Dubai Music Festival: Desert storm

Dubai is bling city: it has the world's tallest building (the Burj Dubai), the largest shopping mall, and the most ludicrously OTT shoreline developments (including three palm-shaped arrangements of islands and another in the shape of the world itself).

Everywhere you look there's a price-tag-is-everything attitude. One Chrysler Building? Pah – there are two look-alikes going up next to each other. Its new airport will be bigger than Cardiff. Not Cardiff airport – Cardiff. And then there's the huge indoor ski-slope with real snow, the enormous baroque-cum-neoclassical waterfront project... It seems a developer only has to want to build something even more outlandish than the last for it to become reality in next to no time.

And culture is what Dubai wants now. Earlier this year, Iron Maiden played the rock festival, and now the poppier Desert Rhythm Festival has hit town after expanding from last year's single day to two days of pop. It took place over the weekend in a shallow grassy bowl in front of the lake by the CNN, Reuters, and Middle East Broadcasting buildings of Dubai's Media Centre. The location was forced upon the organisers when last year's out-of-town venue was sold to developers at late notice. But if the reason was typical of Dubai's pell-mell development, then its effect has been to locate the now annual festival somewhere that could not be more apt.

Talking of apt, the headliner of the first night amid the navigation light-winking skyscrapers was Kanye West, a man whose band mostly comprised a 13-piece string and horn section featuring fabulously attractive women, in gorgeous silver gowns, who sawed and blew away even when the music had no apparent string or horn component. The harpist was a particularly forlorn figure, only occasionally called upon to pluck a few chords, but perched high and looking impossibly alluring: she was so Dubai.

Musical bling aside, West was tremendous. In a black suit that flashed red lining as he pumped and punched and flailed, his huge gold teddy-bear pendant the brightest thing on the outdoor stage, he certainly wasn't in town just to make up the numbers – whether on the concert's bill or his own. His one-and-a-half-hour set in the 26C heat of late evening was a masterpiece of pacing. The pounding first two-thirds were irresistibly epic, string-laden, even gothic: "Touch the Sky", "Diamonds", and "Gold Digger" all overwhelming. "What do you want?" he demanded during "Gold Digger", and the crowd, in their Gucci, Chanel, and Moschino finery, screamed back, as one, "We want greenbacks!" Boomtown, you soon discover, is an irony-free zone.

Around the hour mark he became quiet and personal. "Everything I'm not, made everything I am," he intoned, building through references to the locality ("I'm living the Dubai-type dream") to a show-stopping climax of "I'm the MAN!". Except that the show didn't stop: he returned, in a neon-seamed jacket, for a crunching "Stronger".

Earlier in the day, Ziggy Marley had ignored local organisers' requests not to sing "Shalom" in a set whose high points were jolly readings of his father's hits, and Madness had put in a tired but expat-pleasing greatest-hits set. Both were entertaining, but as much in the shadow of past glories as of the surrounding cluster of vertiginous concrete, and neither seemed to belong here anyway: Marley because the lack of any odour of ganja during his set was overpowering (a sign at the airport announces that possession of drugs is punishable by death), and Madness because they sing of English rain and domesticity.

After a performance by the Euro-Iranian Arash, Joss Stone began the business end of day two. The first half of her set was mostly drawn from her latest album, Introducing Joss Stone, a series of unconvincing, smooth, slick and indulgent tunes, in which her top-notch band, with its former James Brown sidemen, barely got out of first gear. The most toe-curling moment was when she announced, in a voice wobbling unsurely back and forth across the Atlantic, that she had finally found her true love, and it was music. Pass the D&G sickbag...

Stone asked if Dubai was digging her, and the 15,000 privileged locals and expats in attendance sounded a little unsure. Dubai doesn't buy in huge acts to watch them pass through the moments of self-discovery that the 20-year-old Stone is patently experiencing, after the first flush of her success. No: Dubai wants what it can afford, and it can afford the very best.

Stone belatedly complied. With perhaps unconscious candour, she said: "I want to tell you something real and honest," and found some passion as she delivered "You Had Me", her signature tirade against an old boyfriend. The band found fire as she did, with Eric Baker's fatback guitar particularly hot. The penultimate "Tell Me About It" was a tour de force, where each band member took stunning solos. By the time Stone finished with a breathlessly soulful "Leave Me Alone", no one was happy to acquiesce. It was just a shame that it took her so long in the set to free herself and, especially, her wonderful band.

Aside from showing off their latest luxury-brand togs, it was plain that the audience was mainly there for the teenybop sensation Mika. He is almost the exact antithesis of West – white where the latter is black, light where West is dark, and bright and trebly where the rapper is low and throbbing. Mika's nuclear falsetto not only thrilled the crowd but also threatened to knock out the swathes of plate glass in the surrounding towers. As he bounced around the stage, clad in dental white, he was like a kids' TV presenter on a diet of industrial-strength E-numbers. Hyperactive toddlers must gaze upon him in awe.

His songs are pure Eurovision with candy-stripes through them of Freddie Mercury, Robbie Williams and Elton John. He did the hit album Life in Cartoon Motion, of course, with a couple of new songs, and the crowd – of all ages, it must be said, but chiefly in their teens and early twenties – absolutely adored it, even helping him out of a little local difficulty by singing the last word of the line, "Billy Brown fell in love with a... man!"

He and his band encored – in furry animal costumes, no less – with "Lollipop", and balloons, glitter and streamers cascaded into the cheering, dancing, mass as their squeaky hero bounced out of view in his now off-the-shoulder alligator get-up.

Dubai is the biggest, boldest, brashest upstart place in the world, and Mika was made for both for it and its unashamedly exhibitionist inhabitants.