High Voltage Festival 2010 Sunday Review

We parked our little group outside the bar at the side of the Metal Hammer stage and enjoyed Lethargy from that vantage point. The South Wales band are another up and coming British band that seem destined for great things. Check out their new album 'Purification', it's a bit good.

This band have some killer tunes, and when they opened with the immediate crowd favorite 'Charon' it was clear that these guys were delighted to be here strutting their stuff in the early afternoon sunshine. There genuinely wasn't a flat spot in their set and as the band fed off the energy of the crowd the party atmosphere started to kick in, in a big way.

It was really good to see the audience swell during Audrey Horne's set and by the time they finished their brief show with 'Blaze of Ashes' the place was pretty packed. This is a band that we really need to see more of as this was a bloody good set and one which really got the crowd going.

We stayed put for the next band on the Hammer stage. Good things have been said about American Metal outfit High on Fire and on the basis of todays performance they are well deserved. 'Frost Hammer' is one of the favorite tracks at the moment here at CackBlabbath and, if anything, it is even better live than on record.

High on Fire were certainly not everyone's cup of tea, being substantially more 'extreme' than their predecessors on this (nominally) Metal stage but I liked them. Nice to give the neck muscles a bit of a workout too :)

Next some of us had an appointment with our past, as we headed off to see Magnum on the Prog stage we were hopeful of good things. Pity we didn't get them.

From what I saw of it, this was a Magnum set for the Magnum fans instead of something intended to draw in the passing festival goer, and we were bored to tears by about two songs in. So we left and headed back to the Metal Hammer stage.

They were joined on stage for the latter part of their set by Opeth's Per Wiberg, causing the fans of the Swedish Prog Metallers to overcome their instinctive fear of sunlight andsit up and take notice.

For many the next set on the Hammer stage was the one that they had been looking forward to most, ever since Opeth were brought in to replace Venom who pulled out for 'contractual reasons'. Now these Swedes are a bit of an acquired taste, Watershed and Blackwater Park are fairly undisputed classics but, for us, some of their other releases have been a bit hit and miss. However after giving them a fair hearing today, there is no denying that that are an amazing live band. Mikael Åkerfeldt, on the face of it, doesn't have much in the way of stage presence but a more engaging and intense frontman it is difficult to imagine.

Their set gave the uninitiated an excellent introduction to the grand sweeping scale of Opeth's music. Many of us weren't particularly fans before, but by god some of us are now. It looked like we'd had our set of the day...

Marillion, of late, have run a bit hot and cold with me. Sometimes their more recent live performances have seemed to be, well, a bit up their own arse. And when they announced in the programme that they would be playing their most 'experimental and progressive set' I was slightly concerned, especially as this band were such a massive part of my youth. And good as Steve 'H' Hogarth is as a singer, I grew up listening to Fish and some prejudices are difficult to shake...

The band opened up with 'The Invisible Man' and everything just gelled into place. H is undeniably a 'proper' frontman and worked the stage while the band were about as mobile as they have been for the past 30 years, I.E. not very. This was a stunning opening track and even the noise from Down over on the Hammer stage wasn't going to spoil this...

The Invisible Man was followed up with Cover My Eyes, and then the highpoint of the weekend, by miles, Slainte Mhath. This was just an incredible moment and H sang it brilliantly, even down to the anguish of 'all we've been left behind, is to stand like our fathers before us in the firing line'. If I could have picked one Fish era song for the band to do, this wouldn't have been it. Just shows how much (I.E. little) I know.

This was Marillion at their best. H communicated with the audience, really connected and made us feel like we were part of a special moment, shared between this incredible band and their fans. I can't deny it would have been special if the rumours about Fish joining them on stage had been true but then again maybe that would just have reopened my old biases.