Cruel World festival 2023

For anyone who is in vicinity of the Rose Bowl in LA on May 20 (or wants to make the trip), this years' Cruel World festival will feature Siouxsie (minus the Banshees?), Iggy Pop, Love and Rockets, Billy Idol, Adam Ant, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Human League, ABC, Gang of Four, Gary Numan, the Motels, and a few youngsters so it isn't a total punk retirement home lineup: Boy Harsher, the Soft Moon and GVLLOW. What, do they all get like 10 minutes a piece? Actually, might be more than one stage.

Don't know what's going on with Siouxsie lately. I can certainly vouch for Iggy, and Adam Ant live, I cannot vouch for Gang of Four cuz who knows who or what is calling itself Gang of Four nowadays, and I'm pretty sure that the thing calling itself The Motels is, and has been for some time, singer Martha Davis + a buncha guys. The others could go either way, but I'd wager Love & Rockets (with its' core trio intact) and the dependably theatrical Gary Numan shouldn't disappoint.

The current line-up of the Motels is Martha Davis with keyboardist/saxophonist Marty Jourard, who's been a member since the first album, and a bunch of guys. So that's two genuine members of the band, which isn't too bad, as these things go.

Last I heard, Gang of Four is currently Jon King, Hugo Burnham, Sara Lee and David Pajo as a about as reasonable a ringer for Andy Gill as could be dug up. So it's a higher percentage of "real" members than what Gill had been touring with, but none of those members is Andy Gill, who is of course not now available for touring. So make of that what one will.

Gosh, when I saw The Soft Moon in 2018, Boy Harsher were the opening act and they managed to be an all-time best opener. Boy Harsher were the 1982 band of my dreams, sounding like Chris + Cosey vs DAF… in dub! Highly recommended.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/24/2023 09:17AM by Post-Punk Monk.

I can vouch for the current lineup of GO4. I saw them last summer or so and they put on a great show. Jon King's got a lot of goddamn energy for a 70-year-old!

Having seen a number of these old-timers in recent years (Heaven 17 back in the fall as a recent example), I had wondered if ABC/Martin Fry were still making the rounds. Probably not worth a trip to LA just to see them, but I would like to check them off the list at some point before Martin kicks it.

The official website adds to the lineup Animotion (ha!), Modern English, and the Vapors.

I am sorely tempted to go to this but May is going to be too busy for me to justify the trip. I don't know what Siousxie's tour plans are and Iggy only seems to do festivals now but there are strong rumors that Love and Rockets will tour.

My big problem with these festivals is that the smaller billed bands don't play a lot of songs. ABC probably will only get five or six songs.

Heff Wrote:
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> I don't
> know what Siousxie's tour plans are

From what I understand, this is her only show planned...for now.

Friends of mine went to it last year, and their biggest complaint was that yeah, it's an amazing line-up, but it's spread out over three stages, meaning that it's inevitable that bands you're dying to see are going to be playing at the same time. So when you look at the poster and think "Wow! Siouxsie, Iggy and Love & Rockets!" be mindful that there's a good chance their sets will be overlapping and if you want to see any of them's entire set, you'll be missing the bulk of the others'.

Or so I'm told. I wasn't there last year.

Big concert festivals often are that way. Warped Tour regularly had so many stages I lost count. Lollapalooza had multiple stages too; I haven't paid much attention to it since it stopped touring, but I suspect it's still that way.

That's one thing I like about Mosswood Meltdown: it has only two stages, and when a band finishes on one stage, the next band is rarin' to go on the other.

The main difference with the touring version of Lollapalooza was the big name headliners were never competing with each other. There was the main stage, then a side stage with mid-level bands that usually shut down around sunset before the main couple of headliners went on on the main stage. And maybe there was a third stage that had local bands. At any rate, you never had to choose between the names in the big type.

The big festivals nowadays generally have such a wide range of performers that people aren't usually forced to make impossible choices. If the Foo Fighters are on stage one at the same time Dua Lipa is on stage two and Sturgill Simpson is on stage three, most people can make their choice easily enough. But Siouxsie and Love & Rockets attract pretty much an identical audience, and neither have been in these parts since Hector was a pup. If they go on separate stages at overlapping times, that is a massive headache for festival goers.