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Posted: 2024-04-21 01:55:49

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“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.

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.

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.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it every Friday.

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