It must he hard to headline a festival knowing that the primary attraction lies beneath you on the bill. Florence + the Machine may be the titular main draw at this British Summer Time one-dayer, but the huge sense of anticipation is surrounding Kendrick Lamar.
With three No 1 albums to her credit and a vast, evangelical fan following, Florence Welch is Britain’s biggest-draw female live attraction after Adele. Yet today she is up against a rapper who is flying home after this show to headline the White House’s Fourth of July barbecue at the express request of President Obama. It’s quite the clash of the heavyweights. The Compton rapper is undoubtedly the hottest property in hip-hop right now, and Florence is in danger of being upstaged here.
Early in the day, Cat Power sets the bar less high. Looking like a weary 21st-century Patti Smith, she appears to accept that her solipsistic singer-songwriter musings are more suited to an intimate club than to these wide-open spaces. “Don’t worry,” she reassures after one moody number. “You’re going to have a lot more fun than this!”
Jamie xx’s collage of house beats, dubstep, drum-and-bass and digitally treated steel drums may be anathema to dance-music purists, but his DJ set in blazing sunshine shows he knows how to get a festival crowd moving. Except that, this being British summer 2016, the heavens then open, reducing the field to a sodden sea of brollies and EU flags.
To Pimp a Butterfly, Lamar’s extraordinary third album, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic last summer. It is a magisterial melding of rap, 1970s protest soul, politicised funk and freeform jazz. When he appears, a diminutive form in branded sportswear, he looks an unlikely figure to have produced such a coruscating state-of-the-nation address.
Yet it soon becomes evident that he is a righteous, restless ball of tension. Parliament-Funkadelic are an acknowledged influence, and the voice of George Clinton features large on the personal-political Wesley’s Theory, while a sample from a 1970s Blaxploitation film declares that “every nigger is a star”.
As ever at Hyde Park gigs the muted volume is an issue, but Lamar’s externalised inner monologues of angst and anxiety are transfixing. The sultry These Walls opens like an OutKast-style sex song, all R&B beats and treated vocals, before diverting into a barbed critique of the US jail system.
King Kunta transplants the slave hero of Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots into the modern day and is a fantastic slice of Sly Stone-like funky militancy. Lamar’s rage is all the more powerful in that it is delivered with ice-cool, forensic precision; when he leaves, the applause is tumultuous.
Yet despite Lamar’s brilliance, Florence + the Machine have been knocking around the block for 10 years now and are not easily overshadowed. Whatever the failings of their overwrought, bombastic pop operas, the redoubtable Florence Welch is never less than riotously entertaining.
Barefoot and flame-haired in a diaphanous gown, she gallops across stage during the histrionic Ship to Wreck as if on an invisible pony. Her formidable, pitch-perfect vocal on Delilah could strip the paint from the fence at the back of the field. The muted noise levels suddenly seem less of an issue.
The blaring Queen of Peace sees an outbreak of ye olde Pan’s People-style interpretive dancing, then Welch ends her rollicking set with an earnest post-Brexit-vote pep talk, before urging us to remove an item of clothing and hug a neighbour. Unlike Kendrick Lamar, she is rarely sublime but she remains endearingly ridiculous.
