The Stone Free Festival was conceived to do for classic rock what C2C has done for country. Hubristically hiring the O2 meant the venue’s top tier was closed, the back of the hall was surrendered to some giant Lucian Freud-style inflatables and there were still banks of empty seats for both nights.
Nobody had bothered to install video screens and Saturday’s headliner Alice Cooper was in town as recently as November, supporting Mötley Crüe at Wembley Arena.
But, if one part of being a great arena act is making the vast seem intimate, another is making the fairly empty seem full. Once The Darkness had raised the evening’s gaiety (“Tonight I will shave the middle part of my head for you,” fibbed singer Justin Hawkins, shortly before standing on said head and waving his legs around), teetotal Christian and golf maven Alice Cooper turned trouble into triumph.
Cooper’s tightly drilled, heroically daft pantomime was in fine fettle, despite the 68-year-old’s reduced mobility and absence of patter. As if it were 1972 (the whole point of Stone Free), there were explosions; the traditional live snake on Is it My Body; the guillotine ritual on the Killer/I Love the Dead medley which, not entirely unpredictably, ended with Cooper being resurrected by the love of a lascivious woman; a 20ft monster on Feed My Frankenstein and two fake Kennedys having a fake brawl during the closing Elected.
The marvellous nonsense disguised the limitation of some of the songs, but School’s Out (which segued into Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall), Poison and No More Mr. Nice Guy were perky pop-rock anthems capable of rescuing causes more lost than this one.
For all the self-inflicted defeats, Stone Free remains a viable proposition. Let’s hope it’s around in 2017 to rectify 2016’s mistakes.
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