Monday 29/05/07 Evolution Festival @ Newcastle/Gateshead Quayside

It's an overcast and drizzly Bank Holiday Monday and Gigwise finds itself attempting to straddle the divide between Newcastle and Gateshead like a particularly wide-hipped colossus.   Freevolution, the climax to Newcastle-Gateshead's week-long Evolution festival, sees a startling array of bands camped out on either side of the Tyne and attempting to rock and rave the Millennium Bridge off its tilting hinges.

We take our chances with the ravers for the start of proceedings and while electro-pop duo To My Boy prove an interesting enough flirtation to distract from the seemingly inevitable watery onslaught, it's not until the rebellious baile-funk of Bonde Do Role that the party really gets started.  Putting on a show that, despite the array of tweenies taking up the front rows, involves a veritable porn-ucopia of simulated microphone sex by MC Marina, the Role whip Gateshead into a barely believable frenzy of bemused excitement.

We leg it to the other stage just in time to catch Kano spectacularly balls up his set in a cacophony of false starts and racial epithets to an irredeemably white crowd intent on aping his crotch grabbing, arm bobbing ghetto antics with disturbing and baffling gusto.   Gigwise leaves disappointed it would have been better if Kano was a heavy rock band named after the psychotic leader of Bad Company in Brett Ewins' classic 2000AD strip rather than a third rate Lethal Bizzle.  Hot Club De Paris fare better, even with a slightly odd barbershop acapella number and a worryingly samey set, but are primarily responsible for instigating a debate around whether pronouncing it Par-ee is "a bit too gay". Gigwise, you'll be please to know, is suitably relaxed about his sexuality to have no truck with that particular argument.