Up to your ankles in abnormally sticky mud, it's tough looking ghetto fabulous when you have binliners wrapped around your shoes. This, though, is the most popular fashion statement at Jam In The Park, where the previous day's torrential rain and shaggy herd of Neil Young fans have turned Finsbury Park into a treacherous marsh.
Only those onstage are safe, like lithe rapper Eve. Her main problem, today, is avoiding her blokeish, bumbling MCs from the Ruff Ryders squad, as well as the six amusingly disorganised dancers who keep swanning past her. There are brittle marching beats, faintly Latino riffs and Eve, fine and declamatory and on anti-domestic violence showstopper 'Love Is Blind', even poignant.
K-Ci And Jojo, meanwhile, would be improved by a quick dip in the mud. Epic in their uselessness, the duo are still stuck on the hyperventilating bump'n'grind of swingbeat balladry they patented a decade ago. As a pantomime of male sexuality, their posing is briefly hilarious, but their best song is ostensibly an advert for their Jodeci reunion tour next year. Like holding your head in a bucket of syrup for an hour, really.
Last night Neil Young decorated this stage with a shoddy pirate flag and the odd candle. Tonight, Destiny's Child have installed a mirrored staircase, some tame fireworks, an MTV camera crew and a squadron of dancers. Given extravagant expectations, it all seems relatively understated. It's strange, in fact, to discover that these cyber-Amazons, these perfect video products, exist in three dimensions. As they clatter about to the opening 'Independent Women', it's the prospect of fallibility that's most fascinating; that they're not quite bulletproof after all.
Which isn't to say that they aren't slick, just not quite as inhuman as we'd expected. Nevertheless, those stabbing, intricate rhythm'n'baroque hits ('Survivor', 'Bug-A-Boo', an astonishing 'Bills Bills Bills', 'Jumpin' Jumpin'' enlivened further by a snatch of 'Get Ur Freak On') sound every bit as impressive live. There's something refreshing, too, about the brutal acquisitiveness, the greed so openly expressed by them in these songs. An honesty, of sorts, which an older generation of R&B performers (like K-Ci And Jojo) try to disguise so crudely with sentiment.
But then Beyonce, Kellie and Michelle troop off to change their costumes and, depressingly, return to reveal that beneath the attractive layers of cynicism, there beats three hearts of pure schmaltz. Hence stool-based dribbles through The Commodores' 'Sail On' and The Bee Gees' 'Emotions' and a grisly a capella gospel shouting match. Beyonce takes some time to share her sales figures with us. Kellie inroduces Beyonce as, "A phenomenal woman, she's beautiful on the inside as well as out. She's so multi-talented and she loves you all very much," thus staving off the sack for a while longer.
And it's then you realise Destiny's Child's radicalism is an accident of time and fashion. That the stunning staccato hits, the calculated fury, is something to mark time with until Beyonce is a respectable age to belt out the big ballads non-stop. It's a brief golden age of pop that's produced a band like this - one worth savouring now, before the edge becomes rotted away by saccharine completely.
