There may be more dignified ways for a 46-year-old Frenchman, recently divorced after a 22-year marriage, than playing some records for people mostly young enough to be his children. For David Guetta, king of the worldwide DJ circuit, it's a living which has made him the multi-million fortune he is currently squabbling with his former wife over.
Last night, he was 30 minutes late in bringing his DJ set to a smaller venue than his usual arena but he made the evening big. With his set played via memory stick and there being nothing so old-fashioned as records to trouble him, the mystery of what Guetta does behind his console, beyond gurning, fiddling with his headphones and straightening already straight hair, remained unsolved.
But he did turn the volume up or down occasionally and offer some wedding DJ patter: “How you guys feelin’ tonight?”
However, the son of a professor and a psychologist is a showman. There were lasers, confetti, explosions and bunting. The ecstatic crowd, admirably untroubled by spurious notions of authenticity, understood how genuine the thrills generated by Guetta were. They danced to his hits Without You, the recent chart topper Summer on the Sun and the grandstanding Titanium. They whooped and hollered the riff to The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army and the chorus to Oasis’s Wonderwall. They allowed Guetta to dictate the night’s mood: he repaid them many times over.
Before that, Clean Bandit were an endearingly bonkers cacophony of steel drums, classical inflections, soaring pop, walloping beats, disco and, on Nightingale, bird song.
This summer’s standout anthem, Rather Be, remains their finest moment but the three impossibly scruffy men and three impossibly glamorous women covered Robin S’s Show Me Love, sang about listening to Rihanna on the appropriately titled Rihanna, and traded lines like Broadway veterans on Extraordinary. If this 21st-century Ace of Base end up one-song wonders, it won’t be for any lack of ideas.
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