“The first time I came here, you had the Killers and Foo Fighters – more my cup of tea. But now…” says a thirtyish man on the shuttle bus from Chelmsford station to Hylands Park on the outskirts of town. And that’s about the size of it: a decade ago, V-goers gently nodded off to the likes of Radiohead and Morrissey, but the dual-site event (it also operates at Weston Park, Staffordshire) has since evolved into a brash popfest with the youngest audience of any major festival.
Justin Bieber and Rihanna head this year’s lineup, which also includes Sia, Jess Glynne, Zara Larsson and anyone else whose YouTube streams number in the hundreds of millions.
For comparison purposes, Rick Astley is here to recreate the 80s, and reality star/YouTube hatchling Troye Sivan represents pop’s end times. Only grime’s bellicose Stormzy, recruited at the last minute to replace Halsey, is much of an outlier.
Swedish 18-year-old Larsson has two of 2016’s best pop hits in Lush Life and Never Forget You but is disappointingly generic in the flesh. It’s probably unfair to grouse about a teenager presenting a featherweight set of frenetic dancing and cranked-out vocals, but it’s also accurate to note that the best thing about it was MNEK swaggering by, fresh from his own show, to pitch in on Never Forget You.
Rick Astley, by contrast, is an old hand at this sort of thing. “Anyone born in the 80s? I’m Uncle Rick!” he roars to an audience half the size of Larsson’s. “This year I had a number one album, ya buggers!” He plays a bit of it, along with the expected hits and unexpected covers (Uptown Funk and Rihanna’s We Found Love), clearly having a whale of a time.
Bastille, often critically derided for their perfectly decent guitar-meets-club vibe, are entitled to exult in the moving spectacle of the entire main-stage field singing their songs back at them. Jess Glynne, who’s supplanted Jessie J as the nation’s lung-bursting poptronica empress, has still to master the art of stage presence – a quality possessed down to the last atom by Sia.
Sia’s performance has a highbrow, Björkesque theatricality, with abstract interpretations of her music. Singing from beneath her face-obscuring wig, she stands isolated from her dancers, who use props such as old telephones in head-scratching ways. Sia’s take on Diamonds, the hit she wrote for Rihanna, was the highlight of a brilliant set.
After engineering a comeback in which he apologised for egg vandalism and other foolishness and released the acclaimed album Purpose, Justin Bieber now threatens to undo his good work. He admits to being hungover, repeatedly addresses this Essex field as “London”, and appears to be miming – the last of which turns a voluble group of Beliebers next to me into Unbeliebers on the spot.
Mumbled motivational quotes speckle the set (“People said: ‘Justin, you’re not good enough,’ but I showed them,” he exhales, which leads into – who’d have thought? - I’ll Show You), and he throws away nocturnal slinks like Where are U Now and The Feeling by ambling around on his dancers’ heels, apparently for want of better things else to do. Perhaps he’ll have recovered his cockerpoo-meets-badass mojo when his Purpose world tour arrives in Britain in October.
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