‘When Fo
o (^) Fighters
are on fire
,
they’re mom
entous.’
the fact that Matthews’s thick southern accent
prompts cries from the crowd of: “jam, Forrest, jam!”
Then, thankfully, JBJ arrives looking like the New
Jersey cousin of Zelda from Terrahawks and touting
a masters diploma in pomp-rock manipulation. His set
is every bit as overblown as the Foo Fighters’ but, like
the bloke himself, you couldn’t pinch an inch of flab on
it. His dustbowl epics – Lost Highway, Bed Of Roses,
Wanted Dead Or Alive – billow along hypnotically, the
sonic equivalent of gazing into the Grand Canyon,
while he slow-dances with fans plucked from the front
row. His hits, meanwhile, are engrained in rock’s DNA:
the factory-floor Americana of You Give Love A Bad
Name, chest-clutcher extraordinaire Always,
a Pentecostal Lay Your Hands On Me delivered from
a stage transformed into the Church Of Jovi, and
a Livin’ On A Prayer that shakes Rio’s Sugarloaf
Mountain. His variety quotient remains
high too – It’s My Life is all sci-fi guitars
and Dr Alban hooks, while Keep The Faith
sounds like JBJ spent the early 90s
boshed off his melon at the Hacienda with
The Charlatans. Stand back, pro at work.
T
hree days later, weekend two
funks up to the plate. There’s
Chic’s suave disco razzmatazz.
There is Panic! At The Disco’s shallow boy-band
‘emo’, as sparkle-toothed and facile as their Vegas
home town, delivered through Brendon Urie’s
plastered-on rictus grin.
And there are the Red Hot
Chili Peppers, Anthony
Kiedis grooving on stage
dressed like a sheriff facing
retirement, with Flea as his
evil biker sidekick. They
too have trimmed the
funk-jam fat from their set, and are out for fun. Dreary
funk-outs like Soul To Squeeze are kept to a minimum in
favour of punk and psychotic disco interludes. Flea
walks about on his hands, sings his throwaway solo
attack on a “homophobic redneck dick” Pea and
discusses what he just threw up in his mouth. The
band cover The Stooges (I Wanna Be Your Dog done
grindcore), The Cars (a cheery Just What I Needed) and
Funkadelic (a sluggish What Is Soul?). With nothing to
promote and no one to impress, it feels more like
a garage rehearsal than a show-stopping set for
a televised audience of millions. If RHCP take a casual
approach, it’s because they know their set is backboned
with brilliance – the weightless Zephyr Song, euphoric
West Coast pop like Dani California and Californication,
a By The Way that descends into savage bass dementia,
Give It Away – and they know they’ll never out-rock the
coming conflagration.
Overnight, the splayed hands of Christ The
Redeemer statue turn into
devil horns, and the four
horsemen of the thrash
apocalypse descend on
Rock In Rio for a Friday
night onslaught of
Download dream bands.
Local metal heroes
Sepultura thrash Rio to within millimetres of its life;
Anthrax make a noise like a tornado full of Harleys.
Helloween produce a remarkably melodic racket for
a horror-rock band whose singer resembles an angry
testicle, and Slayer deliver their testaments of doom,
death and damnation with such intense virulence that
‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’
set is backboned
with brilliance.’
Foo Fighters: one of the most
dedicated advocates of
stadium rock’s extravagances
and indulgences.
Sepultura:^ thrashing^
Rio to within^
millimetres^ of^ its^ life.