Certain sections of the internet have been clutching their pearls about Royal Blood’s less-than-avuncular reaction to the Radio 1 Big Weekend audience reaction to their riff-based tunes. The BBC write-up is, as one would expect, on-brand and rather withering about their little strop. But do they have a point? Are crowds too passive? Should they have ‘rocked harder’ or something, and won the rabble over? Or, have they been placed on the wrong bill, at the wrong time, by an idiot, and had their expectations of an up-for-it audience thrown back at them with a resounding ‘meh’ by the pop kids?
Royal Blood making their feelings known about the crowd at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend yesterday 😂
— The Rock Revival (@TheRockRevival_) May 29, 2023
It’s not the crowd’s fault if the band don’t rouse them to sufficient enthusiasm. I’d never heard of Royal Blood before this so perhaps this was an engineered publicity stunt. Now I can go back to forgetting them again, except perhaps to muse occasionally on this couple of bedwetters showed that they don’t have balls a fraction as big as Daphne and Celeste.
Very brave, throwing bottles at two young female singers on stage. Nice interview afterwards when Daphne and Celeste said they didn’t mind.
Both acts/clips epitomise why I’d never go to a Reading Festival.
Not a single act on that bill I could ever care about and an audience I wouldn’t ever want to be a part of.
Royal Blood have been around for a few years – no idea why as they are dreadful.
The only idiots responsible for their appearing on the wrong bill at the wrong time are the band themselves.
“Who are these ghastly people?”
If so, that’s not the ‘challenge’ I’d like to set for myself. Sometimes you’re just on a hiding to nothing. Unless, as others have stated, it’s a publicity stunt – but it’s still no fun at all being sandwiched between two acts you have arse-all in common with. Hope they, or their management, think it was worth it.
Guess they missed the memo about the audience not owing them a living.
As suggested above, I think there might be an element of ‘publicity stunt’ here. Their stock seemed to have fallen in recent years, but now Royal Blood are trending again.
No such thing as bad publicity etc
I’m not really their target market.
As Jim says, they’ve released three UK No. 1 albums since 2014, and they have a new one coming out in September that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about. They must be feeling the pinch to go on a R1 Roadshow.
They seem to be on Later… whenever I tune in. At least with iPlayer I can fast-forward through their appearances.
Typical posh boy sense of entitlement. Demanding an appreciative response for doing their job. The audience paid their money and I’m sure really enjoyed other acts. Does anyone on here give an enthusiastic response to bands they don’t like or are indifferent about?
I can’t see that it was a publicity stunt unless they tried to be terrible. The attention they have received has all been negative.
In my younger, gig-going days, I used to see Glam-Mod band Boys Wonder* as support to, well, everyone. Including the time I saw A Certain Ratio one night and The Icicle Works the next. It did make me wonder whether they looked further than “will we get paid?”
Similarly, Dingwalls used to have pre-White Ladder David Gray as house support to everyone. He must have been living round the corner.
(*) They later reformed, with more success, as Acid Jazzers Corduroy.
@Alias
The real signs of a professional act. is one who, when confronted with a miniscule or apathetic audience, pulls out all the stops.
Bands who I’ve seen who did just that include Red Beans and Rice (Manchester Poly in the early 80s) and Mud (Bahrain about five years later).
Fact that I still remember both shows all these years later tells all you need to know
Absolutely. Saw Toploader at a “festival” at a caravan park in Skegness, supporting The Shires & they played as if they were headlining Glastonbury. Really admired them after that.
Okay, my thoughts are:
– Firstly, it’s a storm in a teacup. I don’t really see a “strop” at all; am I missing something? They appear slightly miffed at not getting a bigger response from the crowd, and are jokingly trying to cajole them into being more enthusiastic… but is that really a strop?
– But fair enough, I only watched it once and maybe I’m misreading it.
– So if they ARE in a “strop”, then I think “hell mend them”. I don’t know if that’s a Scottish phrase, but it basically means “on their own heads be it”. They (or their management anyway) booked themselves on the wrong gig at the wrong time for their particular thang, so they should have chalked it down to experience, not had a tantrum about it.
It seems fairly good natured until the end when the singer/bassist throws his instrument and leaves with both middle fingers aloft. If this is an attempt to get the ‘real rock’ people on board after the event, it comes across more Rik from the Young Ones than Lemmy.
Indeed –
“…and the only reason you don’t understand our music is that you don’t like it!”
