Located a half hour drive north of downtown San Diego, the Del Mar Fairgrounds – a horse racing track and attendant environs – are given over every June to the San Diego County Fair. A cross between Glastonbury and the Royal Agricultural Show, the Fair's marquees house prize cattle and a petting zoo while a funfair sits at one end of the site, and a bewildering array of calorifically terrifying edibles are on sale at all points in between.
Musicians have a peripheral role. Small stages are scattered between the halls, marquees and booths, and some acts manage a decent audience of the foot-weary and the otherwise not entirely enthusiastic, encouraged to wile a while in front of them by the plentiful seating. The only stage of any size is located opposite the race course grand stand, and it's here that the Fair's bigger names play, one per day.
Last week, Neil Sedaka was here, and tomorrow it's the turn of Ozomatli, all freebie extras for anyone who's stumped up the twelve bucks required to get in to the grounds.
Clearly this is a show Maroon 5 must have booked some time ago. "Songs About Jane", their debut album, has famously sold over a million copies in the US and spent over a year in the album chart on the back of the band's never-ending gigging, so they could hardly cancel just because they're too big to be here. But too big they are: extra security have had to be drafted in, and a video screen relays the action on stage for
an entire adjacent grandstand's worth of punters who would otherwise be craning their necks for the merest glimpse of the band.
And it's easy to see why. Not only are the "Songs About Jane" tracks ones that come into their own live, Maroon 5 are a band who come across best in front of an audience. Adam Levine seems genuinely touched by the massed ranks of faces seated in the grandstand and standing on the racetrack apron in front of the stage.
The majority female crowd squeal with delight when he removes his white cardigan top, but when he sings the U2-styled, and U2-sized new single "She Will Be Loved", it's clear it's not just his male model looks and physique that count: it's as if he's singing this song of determined love for "the girl with the broken smile" to each and every one of them.
