This is the only thing you should watch on TV this weekend
Music! Crowds! Atmosphere! All from the comfort of your own couch ...
“Can we all think about the fact we're alive and breathing right now?” says Billie Eilish.
She’s on stage, microphone in hand, clad in a neon green outfit that makes the teenage pop star look like she’s just been slimed by Mr Blobby on an episode of Noel’s House Party.
Her hair is green, her shoes are green, her shorts and T-shirt are green. Even her fingernails are painted green.
Eilish didn’t say this recently. She delivered this all-too prescient quip at last year’s Austin City Limits music festival during a headlining Friday night set that was dark and crisp and impressively energetic considering the 18-year-old was wearing a moonboot.
The crowd numbered in their tens of thousands and stretched back as far as the horizon. It was 2019, and they were swapping drinks and sweat and plenty of other things in an enclosed space well before ideas like bubbles and masks and social distancing and staying at home and saving lives were a thing.
God damn they were simpler, happier times, weren’t they?
I know Eilish said this not because I was there. I know this because I spent yesterday watching the excellent Austin City Limits 2020 livestream from the comfort of my own couch.
This year, obviously, it’s not live like it normally is. It can’t be. That festival, like almost all American festivals, have been cancelled because of Corony. Instead, the stream is a highlights package of previous performances, designed to keep the ACL brand alive and kicking until it can be held again.
Possibly in 2021, but the way America’s going, probably in 2022. Maybe 2023. Sort your shit out, ‘Merica.
Anyway, the ACL livestream is really good, far better than the extremely average Lollapalooza one I wrote about a while back. The Chicago festival, which I have attended, just played snippets of songs from sets of yesteryear, and it was like watching someone mash through a collection of live YouTube clips. Awful.
ACL is much, much better. Yesterday, I watched a ferocious set from genre-mashers Twenty One Pilots that ended with front man Tyler Joseph climbing the sound tent and screaming into the crowd. I saw Willie Nelson stagger onto stage and, inexplicably, survive another performance. I saw Khalid sing through his impressive catalogue of teenage anthems. A small band called Coldplay performed.
Then there was Billie Eilish, the stream’s headliner who made up for my guilt at not catching her Auckland show last year. She’s brilliant. She should get back down here soon.
Best of all, it’s all happening again today with a line-up featuring LCD Soundsystem, Radiohead, St Vincent, Sylvan Esso and Queens of the Stone Age.
Sure, the All Blacks are playing someone or other around 4pm, but if you watch that you’ll miss out on a brand new set recorded recently just for ACL by Run the Jewels.
I know where I’ll be ….
The Austin City Limits livestream kicks off around 1pm (NZT) and runs until about 7pm. You can stream it in the video player window below: