Everyone feared this festival would implode, but there’s Alice Cooper waving a boa constrictor on stage

2 weeks ago 14

MUSIC
Pandemonium Festival ★★★★
Caribbean Park, April 20

I’ll get the evident bits retired of the mode first. Yes, Pandemonium is an apt name. No, it hasn’t been smooth. After spiralling costs and dwindling summons sales, many festivals person announced cancellations successful caller months – but alternatively than cancel, Pandemonium dropped fractional its line-up little than 2 weeks earlier the show.

Music fans astatine the Pandemonium Music Festival successful Scoresby connected Saturday.

Placebo, Deep Purple, Dead Kennedys, Gang of Four, Gyroscope and Petch were each removed from the measure past week, and a fewer days aboriginal Palaye Royale dropped retired too. Communication wasn’t great. The promoters offered lone partial refunds, and it was reported connected Friday that hundreds who applied for refunds had been the victims of a monolithic information breach.

But we’re each here, successful Caribbean Park successful Scoresby. The 7500-strong assemblage is rugged up and happy, and everything is smooth. It’s ne'er cramped, the queues are short, and the dependable is good. The bands rattle done packed sets without a hitch. There’s an elevated level for wheelchair users, a small paddock for smokers, and immoderate precise bully paella.

The lineup isn’t what was expected, but radical are making the astir of it. Someone watches the footy connected their telephone successful beforehand of maine during The Psychedelic Furs.

One punter tells maine she truly came for Placebo, and she flew her dada successful from Wellington for Deep Purple. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m looking guardant to Blondie.” And who isn’t?

Wheatus offered up 1 of the astir memorable moments of the festival.

The remaining 7 acts are puzzle pieces that don’t rather spell together. The state stone of Aimee Francis into the raucous pub stone vigor of Cosmic Psychos into ’70s hard stone tribute enactment Wolfmother makes a benignant of sense. The convulsive near crook to Wheatus little so.

Though I’m definite nary 1 is present specifically to spot Wheatus, astatine the extremity of their energetic yet anonymous pop-rock set, the assemblage and the set stock a infinitesimal unneurotic during Teenage Dirtbag.

“This opus is crushed we inactive bash this,” says a grateful pb vocalist Brendan B Brown. The assemblage sing – no, shriek – each connection for an unhinged, off-key 5 minutes of joy.

“That 1 opus rocked a 1000 times harder than each of Wolfmother,” I overhear an assemblage subordinate observe, correctly.

The superb Psychedelic Furs are smokey, gothic and glittering. If anything, vocalist Richard Butler’s dependable has aged into these graceful songs. Old worldly similar Love My Way, Heartbreak Beat, and the perfect Pretty In Pink are the highlights, but Wrong Train from 2020 is large too.

Blondie, fronted by Deborah Harry successful a pea-green suit and a monolithic brace of sunglasses, unfastened with their debut single X Offender, from 1976. Harry is inactive chill and inactive beautiful, with a daze of achromatic hairsbreadth she nary longer has to bleach.

Her dependable is simply a small shakier, a small little crystalline, but she is Debbie Harry, and she is punk-rock personified, and I privation to beryllium conscionable similar her erstwhile I’m 78.

She stands hands connected hips through One Way Or Another, raps the awkward proto-rap spot of Rapture, and rallies the assemblage into The Tide is High, Call Me and Heart of Glass. It’s surreal to deliberation this is the aforesaid idiosyncratic who played CBGB successful the ’70s. It’s a agelong mode from CBGB to Scoresby.

Alice Cooper turns the amusement into a full-on pantomime.

Finally, Alice Cooper asserts his dominance by turning the amusement into a full-on pantomime. In his make-up, frilly garment and a apical hat, and carrying a cutlass, helium looks similar a swashbuckling Beetlejuice, and his set of hard rockers look similar they’re astir to beryllium beaten up successful a barroom by the Terminator.

The acceptable comprises of theatrics befitting genuinely insane songs including Feed My Frankenstein (“Hungry for emotion / And it’s lunchtime”) and I Love the Dead. Cooper waves his sword around, past a cane, past a unrecorded boa constrictor.

He’s straitjacketed, past helium dances with a pistillate dressed arsenic Marie Antoinette (it’s Alice’s woman Sheryl), who promptly guillotines him earlier parading his decapitated caput around, kissing it.

Alice Cooper’s acceptable comprises of theatrics befitting genuinely insane songs.

“School’s retired forever!” Yeah! It’s hard to judge this caused a motivation panic successful the 1970s. It’s astir arsenic transgressive arsenic The Munsters. But it’s very, precise fun.

As Wolfmother’s Andrew Stockdale enactment it, “Rock and rotation ain’t dormant yet!” Neither are euphony festivals. They’re conscionable going done an awkward phase.

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