High Voltage Festival // Day 2 – Victoria Park, London 25/07/2010

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I expected a lot more denim and mullets at this festival. Perhaps I was underestimating the clientele at this years High Voltage festival but I did see a few things that I guessed I wouldn’t normally at a rock event; namely punters with a sack load of pro-sumer SLRs, more people sitting down than standing up, and kids watching the entire day through binoculars. However, buried amongst the dense prog, blissful blues and corporate entities — I couldn’t believe my eyes when they were drawn towards the spherical mini-store of retailers HMV — was mainstream mag Metal Hammer’s stage. Ideally situated alongside a bar and the exit, if you are between the ages of 18-35(ish) you couldn’t really go far wrong from watching this stage progress throughout the day, with the sun spewing sickly heat on your back and supping on an expensive canned beer or five. For the “goths” that arrived, well, they soon looked more “emo” as their white/black skin and cloth took a turn for the worse towards bright pink/black.

I’m not going to claim I saw Lethargy – who opened for the stage — because I simply didn’t. Neither did I fully catch the ghastly Audrey Horne properly. Instead, I was caught between timid prog on the prog stage and more timid prog on the main stage. So I skipped that and headed via the muscle cars and the least populated fairground rides I have ever seen, to the “Eagle Vision Cinema” where there was a photography exhibition by Mick Hutson. Exhibited were a lot of excellent live shots (obviously) amongst his other portfolio work of portraits and studio work. I still can’t decide whether the studio work is a little too digitally edited. Anyway, there is an fantastic fisheye shot of Henry Rollins if you ever want to track the man down online.

Fact: If it hadn’t been for High on Fire, Mastodon would not be a band. Which at this point is the only thing really going for them. It saddens me to say that the band didn’t really live up to the expectation of a date in the UK supporting their excellent Snakes for the Divine album. Firstly, guitarist Matt Pike completely forgot to turn his amp off standby, so when the band wanted to really kick off the set in style it just didn’t happen, and they had to embarrassingly restart the show. Pike also seems to be down to the normal 6 strings on his guitar, which is let down considering the depth and volume he normally gets out of his custom First Act 9-stringer. He then looked nervous for much of the set, and also failed to nail some of the powerful riffs which the band thrive on — particularly on ‘Fire, Flood & Plague’ and ‘Blood from Zion’. I guess the trip from Montreal the day before had something to do with it, though for a small section of the crowd it really didn’t matter too much as the mosh and circle pits soon started during ‘Frost Hammer’ and ‘Snakes for the Divine’.

A heck of a lot more people turned out to watch “hardcore jam band” Clutch, and they certainly didn’t disappoint the crowd, with main-man Neil Fallon taking the stage and introducing the rest of the band through some slick slide guitar and the opening licks to the foot stomping ‘Gravel Road’. the crowd was already hooked. As a “reluctant studio band” (despite having released a sizable number of albums) they are best seen live, where you can watch them experiment and groove to their own mix of rock/blues/funk. In the case of drummer JP Gaster, you can instantly see this through the shift in technique from Buddy Rich jazz hands to thumping John Bonham power rock. As for Fallon, well he is the personality of the band, and the crowd sing along to the sometimes ludicrous lyrics he has penned. For instance, ’50,000 Unstoppable Watts’ contains the bizarre chorus of “Anthrax, ham radio, and liquor” whilst the opening lines of ’10001110101′ are “Ribonucleic acid freak out/the power of prayer/Long halls of science/and all the lunatics committed there/Robot Lords of Tokyo/smile taste kittens”. With added wah and space age phaser fx, the band pace through ‘Profits of Doom’ and ‘Mice and Gods’, and soon everyone around was getting down to their groove. For the final few tracks including ‘Electric Worry’ and ‘One Eye Dollar’ the band were joined on stage by Opeth keyboardist Per Wilberg. Funkin’ excellent.

Fact: 8 out of 10 guitar playing Italians love Opeth**, and their focal point Mikael Åkerfeldt. It seems that he is almost mocking us with the bands laid back approach to delivering some extremely intense black metal infused jazz pieces. Why don’t you put some effort in for a change, and throw your guitar around your head or something — you know, showboat a little? Anyway, it really isn’t their style, and before the band started, I wondered what kind of set they would play — considering the kind of festival it was. They could have played most of Damnation, and that would have gone down well with some of the melo-proggers out there. When they started with ‘Windowpane’ it looked like it could happen. Wrong. They played their “normal” set full of huge sections of black metal drumming and furious riffs, to which the ‘Bodom shirt touting kids were soon whirling their heads to. The bands effortless stance is testament to the spectacular musicianship of the 5 piece. Every part of the band can be heard, and especially Åkerfeldt’s silky smooth solos which melt through the rest of their dynamic sound. With the sun still shining at around 6pm, it certainly wasn’t the kind of mood setting that perhaps the band would have wanted. Their attempts at atmospherics engulf the crowd with a sheath of white smoke during the dramatic stabbing power riffs of ‘The Grand Conjuration’. I had actually momentarily forgotten I was at a classic rock/prog fest as for the past hour or so I could have quite easily been standing at the main stage of Download. I guess this stage was for the kids, right? Well, not really. These bands have an adult following for tens of years, so, is this the new “Dad rock”? Would that make the main stage here the “Grandad rock” stage? Anyway, 3 more songs in the next 40mins or so from Opeth (‘The Drapery Falls’, ‘Lotus Eater’, and ‘Deliverance’) meant that afterwards the over-sized bearded men (some with theirs sons) headed back towards the stage.

Two-thirds of the way through Down’s set, smoking enthusiast Phil Anselmo divulges the crowd into one of his “stories” about how the band earlier managed to score the best weed they have got a European festival for 10 or so years. And it sure has done some work on his voice. He is in pain throughout the whole set, constantly grimacing and pumping throat anaesthetic whenever he gets a chance. He also tries a number on his microphone, but beating it into his chest to the tempo of ‘Temptation’s Wings’, much to the annoyance of the sound desk. But every gig means so much to him, and he still has Dimebag memories attached to each gig he plays. He constantly eyeballs fans in the crowd, thanking them for turning up, or for them nodding along to the heavy sludge riffs that Kirk Windstein and Pepper Keenan throw out with their huge Orange Amp presence. Anselmo isn’t the only one suffering though. Bassist Rex Brown looks tired and wiped out and probably still recovering from his relatively serious illness last year. He has never been a big bloke to say the least, but now is painfully thin and attempts to get in the groove to tracks such as ‘Lifer’ and ‘The Path’ are met with an equal amount of taking himself to one side and lighting up another cigarette. Windstein and Keenan are on form though and love the reaction they get from the crowd. With 9pm now approach — yes, the evening was going to end pretty early — Anselmo’s words of wisdom took another turn as he urged the crowd to “jam balls and vaginas off” before launching into ‘Hail the Leaf’. There hadn’t been a great deal of talking from any of the bands throughout the day, but for sheer onstage presence there are few that come close to Anselmo.

** I cannot actually support this claim.

Photo by Ash Akhtar