Bastille have about as much in common with Craig David as chalk does with cheese. Yet the band were joined by the resurgent R’n’B star at last night’s Apple Music Festival in a collaboration that was as brilliant as it was bizarre.
David took the stage late on to sing a medley of songs including a reworking of his own Fill Me In, complete with spine-tinglingly good singing and toe-curlingly bad rapping.
To re-e-wind for a second, this was first and foremost Bastille’s night. With their second album, Wild World, topping the charts this month, Dan Smith and co are now a huge draw in their own right. Like Coldplay, Bastille specialise in catch-all choruses and worry-wart lyrics. And, like Coldplay, they have their share of detractors keen to point out that there’s nothing particularly edgy or original about the above. But while boundaries remained unbroken, their 90-minute set had more hooks than a pirate convention.
Good Grief, a song about a funeral, had a chorus to wake the dead; Send Them Off! was a horn-heavy hit-in-waiting; Two Evils proved Bastille can also do stripped-down and subtle.
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If the lyrics don’t always hold up to much scrutiny (The Currents, a rally cry against the Trumps and Farages of this world, can muster only: “I can’t believe the scary points you make”), the tunes stick like Teflon.
When Pompeii erupted, you feared for the Roundhouse’s foundations, such was the level of the pogoing. The celebrations will get even bigger when Bastille headline the O2 in November. On the basis of last night, it’s set to be a storming show — whether Craig turns up or not.
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