The Rock for People festival in Hradec Králové, which ended on Sunday evening, advanced to a higher league this year. He welcomed 37,000 people, increased the budget from 100 to 200 million crowns and precisely handled the technically demanding performance of Muse. At the end, the British rockers played a show of Hollywood parameters.
On the back wall of the monumental podium, a circular logo burns in the dark, on which the letters WOTP are gradually alternated with the help of flames. It is an abbreviation of the album title Will of the People, which was released by Muse last August. They come in black pants and jackets with hoods, silver masks made of glass shards on their faces.
“Welcome to the desecration, baby / We’ll give you confidence and then we’ll tear you down / Welcome to the celebration, baby / All the judges are in the cell and the future is ours,” sings guitarist Matt Bellamy. once title track dies away, the musicians take off their masks and become human.
From the first moments, the frontman impresses with arching riffs, just balancing between complexity and urgency. At the same time, he uses the guitar most of all to create noises by distorting its signal in various ways. In a way, he follows Tom Morello from the band Rage Against the Machine.
The instrument often howls, sometimes it just emits a kind of hot air. In several songs, the musician also picks up a custom-made MB-1 electric guitar, which has a special touch surface located under the bridge. By swiping over it, Bellamy makes a similar sound scratching. At one point, he taps his fingers into it while walking down the catwalk surrounded by listeners, letting them repeat the hums from this device.
A musical blockbuster
Blocks of songs separate animated sequences on the screen. They tell a story from a destroyed planet in a parallel universe. People in hoods and glass masks represent resistance, robotic devil usurpers and totalitarian power. In front of visitors Rock for People unfolds a kind of dystopian video game, which Muse accompany with their greatest hits and songs from the last recording. The flow of sensations is intense. Theatricality is mixed with futurism and the aesthetics of the apocalypse, which one needs to survive.
The English brought a rock opera for the 21st century to the Králové-Hradec festival. They change positions, go from soft electronics to metal thunder, cover the songs with more and more layers of effects.
Behind the band at first is a gray fluffy tarp. After several compositions, he falls to the ground, revealing a generous mirror mask of a member of the resistance. The head of the hero of the dystopian story looks down at the people and slowly rotates back and forth, at the same time acting as a giant disco ball. Confetti in the form of long strips of crepe paper fly into the air. People catch them and put them in their pockets as souvenirs.
Before their eyes, Muses are testing the limits of what is possible to invent and produce at the highest levels of music show business. Their concerts are like moving Hollywood movies. They emphasize the effect and the intoxicating experience, the songs form a self-evident basis.
It’s admirable that all those sounds are more or less extracted by a few instruments. Instead of playback, the band relies on effects. Matt Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenholme and drummer Dominic Howard are now joined at the concerts only by Dan Lancaster playing everything possible. Everything fits together, the sound is perfect.
Cydonia’s Knights as played by Muse this Sunday at Rock for People. Photo: Petr Klapper Video: Marian Bartoň
The need to fight
At one point singer Bellamy comes dressed as a robot and performs a solo on his own robotic hand, or to the touch synthesizer, which is part of the suit. In an instrumental piece Prelude appears as if his luminous jacket is in sync with the music. But it’s probably just a confusion of the senses.
“We will not be controlled, we will achieve victory,” the entire campus chants with Bellamy, though it feels more like wishful thinking. Each listener has a phone in his pocket that records his conversations and movements, and a festival bracelet on his arm that maps spending. Rock for People is cashless this year, you can’t pay without a wrist chip. Thus, Muses are part of the machine to which they conspire. But the audience takes the narrative show and the lyrics as a play that borders on perfection in Hradec.
The encore begins with a hard metal composition Kill or Be Killed, when the sound becomes powerful in synergy with all those fires, lights and lasers. The happy ending comes in a kind of incentive. “It’s time to make things right / You and I gotta fight for our rights / You and I gotta fight to survive,” the band urges in a futuristic western song called Knights of Cydonia.
It ends with a stormy finale, when the musicians “beat” the instruments. Drummer Dominic Howard steals the spotlight, Bellamy’s guitar sounds like a neighing horse. It is finished. The feedback of the electric guitar continues to sound for a long time on the empty stage, over which a generous fireworks display completes the festival. Just a few hours earlier, however, a different kind of rock and roll was taking place in the next tent.
Rock and roll in a thousand ways
Frontman and bass player Eamon Sandwith sings like a dog barking over a fence. He even looks similar.
Australian trio The Chats brought frenetic punk and rock’n’roll to Rock for People. Formed in 2016, they capture what they see around them with terse, repetitive songs. “This song is about a very hot day,” the 23-year-old frontman introduces the song The Stinkeri.e. Stinking.
Instead of the band’s name, as usual, they have Get Fucked written on the tarpaulin. It’s the same name as their last year’s album. Compositions generally do not exceed three chords, pauses last at most spitting on the ground. “Oi! We’ve got a few more pieces, so just put up with it,” Sandwith blurts out before launching another “one, two, three, four.”
Sustaining such a pace for over 50 minutes seems like an inhuman feat. The audience, as is common at Rock for People, runs in circle seven, which is a type of circle dance. “Then again sometime,” Sandwith finishes and starts packing his camera as if nothing had happened.
That evening culminates the biggest year of the festival founded in 1995. On the fourth night, the visitors are searching for the last remnants of energy, the experiences are perhaps even stronger in that intoxication.
On the Táborák stage near the fire, they play Pavel Bobek’s classic called Veď me dál, dougho mai, while it is coming from afar singing band Tata Boys: “My only wish is repetition”.
