Not much has changed in Sheffield in the last year: a beer guide pub has closed, while Doctor Who has been nosing around a bit.
The festival, however, has lost its way. Molly Hatchet vanished from the bill (that weekend they played a gig in Pennsylvania), to be replaced by Rob Tognoni, a generic pub blues guitarist. There was scarcely a bandanna or flannel shirt to be seen on stage over the weekend. There was an excess of blues artists - I’m not against blues, but it’s not the same as southern/countr rock - and many metal bands who didn’t really fit the outlaw tag. It’s as though the organisers had no faith in the remit they’d defined.
There were some great acts:
Elevation Falls are an Irish folk-metal band with blues aspects. Yeah, I know I’m going back on what I just wrote, but their singer Hazel Jade has a quite staggering voice and the band did an acoustic set where they came across incredibly well. The blues numbers showed off Jade’s voice and her ability to jump a couple of octaves on the beat. Unfortunately, they were totally misplaced in the line-up and the crowd was not on their side.
On Sunday morning they did an excellent acoustic set featuring a great cover of Heart’s ‘Alone’, given they are all too young to remember it being released.
Collateral were far better than their records suggest, with a lot more grit and definitely ticking the ‘Outlaw’ box by channelling Aerosmith and Bon Jovi.
The Wattingers arrived with their own audience. Leaning against the rail were a statuesque couple in Western attire, both obviously part of the retinue as they appear on the album cover. A steam-punk three-piece (sweet!) of singer and percussionist dressed in the style of ‘Hell On Wheels’ TV show and a bass player modelling the latest in Mad Max dog-style facial gear. The trio are bolstered by ‘Ezekial Obediah Wattinger’ - a drum machine and synthesizer fashioned from wood, bones, a steam engine and an old reel-to-reel. Sisters of Mercy meets Ministry meets Johnny Cash!
Swamp Born Assassins and Sons of Liberty were proper Southern Rock and both did a fine job. The Assassins had a female backing singer ala Cassie Gaines of Lynyrd Skynyrd, but lack Skynyrd’s swing (and clashed with the Wattingers who were too good to leave). Both were fronted by ageing men in hats who could play a mean harmonica and were excellent frontmen.
Two of last year’s highlights made return visits this year, the first being the wonderful Outlaw Orchestra. They are still playing rock-grass with aplomb, now joined by a new banjo player who also plays minimalist but effective lap-slide guitar to give an extra depth and more silliness. The stories are still tall, the jokes still dumb and the grooves still infectious.
Saturday’s twin headliners - Jason & The Scorcher and The Kentucky Headhunters were both better than I expected and exactly what I wanted. The Scorchers are a Southern bar band with a front man modelled after Norman Wisdom. They sold me early in the set with a song about coal mining, “Where to stand and be a man you have to learn to crawl”.
The Headhunters have been going for 50 years and it shows in their material and classy playing. Their lead guitar player is a small man of advancing years, who wanders around the stage with a huge smile and knocks out lovely solos as though he’s been doing it all his life. Which he has.
The next morning I met one of the Headhunters at breakfast and he was very friendly, considering the lack of sleep and being late up and all that.
Finding Georgia was the only other band of the weekend with a female lead singer, and a whole different proposition. They brought country & western music from Leicester, (Country & Leicestern?) played with gusto and a nod to the 80s soft rock acts. Some great songs about drinking, revenge, and, er, being Welsh in a built-up area. A highlight was a song mixing ‘Enter Sandman’ with ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, showing that Metallica and Journey are just two ends of the same continuum.
My favourite new band of the weekend is Dead Men’s Whiskey. Young men playing metal with a slight drawl and a lead singer based on Jack Black. They have tapped into a rich vein of songs about being a heavy metal fan (‘The Fight’, ‘Last Train Home’ that reminded me of when I had hair. There was also a song about a giant robot, which quite logically (at the time) included a Rick Astley chorus. The emotional highlight was a song dedicated to the singer’s mother (so they MUST be a country and western act) that brought grown men to tears, while their fab cover is ‘Kiss From a Rose’, the old Seal song.
Gorilla Riot were the other returning champions from last year and by rights should have headlined the Sunday as they are a proper C.R.O.W.S. band and had the crowd in the palms of their hands.
Matt Pearce was the only blues artist of the weekend I enjoyed; he channels Gary Moore and Peter Green, even to the point of a gold Gibson Les Paul and a cracking version of ‘Oh Well’. His album is very good and the crowning song is the title track ‘Got To get Home’ with its gospel chorus to set the arm-hair on end. The band was also mighty fine and having a guest saxophonist gave the set a nice tonal variation.
The HRH organisation has dropped the ball with this particular project and next year it’s being folded into the Blues weekend, which the crowd attendance for some of the blues acts this year may have shown them wasn’t a totally good idea. I’ll be awaiting the line-up announcement before I put money down on C.R.O.W.S. chapter 3.
And that’s my last trip to Sheffield in the foreseeable future. It’s a great city, and well worth a weekend trip, even if there’s not a bizarre metal festival happening at the time.
