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Pearl Jam, BST Hyde Park, review: an intimate set from grunge's great survivors – and one very unlikely guest

Born showman: Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam perfoms at Hyde Park - Gareth Cattermole
Born showman: Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam perfoms at Hyde Park - Gareth Cattermole

Presumably, during Wimbledon fortnight, John McEnroe lives beneath the stage at Hyde Park. After he appeared onstage with the Eagles last month, crooning along and playing tambourine to the group’s rendition of Jack Tempchin’s Already Gone, there he was again, on a balmy Friday night in central London, singing his way through Pearl Jam’s hallmark cover version of Neil Young’s Rockin’ In The Free World. (Although McEnroe has no formal association with either band, his fame is clearly sufficient to have warranted a berth on the stage.)

The song followed Alive, the biggest hit from the Seattleites’ blockbusting debut album, the 13-million selling Ten, from 1991. As lead guitarist Mike McCready cranked out its exquisite solo, and as frontman Eddie Vedder bounced around Hyde Park’s vast stage as if it were nothing other than a child’s trampoline, for about five minutes these apparent superstars looked exactly like the kind of group capable of drawing 65,000 people to a Royal park in Central London over the course of two successive nights. Here they were, playing a song that everyone knows, doing the job to which top-tier musicians are born.

Really, though, Pearl Jam are an unusual fit for the vast canvas of Hyde Park. Strolling onstage to the strains of The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love, beneath dwindling sunshine the band yawned into their set with the gentle refrain of opening song Betterman. As Vedder struck up its opening chorus, accompanied only by his own Telecaster guitar, a sea of faces provided backing vocals. “She lies and says she’s in love with him,” they sang. “Can’t find a better man.” For anyone looking for a steer as to the ambiguity that followed over the course of the next 140-minutes, this was hard to beat.

Once upon a time, Pearl Jam kept company with Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, three of four multiplatinum groups from Seattle whose singers died from either drug abuse, suicide, or both. But in surviving the killing fields of the deadly Alternative Nation, this most curious of stadium-fillers might today be thought of as a 21st Century Grateful Dead.

Alongside the flourishes of metal and punk – a well-judged cover of PiL’s somewhat obscure Public Image was a particular highlight – the night’s 22-song set of non-hits and deep-cuts appeared to have been curated by a band oblivious to their own popularity.

Even the set looked as if it had been constructed for a group more at home in theatres or clubs. Never mind the giant screens relaying images all the way to Marble Arch, onstage Pearl Jam performed beneath a lighting rig hung so low that it seemed as if the musicians themselves could have reached up and touched it. The backline was modest enough to have easily fitted inside a trailer attached to the rear of a tour bus. “I remember when we first came to London,” said Vedder in the first of half a dozen informal addresses. “We’d go to Camden and buy bootleg cassette tapes. The Waterboys, Sonic Youth, The Pixies…” Rest assured, you don’t get this kind of chat from Elton John.

But if Pearl Jam are at heart an independent concern who are somehow capable of filling Hyde Park for as many nights as did Adele the previous weekend, in musical terms at least they have the measure of their surroundings. As the pummelling Mind Your Manners caught flight, the sound was of a band who never succumbed to cynicism, or laziness, or else resorted to nostalgia for the purposes of somehow remaining relevant in front of the kind of crowd willing to pay a week’s wages to see them play. Of all the many groups littering London’s unprecedentedly busy summer season, few are as adept as this at making a vast impersonal space appear intimate.

“I will stare the sun down until my eyes go blind,” sang Eddie Vedder towards the end of the evening. As if on cue, Hyde Park obligingly slipped into darkness.


Pearl Jam play Hyde Park tonight, July 9