More Westfest – Mt Smart Stadium – 4 March 2015

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Tuesday afternoon is an odd time for a rock festival. Judas Priest’s closing number — I only caught the end of it; I had to work all day — might have better been titled Rockin’ Before Teatime. Theirs is not music that wants to be performed in daylight. As soon as Judas Priest left the main stage, Faith No More’s road crew, dressed in white outfits that would suited a kundalini yoga class better than a heavy metal concert, put white slipcovers on amplifiers and speaker stacks, and floral arrangements across the top of the backline and along the front of the stage; all the while, the PA played selections from Henry Mancini.

Faith No More took the stage dressed in the same white as their crew. They opened with the infelicitously-titled Motherfucker, sung by the equally unfortunately-named keyboard player Roddy Bottum. Next up was Caffeine, vocals now the job of regular singer Mike Patton. Patton looked distressingly like Ricky Gervais; I left for the Ding Dong Lounge Stage.

Band selections for the evening were largely the responsibility of my daughter, who was similarly unimpressed with Faith No More. That, then, is why I found myself in a large steel-and-vinyl barn adjacent to the stadium. We got there in time to hear Papa Roach wrap up their set; singer Jacoby Shaddix was extensively, but not terribly creatively, sweary.

But we weren’t there for Papa Roach; Daughter had persuaded me that All Time Low would be worth a look. I started to question her judgment a little — an American four-piece usually described as “pop-punk,” as though that label might be meaningful, they played a forty-five minute set that was extremely well-received by the largely female, largely teenage crowd, but there was little in their music that was especially original, or inventive. What they played, they played well, but it was a touch derivative. Damned If I Do Ya was typical of their set — big vocals over chugging guitar accompaniments, it wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the soundtrack of an American Pie-style late 1990s American college-boy comedy, solidly but uninspiredly melodic.

Weightless was an welcome change of pace, singer Alex Gaskarth actually playing the guitar he had slung around his neck for much of the show, rather than simply having the occasional quick strum, and showing himself, in the process, to be quite a competent player. Stella showed a bit more promise, opening with a glam-rock beat from drummer Rian Dawson, but the highpoint of the show came during Time Bomb. After teasing a line or two of Golddigger, by one of Kim Kardashian’s husbands, Gaskarth invited about half a dozen girls from the audience onto the stage, and a couple of lads, to take backing-vocal duties. The girls had names like Yasmine and Imogen; they sang and danced like this was the moment their entire lives had been building up to. One of them — Imogen, perhaps — sang almost in tune into the microphone; Jack Barakat put his guitar round, possibly, Yasmine’s neck and fingered chord shapes as she strummed the string. The whole thing could have been awkward and slightly creepy; in practice, it was a surprisingly endearing moment of audience engagement which went some way toward redeeming Barakat and Gaskarth’s cringingly painful attempts at witty banter which rarely went beyond repeated teenage-boy sniggers about blowjobs.

Daughter’s musical choices now in question, we waited for Fall Out Boy to arrive. They came onstage at about 9:50, leaving less than an hour before the official curfew for the Ding Dong Lounge Stage. A spoken intro, and then Fall Out Boy arrived on stage. On paper, they’re a similar band to All Time Low — a teen-friendly American four-piece rock band. But from the moment they opened with Phoenix, it was clear that they were of a different calibre. There was an intensity, an emphatic urgency, to their performance that was hard to deny in the song, one of the high-points of the show and a showcase for the vocals of Patrick Stump. Fall Out Boy simply performed music of significantly more maturity than the act that preceded them. Irresistible was introduced by bass player and lyricist Pete Wentz with the old story of a frog persuaded to carry a scorpion across a river.

Perhaps the stand-out song of the evening was I Don’t Care, kicked off with a full-on glitterbeat by Andy Hurley on drums, wearing what appeared at first to be a questionable paisley shirt but turned out to be quite elaborate tattoos. Glam-rock guitars, and the riff, the bastard child of T-Rex and the heavy rockers over on the main stage, was a glorious groove. The show continued for about an hour; the Ding Dong Lounge Stage was perhaps half-full, the crowd, mostly female again, thinning out long before it reached the mixing desk. Stump’s vocals were indistinct, but it mattered little — the audience sang along joyfully to every song. When Wentz announced that the band would skip the leaving-the-stage routine and simply push on into the encore “to get a couple extra songs in and beat curfew,” he made a lot of young ladies very happy, and the band played American Beauty/American Psycho to close the evening out.

Daughter’s taste in music, then, was redeemed. I’m not likely to become a huge fan of either Fall Out Boy or All Time Low any time soon, but, on the strength of what I saw last night, I can, at the very least, start to see what the fuss about Fall Out Boy was all about. While I don’t care for their style especially — I want guitar lines that stand alone musically, and don’t just serve to accompany and support the vocal melody — I know a tight, talented, polished band when I hear one, and that’s exactly what Daughter introduced me to last night.

Steve McCabe

Setlists

All Time Low
Lost In Stereo
Stella
Feels Like War
Damned If I Do Ya
The Irony Of Choking On A Lifesaver
Weightless
Golddigger
Something’s Got To Give
Reckless And The Brave
Dear Maria, Count Me In

Fall Out Boy
Phoenix
Irresistible
Centuries
My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark
Uma Thurman
I Don’t Care
Dance Dance
This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race
Thnks fr th Mmrs
American Beauty/ American Psycho
Sugar We’re Goin’ Down

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