Everyone feared this festival would implode, but there’s Alice Cooper waving a boa constrictor on stage
By Will Cox
MUSIC
Pandemonium Festival ★★★★
Caribbean Park, April 20
I’ll get the obvious bits out of the way first. Yes, Pandemonium is an apt name. No, it hasn’t been smooth. After spiralling costs and dwindling ticket sales, many festivals have announced cancellations in recent months – but rather than cancel, Pandemonium dropped half its line-up less than two weeks before the show.
Music fans at the Pandemonium Music Festival in Scoresby on Saturday.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Placebo, Deep Purple, Dead Kennedys, Gang of Four, Gyroscope and Petch were all removed from the bill last week, and a few days later Palaye Royale dropped out too. Communication wasn’t great. The promoters offered only partial refunds, and it was reported on Friday that hundreds who applied for refunds had been the victims of a massive data breach.
But we’re all here, in Caribbean Park in Scoresby. The 7500-strong crowd is rugged up and happy, and everything is smooth. It’s never cramped, the queues are short, and the sound is good. The bands rattle through packed sets without a hitch. There’s an elevated platform for wheelchair users, a little paddock for smokers, and some very good paella.
The lineup isn’t what was expected, but people are making the most of it. Someone watches the footy on their phone in front of me during The Psychedelic Furs.
One punter tells me she really came for Placebo, and she flew her dad in from Wellington for Deep Purple. “It’s OK,” she says. “I’m looking forward to Blondie.” And who isn’t?
Wheatus offered up one of the most memorable moments of the festival.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
The remaining seven acts are puzzle pieces that don’t quite go together. The country rock of Aimee Francis into the raucous pub rock energy of Cosmic Psychos into ’70s hard rock tribute act Wolfmother makes a kind of sense. The violent left turn to Wheatus less so.
Though I’m sure no one is here specifically to see Wheatus, at the end of their energetic yet anonymous pop-rock set, the crowd and the band share a moment together during Teenage Dirtbag.
“This song is reason we still do this,” says a grateful lead singer Brendan B Brown. The audience sing – no, scream – every word for an unhinged, off-key five minutes of joy.
“That one song rocked a thousand times harder than all of Wolfmother,” I overhear an audience member observe, correctly.
The brilliant Psychedelic Furs are smokey, gothic and glittering. If anything, singer Richard Butler’s voice has aged into these graceful songs. Old stuff like Love My Way, Heartbreak Beat, and the perfect Pretty In Pink are the highlights, but Wrong Train from 2020 is great too.
Blondie, fronted by Deborah Harry in a pea-green suit and a massive pair of sunglasses, open with their debut single X Offender, from 1976. Harry is still cool and still beautiful, with a shock of white hair she no longer has to bleach.
Her voice is a little shakier, a little less crystalline, but she is Debbie Harry, and she is punk-rock personified, and I want to be just like her when I’m 78.
She stands hands on hips through One Way Or Another, raps the awkward proto-rap bit of Rapture, and rallies the crowd into The Tide is High, Call Me and Heart of Glass. It’s surreal to think this is the same person who played CBGB in the ’70s. It’s a long way from CBGB to Scoresby.
Debbie Harry of Blondie is punk-rock personified.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Finally, Alice Cooper asserts his dominance by turning the show into a full-on pantomime. In his make-up, frilly shirt and a top hat, and carrying a cutlass, he looks like a swashbuckling Beetlejuice, and his band of hard rockers look like they’re about to be beaten up in a bar by the Terminator.
The set comprises of theatrics befitting truly insane songs including Feed My Frankenstein (“Hungry for love / And it’s lunchtime”) and I Love the Dead. Cooper waves his sword around, then a cane, then a live boa constrictor.
He’s straitjacketed, then he dances with a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette (it’s Alice’s wife Sheryl), who promptly guillotines him before parading his decapitated head around, kissing it.
Alice Cooper turns the show into a full-on pantomime.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
“School’s out forever!” Yeah! It’s hard to believe this caused a moral panic in the 1970s. It’s about as transgressive as The Munsters. But it’s very, very fun.
As Wolfmother’s Andrew Stockdale put it, “Rock and roll ain’t dead yet!” Neither are music festivals. They’re just going through an awkward phase.
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