Sonisphere 2010 – Friday
Knebworth House, Knebworth
30 July 2010

There are far worse ways to begin a festival weekend than in the company of booze addled Vikings. As such, Turisas’s set on Sonisphere UK’s Saturn (second) stage gets us, and the majority of the assembled crowd, into the party spirit, ‘One More’ both a harbinger of sore heads to come and a call to imbibe, while ‘To Holmgard And Beyond,’ ‘Battle Metal’ et al are great to behold, with the latter proving a spectacularly bombastic set closer. Few would debate the unadulterated fun of a Turisas show, and having sadly missed Delain’s earlier set due to the horrors of the A1, we’re well into the festival mood by the time the crazy Finns leave the stage.

Over in the Bohemia tent, Bigelf follow up their recent High Voltage Festival set in front of a fairly receptive crowd, their progressive hard rock not perfectly suited for the time constraints of a festival set, but nevertheless, consistently impressive. Accompanied by gyrating dancers (tonight sees Bizarre magazine take over this circus tent), the LA band provide plenty of potent riffage and keyboard widdling, enough to whisk you away into a parallel dimension where leather jackets are standard wear, elven beauties cavort through the forest, and sporting make up alongside a beard makes perfect sense. Admittedly, that may have something to do with the not entirely legal substance that we suspect someone just to our right is inhaling…

Back in the fresh air, it’s time for Europe. Accompanied by cries of ‘play the fucking song’ and ‘do do dooo do…’, Joey Tempest and co fire out a mix of balls to the wall rockers and ballads with the swagger that comes with thirty years’ experience. Dismissing a band who have sold over ten million records worldwide as one hit wonders is plain stupid, even if much of the crowd never truly engages until they play ‘The Final Countdown’, and we’d imagine that a lot of new people will be checking out their more recent albums after this performance. And yeah, as we have to mention it, ‘The Final Countdown’ gets one of the biggest reactions of the weekend. Fucking right.

October File are one of our favourite UK bands of recent years, so it’s great to see the four-piece drawing a decent crowd to the Jagermeister stage during the first half of Gary Numan’s set. Bringing out a few tracks from their recent ‘Our Souls To You’ record (snigger), the guys pummel those who’ve turned up this evening with oppressively heavy grooves and a delivery which comes in somewhere between ‘highly pissed’ and ‘eye poppingly intense.’ ‘Eau Du War,’ ‘Falter’ and ‘Isolation’ are particular highlights, if that’s the right word for them: sunny stuff this ain’t, but the band are more relevant, powerful and bowel-rumblingly heavy than the majority of bands on our islands.

Similarly cheerful (and, surprisingly, heavy), is Gary Numan, over on the Saturn stage. Far from the cliché of Numan in his synth-pop days, the legendary miserabalist has brought heavy guitars and industrial dynamics into play, stalking the stage like Trent Reznor’s world-weary older brother. ‘Cars’ and ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ are shot through with ominous energy, the power of the classic synth-lines enhanced by live drums and grinding guitar. We’d imagine that many in this crowd had all but written off Numan prior to his performance, but in these post-‘Jagged’ days, the figure in black is once more a creative force to be reckoned with. Even if, as one admiring bystander is heard remarking, he does look a little like ‘the Michael McIntyre of goth’ these days.

It’s generally easy to recognise someone who’s been to see Winnebago Deal, as they usually appear to be deaf, and to be mumbling something along the lines of ‘so much noise, so much noise, so much…’ with a glazed expression. Yeah, Winnebago Deal play loud. Very Loud. It’s great to see these titans of tinnitus out and about again, knocking the Jagermeister stage for six; we’re grabbing a coffee half a mile away when the duo start up, and they still sound ridiculously loud. Volume aside, tonight’s set sees the Oxford two-piece fire out their painfully gritty rock ‘n roll to a fair bit of appreciation from the throng before them, whetting our appetite for (hopefully) a new studio album at some point in the near future. Plus, they finish with the awesome ‘Going Home’ , something that’s always good with us.

Ah, Alice. After god knows how many years of putting on spectacularly enjoyable rock shows, Vincent Furnier, AKA Alice Cooper, still does large scale gothic pantomime better than anyone in the world, tomorrow’s headliners debatably aside. Tonight we see decapitations, strangulations, hangings, Frankenstein-esque monsters, giant injections, angle grinders, flames, drum solos, sparkling suits, mic twirling, and a journey through one of the most fun back-catalogues of any living rock artist, from opener (and closer) ‘School’s Out’ to ‘Poison,’ ‘Elected’ and beyond. Take an Alice Cooper show as twisted theatre and you’ll have a great time, the hits, and thankfully, few of the ballads, making appearances tonight to the crowd’s evident delight. ‘Poison’, ‘School’s Out’ and ‘Feed My Frankenstein’ provoke the biggest singalongs, but everything , ‘No More Mr Nice Guy,’ , ‘Billion Dollar Babies’, even the recent ‘Vengeance Is Mine’, seems to go down well. Long may Alice do his wicked work.

Review by Rob Sayce