Fletcher 18 Jun 2007
The four-day Hyde Park leg of the O2 Wireless Festival was an unmistakably London affair. For starters there were no flooded tents and clothing choices tended to veer more towards club-wear than camp-wear.
The rain even held off for the most part, avoiding the swamps that are such a regular feature of summer festivals in the UK.
With the whole site emptying each evening, each day felt more like a stand-alone concert than a conventional festival, but, if anything, this added to the atmosphere, with each day's headliner able to amass thousands of true fans rather than the usual mix of the committed and the curious.
The event was brought to a close last night by the Kaiser Chiefs, hot on the heels of their return to the charts with number one single Ruby. They had a lot to live up to - Daft Punk had turned out an almost faultless set of relentless electroeuphoria on Saturday night, accompanied by a spellbinding light show.
It didn't take long for Kaisers' singer Ricky Wilson to show himself equal to the task. Wilson proved his main stage credentials as far back as 2005, when he spent much of a blistering set at Glastonbury cavorting with an inflatable dinosaur. The same energy was on display last night, reigniting testosterone-fuelled high street hits that could so easily have lost their novelty value by now.
Na Na Na Na Naa saw Wilson joined on stage by the hyperactive frontman of Japanese rockers Polysics. Clad in an orange boiler suit, he helped notch up the audience participation to new levels, so that by the time the Kaisers signed off with an explosive rendition of Oh My God the entire crowd was a pulsating wave of bouncing bodies.
Wilson, meanwhile, was constantly on the move, scaling the rigging one moment, lunging toward the crowd the next.
Playing the final set of the four days could have been a daunting task even without Daft Punk's impressive precedent, but when the front man asked teasingly: "Is anyone here too tired to go on?" the roar he got by way of reply showed just how big this band has become.
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