When you're talking about a music festival whose inaugural event was literally wiped out by a typhoon, it can feel a bit petty to complain about the weather. All the same, campers arriving at Fuji Rock Festival in Naeba on Thursday last week might have hoped for a warmer welcome than the torrential downpour that greeted them. Though things improved as the weekend went on, the rain still managed to put a dampener on the proceedings, and might explain the muted reception afforded to some of the festival's biggest acts.
This was no truer than for Roxy Music, whose headlining slot on Saturday was a soggy affair in every sense. The group were an awkward fit from the start, and their high-end lounge band schtick, informed more by the slick pop of final album "Avalon" than their art-rock roots, did little to engage a scattered and bedraggled crowd. After an interminable string of torch songs and soprano saxophone solos, they finally wheeled out the hits — "Virginia Plain," "Love is the Drug," "Do the Strand," et al. — but few people had stuck around to hear them.
John Fogerty seemed equally out of place on the bill: The former Creedence Clearwater Revival mainstay was playing in Japan for the first time in 38 years, which was a good decade or so before most of the people at the festival were even born. But as he hurtled through a set that crammed more than 20 Southern rock classics into just over an hour, it quickly became clear that this was going to be one of the highlights of the weekend. As the final chords of "Proud Mary" rang out, a few thousand new converts fired off text messages home to admit that not all of the music in their parents' record collections was rubbish.