2023-08-24 11:00:06
Hannah Grae in concert at the Rock en Seine festival in Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine), August 23, 2023. VICTOR PICON
Barely opened, Wednesday, August 23, the barriers for the entrance of the public on the lower part of the National Domain of Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine), site of Rock en Seine, it is the rush. From memory, since its first edition in 2003 – ten groups invited over one day –, we had not seen such an important event. And in just over half an hour, the lawn in front of the big stage is almost a third full. Mostly by teenage girls – when the festival audience is more made up of young adults and thirtysomethings –, determined not to give up a square centimeter of ground to be as close as possible to the star of the evening, the singer, author- American composer Billie Eilish, 21, scheduled for 10 p.m.
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A little over a year ago, on June 22, 2022, the young woman attracted 20,000 people to the Accor Arena in Paris. For Rock en Seine, it’s probably just its name that made people move almost twice as much. For his only summer date in France – apart from his stealthy appearance for three acoustic songs at the Global Citizen event in June.
But before Billie Eilish, six musicians and their groups perform on the big stage or the smaller Firestone stage, at the other end of the premises, for this first day of the festival with an all-female poster. Lucie Antunes opened the day at 5:35 p.m. with her inventive assemblages of musical sources, repetitive Americans, pop, sound explorations of rhythmic and melodic percussion. Nice discovery also of the warm, full voice of the English Mae Stephens, the pop spirit sometimes a little funk of her music. And the Welshwoman Hannah Grae, who goes from urgent punk (Propaganda) to the pop ballad (Jaded), sometimes reminiscent of the American group Blondie.
Law of the show
It’s 10 p.m., ovation, first notes of an instrumental, with some siren effects, a white spotlight, and here is Billie Eilish. She may evoke in certain songs, in interviews, statements, the depression, the worries, the anxieties in the face of the troubles of the world, in particular on ecological questions, the hopes also of the youth, Billie Eilish is far from being sad figure. She smiles a lot, moves all over the stage, with, in its center, a staircase and a projection in the pit, jumps on herself, welcomes with obvious joy the songs of the public who double her on the refrains and verses of many songs.
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With her, her brother Finneas O’Connell – the singer kept her first two first names as her artist name – on keyboards and guitar and drummer Andrew Marshall. The two perform music that uses a lot of rhythmic sequences, an electro without much research, with sometimes breaks in the unfolding, support for several songs in a slightly spoken/sung way. A somewhat monotonous aspect that hardly convinces us.
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