In the age of shortform video supremacy, there has been a great deal of angst about the authentic club music experience being rendered a vapid spectacle. Stop expecting DJs to be social media stars, put your phones away on the dancefloor, close your eyes and lose yourself in the beats, goes the revanchist wisdom.
It’s understandable, but worries about superstar DJs stomping on the face of the pure rave experience are almost 30 years old now. It is decades since the Prodigy, Chemicals, Orbital and Fatboy Slim lit up festival stages and the charts. And anyway, spectacles can be fun – and funny – and so can dance music.
The grounds of Christopher Wren’s Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich – a Unesco World Heritage Site, no less – are an unarguably comical setting for Welsh duo Overmono’s biggest headline gig to date, and brothers Tom and Ed Russell are fit for the part, and the party, celebrating the release of their second album with lasers dancing on the baroque towers and colonnades.
But even with Overmono’s anthemic, big-room sound, their grandstanding rave melodies, skippy drums and sweet, chopped-up garage vocals, translating the intimacy of the club to the big outdoor stage is tricky. The sound is clear as a bell but not quite loud enough, and at times the crowd seem to be hungering for bigger drops: some of the drums are simply too quiet to fully fill the space.
But the Russells are bouncing around merrily on a gorgeous warm evening, and it’s hard to begrudge them the moment, after a speedy rise to the Radio 1 dance mainstream. A few tracks pick the energy up. Freedom 2, their deadly 2023 collaboration with Joy Orbison and driller Kwengface, brings a welcome extra layer of momentum – and some much needed low-end bass rumble.
Another point of difference arrives when they are joined by beat poet John Joseph Holt for new track Knight in Shining Prada, the extra physical stage presence of a frontman helping the driving synths carry further. Their remix of the Streets’ Turn the Page renders it more cinematic and emo than Mike Skinner’s original and likewise lights up the crowd, and leads us into the feelgood finale, their anthem Good Lies, its irresistible chorus bouncing off the Grade I-listed windows.
