I’ve been to a lot of gigs recently but I’ve not seen good old fashioned Rock and Roll histrionics like I was treated to at The Luna Park, Big Top – appropriately a Circus venue. The Cult were half an hour late on stage. When you pay more than $100 on a school night, that doesn’t go down very well. If he was at his creative cutting edge I think people would have been more patient – but lets face it, he’s not.
The first track of the gig was testy. They started dramatically with the opening chords of “Nirvana” but within only as few minutes Astbury had kicked over a speaker and marched off the stage in a strop – flicking back his locks of thick black hair. The band – no doubt used to this kind of behaviour, stoically played on, Titanic-esque. This situation got more surreal as the track hit another verse, and the obvious vocals the crowd were singing went without vocals on stage, because there was no vocalist! He returned soon before the track was out, and seemed to apologise to his team- but not to the crowd.
Ian Astbury is not the man he was. He’s now a fairly portly chap – a reality that hits us all in middle age of course. At 47, he actually made a point to address media mention of his wider-than-normal girth, blaming it on a recent hip operation. Not sure why he felt the need to bring this up, I expect someone who was recording in the eighties to be slightly shabbier version of his former self today. Nonetheless, his personality dominated the event from start to finish. He even at one point hinted at his well-known Jim Morrison delusions by breaking into lines from The End: “the killer awoke before dawn and put his boots on...” Then he remembered who he was and returned to his own material. Later on he asked the crowd how many of them were Christians before playing The Hollow Man. “This one’s NOT for you” he said. Despite a good number of hands going up, everyone still rocked, without exception, as Devil-worship imagery played behind him.
The crowd were clearly split between Love people and Electric people. I am a died-in-the-wool Love person and know it back to front, but I don’t think much more than half the crowd were. This clearly frustrated Astbury at one point and he even castigated the audience when he left the vocals out for a chorus for the crowd to fill in – without much success: “You don’t even know the words” he shouted grumpily. The tempo rose considerably however for Ethe Electric material – the joint jumped!
So all the histrionics aside, it was a terrific gig. The Mosh pit was livelier than any I’ve seen in Sydney this year. There was more violence as Astbury threw several tambourines into the crowd. One guy behind me successfully caught one but was beaten off it insistently by a very large gentleman with no neck. From then on the latter continued to wind up the former by shaking it in his face. I imagine that took the edge off his night.
One thought did blow my mind as I listened to these old tracks I’d enjoyed throughout my adolescence: we were able to broadcast instantaneously to thousands of people at the click of a button video, audio, text and images from this gig using a location-intelligent wallet-sized device affordably available to most. We can do this using GPS Satellite technology, 3G mobile networks and of course the internet – all technologies I couldn’t even dream of when these songs were first cut. More has changed than the circumference of Mr Astbury's girth.
UPDATE: some great video of the night from as close as I was, a bit more central perhaps. A good sense of the mosh pit from here: