REVIEW: City venue move for Monsterfest rocking to life across the river
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This year’s Monsterfest rock festival moved location from the Ironworks to Eden Court for four days of music performances last week.
An education day on Wednesday opened the event and developed into a Fringe night with acts including young local band Bad Actress from Forres and Muir Of Ord who have played every Monsterfest so far.
Thursday night offered three contrasting rock acts starting with the powerhouse rock vocals of Ross-shire’s singer songwriter Susanna Wolfe opening the night, alternative rock band Lional winning new fans in a return to the live stage with exciting new songs unveiled. And Scottish heavy rockers Mason Hill rounding off an epic tour of their album Against The Wall by storming through its tracks – and adding the odd extra in – as they prepared to set aside the album “forever” to start working on a new one.
This year, the festival dedicated the Friday night, which included Geai Thompson, Bastette and Wild Fire, to marking the 40th anniversary of Thin Lizzy’s performance at the Ice Rink. Graeme Thomson, who wrote Cowboy Song, the biography of the band’s star Phil Lynott, talked, before Marco Mendoza headlined with a set including members of Bad Actress, Josh Mackenzie from Lional, Jools Gizzi from Gun and members of Grand Slam, Lynott’s band after Thin Lizzy.
Saturday began with Forgetting The Future from Caithness, the normally athletic singer Robbie McNicol moving with a crutch.
As Sirens Fall brought all the glamour and edge of goth to their alternative indie rock, black patent leather, skeleton suit. But just catching the end of the West Yorkshire band’s set, Smoke with its ‘Cross my heart I don’t want to die’ refrain made a strong impression.
A three-year gap in seeing local indie rock band Iain McLaughlin & The Outsiders perform live perhaps added extra volume to the enthusiastic crowd reaction to long-missed epics such as Falling Through The Dark, bassist Dave Ramsay’s plume of hair adding its own choreography.
As Monsterfest loves to do, there was a complete change of mood next with the sassy colour and attitude of The Hot Damn!, the female rock-pop band who have called themselves “a perpetual hen party of like-minded nutters” and lived up to that without mercy in everything from new single Live Laugh Love – which illustrates the Covid-formed group’s philosophy of fun first – to their own unforgettable customised merchandise song “Inverness can you buy all our Hot Damn CDs!” and the odd word we can’t print! Add in a couple of confetti canons, bright-coloured flared suits and relentless energy.
The sheer pumping power from Macclesfield blues-punk duo The Virginmarys – drummer Danny Dolan and guitarist and singer Ally Dickaty – was part of the reason their set was such an intense, raw experience ending with the fire of Bang Bang Bang after thanking Inverness for supporting them in the past.
Headliners Gun hit the stage with a dramatic intro straight into the new album’s single Backstreet Brothers and rifled through the band’s impressive menu of live winners to select songs including She Knows, Shame On You – with amazing footage of a very young Gun packing out a stadium on black and white film, perfectly in tune with the mood of new album The Calton Songs. Dante revealed their young stand-in drummer, Nick Georgiou, was just 17, so it felt special for the band to invite young stars Bad Actress’s guitarist Chick up onstage to play with them before the set inevitably headed to a euphoric roof-raising singalong of The Beastie Boys’ Fight For Your Right (To Party).
The festival had been based at the Ironworks since it debuted as part of the autumn calendar in Inverness in 2018.
But earlier this year – amid uncertainty about the Ironworks’ future with a plan to build a hotel there – the Monsterfest organisers announced a move for the festival and a shift from November back to October 26-30.
When asked how the move had gone, one of the festival directors Mark Allison said: “I felt that we have found a new home. What was really magical for us was that when we walked in on the Wednesday, it was just a flat floor in the OneTouch and we watched everything be built. All the guys in there and our crew did a fantastic job.
“The feedback we got from most of the crowd and other people was ‘Wow!’.”
“And it was quite funny because I think a lot of the Eden Court staff were amazed at the transformation.
"And I think some of them might have been a bit apprehensive ‘Oh, a rock crowd, what are we going to get here?’
“But we got the usual thing we used to get when we were at the Ironworks – ‘Everybody’s so nice, we’d love to have you back!’
“So that was all positive.”
Mark Allison said financially it would have been good to have had perhaps another 100 along over the festival.
He said: "It was like year one again. They say it is three years for a festival to get established, but we’ve had Covid and the cost of living crisis right in the middle of it…"
