Kerrang Weekender 2002

Kerrang Weekender: Metal Mayhem

Kerrang's first Weekender has sparked a fantastically great new festival idea in the VF office; how about this: a festival in a prison. You pay two hundred pounds, get locked up 22 hours a day for each of the four day long weekend; eating dry Ready Brek and drinking your own piss and in those two hours each day that you're let out, you have to be escorted by a member of The Cooper Temple Clause - (don't worry, there's always enough of them to go around), to go and watch Stereophonics. In the rain, with thistle down your pants. Good eh? Our festival would be called Gnarrek. It is, you see, the very opposite of our rather fine weekend in Camber Sands.

It's easy to be blinded by line-ups and wild claims (we saw no wallclimbing or go-karting), but the true test of any music event is how much fun it is, and on that note the first Kerrang! Weekender was an unbridled success. Our chalet, along with many others that we invaded over the course weekend, was clean (when we arrived), with all kinds of nice things neatly listed out with the prices should they not make it through the weekend. (Toilet bowls for £110 a piece - that's good value!) The site itself; resembling very much a Pontins Holiday Park, boasted dogged up security guards, and though the much vaunted 'go kart racing' turned out to be a Scalextric sized oval which was closed anyway, the (pedal) quad bikes were still for hire. We gained much amusement watching people deliberately ram them into tress. With just a ten pound deposit and a five pound hire fee, fifteen pounds is very reasonable for half an hour trashing a large bike. This is what you get when you put Kerrang TV in peoples rooms and make them watch Korn videos.

Speaking of which, watching Som Wardner from My Vitriol  rip into the likes of Nickleback and Puddle Of Mudd was rather rich, considering the basis of their sound salivates around the same slop of Nirvana cake as his ever glossy US counterparts. The difference being that they sell squillions of records and he doesn't. Fair dues though, as My Vitriol play one storm-fucker of a set. Worth it for the moment their bass-player stacking it and ending up on her arse, for the first time in ages, the music's as clear as it is loud, and though it's not quite Radiohead on a beach in Spain, their support slot to Lostprophets is a smashing, sweaty little indie drama scene. Keep it up.

Rather like The Cooper Temple Clause then, but without the sweat, clarity of any of the other good things that TCTC normally bestow upon festivities. Headlining the main stage. on Friday night they seemed to lurch around getting gradually more pissed off at (singer) Ben 's out of place theatrics concerning '20 ways to break a tambourine when only nineteen people are watching you'. Their familiar arsebleeding pound is in full effect, but emptiness is no excuse for shoddiness. Mushroomhead had none of those problems. Whilst TCTC meandered, they spunked up the downstairs stage; bursting at its seams with people forfeiting life and limb to crush themselves in front of metal's fifth favourite face-painted furyists. It was very fucking loud.

Friday afternoon saw The Datsuns being as brilliant as they ever are; probably wondering why they weren't headlining, but carrying on regardless. Vex Red's carry on was surprisingly solid too, as the place finally starts filling up. Earlier in the day you could have caught the wondrous Hell Is For Heroes and the ever-so overrated InMe.

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