This new one-day event is an attempt to import California’s four-year-old Cruel World festival to the UK, and as the parent US event is a devotedly Anglophile affair featuring almost exclusively original British post-punk and goth bands, the promoters could feasibly have called this offshoot Coals to Newcastle.
The early 80s were, indeed, an incredibly fertile time in British music, and it could be depressing to see so many of its prime movers recalibrated as nostalgia turns. Yet the bill is such a stylistic mixed bag that it’s hard to draw many conclusions besides the simple truth that some have aged a lot better than others.
Manchester’s ultimate cult band the Chameleons’ gnarled angst and integrity remains intact, particularly on the mesmeric paranoia of Soul In Isolation. So does the doomed glamour and brittle cool of the Bowie-indebted Psychedelic Furs, with suave showman singer Richard Butler increasingly resembling a louche rock’n’roll Peter O’Toole.
“If this is shit, it’s your fucking fault!” declares the mohawk-sporting John Lydon, clad in a clown-like oversize blue checked jacket, as he arrives to begin Public Image Ltd’s set. He reconsiders, and concedes that at least a little of the blame may be his: “My voice is a bit squeaky because I’ve been on a three-week bender … in 12 hours.”
Thankfully, PiL are not shit. Lydon’s attitudinal irony hangs from every note and word yet their throbbing dub excavations are thrilling, especially on a surprise revisit of Open Up, Lydon’s 1993 club collaboration with Leftfield. He quits the stage with a sneered swipe at absent ex-friends: “I apologise for nothing … except the karaoke Sex Pistols!”
The amiable Johnny Marr appears to be on a mission to refocus minds on the beauty of Smiths songs such as Panic, This Charming Man and How Soon Is Now? rather than on Morrissey’s current toxicity. Billy Idol is equally keen to restress his status as a punk-pop cartoon, spinning Frisbees into the crowd during a comedic new anthem, Too Much Fun.
Technical issues bedevil the second stage. Happy Mondays have to cut their set short – mercifully so, on this wretched form – and the Damned and the Jesus and Mary Chain are also curtailed, with the latter’s singer Jim Reid’s earnest apology – “Sorry it was so short!” – ironic for a band who, in their earliest days, regularly delivered 15-minute sets.
The The tellingly open their set with Sweet Bird of Truth, their 1986 song about American bombing raids on the Middle East. Armageddon Days Are Here (Again) is infused with a similar doom-laden topicality, but the crowd notably warm far more to the sweet synth-pop alchemy of their early hymns to adolescence, This is The Day and Uncertain Smile.
Everybody else is running late but Kraftwerk inevitably line up behind their four onstage keyboards at the exact second they are due. Electronic music’s ultimate pioneers, they deliver music that sounds as sacred as school hymns: from Autobahn to The Model, they spiel out exquisite techno-symphonies, with peerless melodies to die for, in front of incredible 3D visuals. Playing songs close on half a century old, while headlining a retro festival, they don’t sound remotely dated: forever now indeed.
