“I feel like Adele,” grins Eddie Vedder, giddily drinking in the vast crowd before him. He might often have worn his stardom with unease, but the Pearl Jam frontman clearly loves his people, and can make even a large-scale an event as this feel somehow intimate.
Tonight’s slate of underground rock luminaries all prove adept at translating their once-cultish sounds to the wide open spaces. With little between-song banter, Pixies are taut like the Ramones, a twisted pop juggernaut of swooning surf ballads, abrasive punk, simmering perversion and tunes about incest. Once a martyr to debilitating stage fright, Cat Power’s Chan Marshall is magnificent this evening. Her band chugging suavely, like the Velvets if they’d been raised in Memphis, the hypnotic likes of Cross Bones Style are elemental and soulful.
