The Festival:

Today 16 HP plays the biggest festival of France in Carhaix, Brittany. For the 1st time ever, the festival is sold out for its 3 days : more than 150 000 tickets sold!!! Just as much as last year in 6 days! 16 HP will be the first band playing the main stage today at 3:30 PM, before M (huge in France), Joe Cocker and Louise Attaque. On the second stage other bands such as Day One will play that same day.

Before the show:

According to my contact in the organization, the show will last 50 minutes. I hope I won't be late as my train arrives at 2:45 PM, and I must walk to the site, take my pass and walk to the stage... In that same train, I read in a newspaper that there are rumors that Bertrand Cantat could sing with 16HP! I begin chilling, even though I don't believe in it... Of course, my train is 30 minutes late, it rains and I have to run, hoping I won't miss half of the show! :-( Moreover many people are waiting at the press stand. 3:30: I have my pass and run to the backstage area, hoping that I will be able to take pictures right in front of the stage. Of course, the person gave me the wrong pass and I can't... I run to the front of the stage, and face Pascal, but from the audience. At least I reached the first row. Meanwhile, the rain stopped and 16HP started to play Splinters.

As you can see, the setlists are pretty much the same at each concert, but they change at each festival.

As the show begins, I can see that there are already many people to see 16HP play. I would say something like 30 000 people at least. The crowd remains quite calm at the beginning, and very few people seem to know the songs... But as the show goes on, they obviously begin to enjoy the music (which is great news, by the way). First proof is that the crowd began clapping along a little bit during Praying Arm Lane. Same on several songs after, with a greater following each time: Harm's Way, Black Soul Choir, American Wheeze and Strawfoot had the best following on this aspect. Second is the amazing number of persons jumping and slamming during For Heaven's Sake and Clogger. And last but not least, everybody really screamed to have an encore... that we unfortunately didn't get :-(. But a good consolation was that the show lasted 60 minutes instead of 50 :-). I think that festival was really a success for 16 HP, and I hope it will help them sell a bit more CDs here...

My perception of the show:

Even though I was a bit disappointed not being able to take pictures from closer by, I must say that it was a really great show. It sounded very different from Le Plan yesterday, which is kind of normal if you consider that the audience was a 100 times larger and that it was in the open air. The sound was pretty good (except that Steve's guitar wasn't loud enough sometimes), particularly the drums. The band was facing the sun so they all came with sunglasses, that they took off after a while as some clouds appeared. I was standing just in front of one hundred speakers (or even more), and it felt just great! Especially on that - again - great Poor Mouth finish. Whaouh! I couldn't believe it could have been even stronger than yesterday :-). Harm's Way and American Wheeze were also very nice to hear. Nice surprise also was to see that the band didn't quit the stage after For Heaven's Sake, which is usually their last song. Moreover I watched the clock at the beginning of the song and saw they had already been playing for more than 45 minutes, so that really was a nice surprise! :-) The music didn't change that much since yesterday on most songs. Except that DEE made a wonderful "a la Calexico" intro on Poor Mouth, and the transition with the "classic" song was really good, so that might be the best version of the song I've ever heard. :-) Oh, I was going to forget: of course Bertrand Cantat didn't appear on stage, but I have no regret about that... During the show, I even forgot that he could possibly sing.

By Arnaud.

A review by the Bretagne Online, a French e-magazine.