Festivals

The electricity of teenage fandom is buzzing in the air today at Hyde Park, this is by far the youngest crowd I’ve seen at a BST event, and almost everyone is wearing the obvious colours for K-Pop international superstars BlackPink. As we head into the arena it’s clear there are a lot less people around early today, compared to the previous BST events, perhaps in part due to the overcast weather, but it’s actually quite pleasant being able to walk around the arena with ease.

Checking out the merchandise options you can only imagine my abject horror at finding bucket hats with tiny BP embroidery on for an eye-watering £40 each. Tote bags were also £40 (compare to £20 for Take That, which I still thought was steep), zip up printed tour hoodies for BlackPink are an astonishing £120. Despite my wish to own all the merch from everything I attend, I really couldn’t justify these prices, but there were plenty of people queuing up to catch some exclusive (and hard to find in the UK) items.

The most popular seems to be the BlackPink official lightstick – which, if you aren’t in the know, looks like a miniature mallet with squishy pink hearts on either side, that you can connect to an app which lights up along with the music at the show you’re attending. Well… it would, if anyone on Hyde Park could get any signal at all.

Shuffling off to the Rainbow stage we catch a bit of the completely adorable Annika Benett, who has a gorgeous voice and is singing breakup songs “…I built my life around someone, and it’s awful when that ends”.

Caity Baser hits the main stage wearing a tartan bodysuit that gives Attack on Titan vibes, and the wind begins to pick up around the arena as she too chooses the topic of breakups for her set – “How many of you have been cheated on before?”. Honestly, looking around at the average age of the fans here and I’d say that quite a large portion probably can’t relate Caity. Nevertheless she’s upbeat and fun, and despite the smaller crowd today she’s managing to get them jumping around.

Taking a turn around the arena to see what’s cracking, we take a few minutes up on the Whiteclaw balcony to sit on some comfortable beanbags and drink a fancy drink or two. It’s a lovely view but any stage sounds are impossible to entertain from there, due to the absolute chaos that is the Carousel Swing fairground ride next to us, which is flying at a brutally horizontal angle and making the riders SCREAM.

We catch at bit of self-proclaimed manic dream pixie – Peach PRC, who is sporting her unique iridescent fairy wings and pink wavy hair, jumping around the stage. I like her, she’s good energy and song ‘Blondes’ is a perfect pop appetizer. Speaking of energy though, we need to eat and the options are bountiful, and therefore hard to choose from. Heading over to the Peroni bar we spy The Cheese Wheel, who are preparing fresh pasta inside, well, a giant wheel of cheese. Deciding to go boujie today we order the truffle cheese pasta and then sat in pure silence while we indulged. This may be the most decadent festival food I’ve ever eaten, highly recommend.

Waddling over to the main stage for Korean rock band The Rose, we are greeted with a cacophony of screaming girls. It’s true, they are *very* pretty, but honestly – they’re a great band and I really enjoyed their song ‘Yes’, even if it came with the slightly odd warning “Er, don’t say yes to everything though!”. It’s not hard to like them when they are a very wholesome mix of funny and humble “Our first gig was to twenty people in Korea, seven years ago… and fifteen of them were our friends!”.

The Cuban Brothers are bringing the Funky Nassau to the Garage stage, and Miguel quickly decides to “…change [his] material” for the clearly younger crowd who have gathered in front. Encouraging the kids to yell “Kenny The Pasta” instead of the other thing, has those of us who’ve seen them before, laughing. Yelling “Where the Blinks at?” they immediately have all the young girls along the front row screaming at ear-bleeding levels, and I think some first crushes have well and truly been established today in the form of Young Domenico.

Rebecca Black, no longer the gawky teenager in possibly one of the worst/most iconic music videos of all time, steps out on stage in a very Goth-loli red tartan outfit with all the confidence of a seasoned performer. Not gonna lie, she’s had some solid follow up bops over the years, but it’s fairly obvious everyone is waiting to hear her sing about her car seat dilemmas in ‘Friday’.

Sabrina Carpenter hits the main stage in stacked gogo boots and a metallic pink slip dress, but the crowd is very very thin on the ground, despite her saying “Hyde Park what’s poppin? There’s so many of you god damn!”. She goes on to say “I’ve been to London a few times… your relationship dramas are so wild, I watch Love Island. Who here has been in a situationship?” is met with rapturous… crickets. These kids are like 13 Sabrina… what’s your angle. Her voice is lovely but she ends up being a bit like one of those Pinterest recipes, where I’ve now heard enough of her life story and would like very much to just make the pie (her cats are named Benny and Bjorn, she covers Abba’s ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’).