Hell mend them – excellent, Arthur! Haven’t heard that for a while…
They’re going to the Bad Fire.
Arthur – are you ma maw?
Tee Hee. They get to do it all over again on Friday night at Glastonbury – wonder whether the crowd will be all “aw diddums” and give them pity cheers or take this as an invitation to pile in.
A lot might depend on who the mysterious “Churnups” – the non-existent band billed to go on before them – turn out to be.
There were a lot of “pop” acts on the R1 bill, but then there are a lot at Glasto too…
I’ve seen much bigger bands than Royal Blood become frustrated with a festival crowd. I imagine that some modern bands dislike festivals, as it isn’t ‘your’ audience you’re playing to. In an increasingly fractured cultural landscape, you might’ve had three no.1 albums – but most people won’t have heard of you. Perhaps it’s a chance to win some people round, or it could be a moderately well-paid waste of time.
I wonder what festivals will be like in even ten years? There will always be a handful of massive singers/bands, but enough small and mid-sized groups that still have enough cultural resonance to elicit a mass singalong? I doubt it.
Royal Blood I am aware of, m’lud, but aren’t they the Poundland White Stripes?
Freddy, you win ‘who will make tea meet keyboard?’ of the day.
Here is a clip of their set.
Two observations:
1) They’re pretty meh, and their ‘sound’ doesn’t suit that environment
2) There are plenty of people into it, so play to them and ignore the apathetic
New Afterword T-shirt suggestion:
WHO THE F**K ARE ROYAL BLOOD?
@vulpes-Vulpes
Apathy in the UK
Bed wetting posh boys, who we’ve never heard of but they are obviously crap anyway. Dear oh dear.
I do slightly feel I should defend Royal Blood. My 12 year old likes them and is learning bass guitar just now. So I’m Team Royal Blood.
Loud round of applause. 😁
Indeed – very good. Tell him to stick at it!
When I was first learning bass (about 14/15, I think) things I tried to play along with included Master Builder, most of Yessongs and all of Soft Machine 7. I used to borrow a Jazz bass copy for weeks on end, from a guy at school who had actually wanted a guitar. Didn’t get my own bass until I was – er – 21…
One for Mr Fenton: one of my friends had a dad with a Linn/Nytech/Linn setup. One day, my friend encouraged me to play the bass through it, in order to show me how good the Isobariks were. His dad came back and caught us…but both the speakers and the bold experimenters survived.
You learnt the bass to Soft Machine and Yessongs? At the age of 14?? Hats off!
At a similar age I was learning the 4 notes of Smoke on the water.
Two points:
I’d been playing cello for four or five years, so I knew my way around bass clef and fingering (Mooooose?).
And: this was what I was listening to at the time – so I wanted to be able to play it. It took a while…I wasn’t hearing what I wanted to hear for a long time.
Ah, Linn Isobariks. Kate Bush had a pair, you know.
A LP12/Ekos/Troika/active Naim monoblocks/Isobarik demo in the Linn room at the Bristol hi-fi show had me skiving off from my job in the Arcam room for an afternoon.
“Is it loud enough at the back?”
“Eh?”
I gather that, after I had left, his dad had a complete meltdown on him – not unexpectedly.
However, after he’d calmed down, he wanted to know how it had sounded – and was apparently very pleased that the Isobariks had coped with the stress test!
I think Isobariks would cope with live Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Not so sure about the Nytech, though.
That was the one with the sloping front, wasn’t it?
I had the misfortune to see Royal Blood a couple of years back at Portsmouth’s Victorious Festival. Given that I doubt I am even remotely their demographic, I thought they were unmitigated shite and had no place at ANY festival so far up the bill. Music for sneering teenage boys who probably think pop is for girls. Why does Later hold this band in such esteem, their black sunglasses, tidy stubble touting, primark clad, sixth form battle of the bands fare is a great advert for sticking with music that makes you smile, dance and sing. Congratulations lads, your brand of entitled gracelessness has probably put a load of kids right off going to a “rock” gig ever again.
Aw. A bad day at the office. Do ‘Tiger Feet’, lads! You could put your thumbs in your waistbands and do the walk-step. No? OK.
Hardly worth clicking. I admit I’m spoiled. I saw Primal Scream on the telly at Glastonbury about a decade ago spitting cobra venom at an audience waiting for Kylie Minogue for a good hour before they were eventually booed off.
Mesmerising and totally vile. Great telly.