Little Mix lack the x factor at Osborne House

Tom Jones & Little Mix at Osborne H.. 2014 - Little Mix — Photo credit: Steve Collins

Tom Jones & Little Mix at Osborne House 2014

Saturday 26th to Sunday 27th July 2014
Osborne House, East Cowes, Isle of Wight, PO32 6JX, England MAP
£60 for the weekend, £32.50 Saturday, £42.50 Sunday

Daily capacity: 10,000

Osborne House –holiday home for Queen Victoria (and where she spent most of her remaining years following the death of Prince Albert), has for the last decade been the place to go for those seeking a more civilised music experience on the Isle of Wight. The concerts themselves are held in what was quite literally Queen Victoria’s back garden, with the golden-bricked house creating an impressive backdrop for the evenings events.

Although the music doesn’t start until half 7, the doors open at 4pm, allowing people to have a picnic in the arena before the show starts. For those who don’t wish to take up this opportunity there are however, a few food vans available offering fish and chips, noodles and burgers as an alternative, as well as a bar on site, prices for drinks and food are about where you’d expect for this kind of event, with a pint setting you back £4 and food at around £6 for a meal.

Shane Filan Osborne House 2014

Support for tonight’s headline act came from Shane Filan, the ex-Westlife singer who’s now crafting a solo career for himself. This is Shane’s second appearance at Osborne as Westlife headlined one of the early shows, and despite performing to far smaller crowd than he did then (I would estimate that tonight’s show was only half capacity - something that meant it was easy to get to the front without too much difficulty), he still seemed pleased to be there. Like Westlife, Shane didn’t break any new ground musically, and his solo work follows in Westlife’s steps with big pop anthems and plenty of covers. That said this is not always a bad thing, and in the early evening sun both his and the bands energetic performance managed to drag a sizeable crowd up from their picnic blankets at the back to have a dance and a sing at the front.

Singing and dancing was the focus of the headline act tonight, as Shane left the stage the instruments were cleared away to make space for Little Mix –last time I saw them perform they had a live band with them, albeit relegated to the side of the stage, so I was a little disappointed that they have decided to drop them for this tour. As a thumping drum-and-bass backing track played out a group of male dancers came out waving flags and performing a routine to whip up some excitement ahead of the main act - while there were plenty of screams at the start, after three or four minutes of this there was a noticeable drop as the only appearance of Little Mix at this stage was on the video-wall at the back and some (pre-recorded) vocals.

Little Mix Osborne House 2014

This excitement was quickly renewed when they did come out, dressed in leather dominatrix outfits, which when combined with the rusted, post-apocalyptic stage set gave the whole thing a Mad Max 3 air –I wouldn’t have been surprised if MasterBlaster came out to do battle for Aunty’s pleasure –certainly it would have been more entertaining than Little Mix. While they started out strongly enough, as the show went on there were far too many average tracks, and several occasions they would leave the stage entirely leaving the dancers to themselves. The first time I thought it was for a costume change, but when they came out in the same outfits, I could only conclude that they needed a break from the high energy dances that the show required. Another oddity was that every so often when talking they would lapse into American accents for no reason, as if their own accents were somehow inadequate to express themselves properly.

All told it made for a relatively dull performance, vocally they aren’t that distinct, musically was all backing tracks up so loud it swamped their vocals regularly, and so it all started to run into one after a while. Although we did stick it out to the end, many others didn’t and by the end of the show there were some quite sizeable gaps near the front of the crowd. I was probably not alone in thinking that these two acts were round the wrong way, as Shane definitely had the edge on Little Mix and would have made for a far more memorable evening.

Osborne House 2014