At this point we are fully stalking the fancy AmEx guest areas to try and catch a glimpse of Hugh Grant whowas somewhere about, bringing his daughter and her friends to see BlackPink tonight. Alas, we failed our mission, he was nowhere to be seen so we shuffled off in favour of getting ourselves ready for the headline slot.

Now, this is not just another headliner it has to be noted, this is the first time a Korean band has ever headlined a major UK festival in history – and a sold out show no less. The crowd is getting fretful now, as the band are a few minutes late in starting, but the ominous “Blaaaack Pink” chant they’re all doing is some horror movie level shit.

Coming in hard with ‘Pink Venom’, Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa take their absolutely earned place in the spotlight to the deafening screams of thousands of fans. Having been mostly a fan of rock and metal, this type of fanatic behaviour is somewhat new to me, and it’s kinda hard not to get swept up in the thrall. Why didn’t I buy a lightstick, damn. Dressed all in white, but different variations on the Leeloo-fifth-element theme, they’ve got quite an industrial gothic look about them – offset heavily by the occasional pink pyrotechnics and sparkles around them.

“London what’s UUUUP” they yell, before dropping the absolutely epic ‘How You Like That’, which was my first introduction to the band a few years ago. It doesn’t matter what musical background you come from, you’ve got to agree that song slaps. The crowd is going absolutely berserk at this point, and there’s a girl next to us who knows every dance move and seemingly every word.

‘Pretty Savage’ includes a saucy chair routine at the end of the runway, and their house dancers are absolutely incredible during their costume change break at the end of ‘Whistle’ as well. It’s such a full on performance, there’s always something happening. The second ‘act’ of the night is each performer’s chance to showcase their solo material, which is truly a genius way of incorporating personal work into your band schedule without breaking the lot or having to split. Why haven’t more bands thought of this?!

Jennie does ‘You & Me’ in a gorgeous lacy tiered coat, followed by Jisoo with ‘Flower’ in sparkly and floral reds with blooming flower choreography to boot, and then a huge explosion of petals across the crowd. I really rate this level of production detail, it’s making everything so magical and special for the audience.

Rosé enters wearing the absolute coolest outfit of the whole night, she is draped in gold chains and looks like pirate treasure, for ‘Gone/On The Ground’. Obviously, there’s a heap of floorwork in the choreo to reflect the ‘ground’ sentiment too, but a ticker tape streamer explosion backfires quite spectacularly, covering the stage lights and a poor unsuspecting security guard due to a turn of the wind. Hey future kids, if there’s a second fire of London, it probably started here m’kay?

Lisa rocks a red bustier and knee high biker boots for ‘Money’ which is one of my favourites of the night, it makes me wish I could actually dance. I kinda wish they’d done money ticker tape here, but you can’t have everything. Coming round into act 3 the whole band is back together for the incredible ‘Boombayah’ in some excellently mad-max style black outfits. Wielding sparkly mics which look quite a lot like the lightsticks is another little touch I think is very well thought out, as they head into the most visually pleasing part of the night yet.

Male dancers with huge burlesque white feather fans head to the top of the stage, as BlackPink emerge on stage on a lift/riser. The fan dance hides each member while another sings, and thes moves fluidly with them as they descend the stairs, it is so well choreographed that it looks amazing from all angles.

‘Shutdown’ has everyone dancing and singing along with them, exclaiming “Wow wow wow, I did not expect this much energy” and “This is a dream come true!”. Now, I absolutely LOVE the feminist message of ‘Tally’, but there’s no doubt that this well and truly moves them out of the ‘wholesome kpop band’ zone. They’ve always been harder edged as a band, but this song deals with sexuality, confidence and equality in a way that I think other female fronted bands haven’t been able to in the genre. Even their video backdrops say ‘Fuck It’, go on gals. I did have to stifle my laughter when the Mum of the girl next to us heard the line “Getting mine like the fuckboys do” and yelled “WHAT”.

For an encore we get the awesome ‘DDU-DU, DDU-DU’ before they head back down the runway and into a cage which is lifted into the crowd on a platform during ‘Forever Young’. The crowd simply cannot be contained at this point, it is decibel curfew shattering levels of screaming all around me. I can’t blame them, you can call me a Blink now too – that was a sensational show. BlackPink are welcome in our area, anytime. Someone send me a lightstick please.