One Night in Cape Town at the Grand Arena

Thursday 09 August 2012

Oppikoppi boasted a pretty impressive line-up of artists this year, and luckily for those of us staying in Cape Town over the festival weekend, the organisers put together a day-long concert featuring some of them: Bullet for my Valentine, Seether, Enter Shikari, The Eagles of Death Metal, KONGOS and Van Coke Kartel at Grand West’s Grand Arena.

Not being a big enough fan of the bands playing, I didn’t buy a ticket but was lucky enough to win one in an art contest, one of several held on the One Night In Cape Town Facebook page – so thanks to the admins for that.

Here’s my drawing of Josh Homme from The Eagles of Death Metal
– sadly he wasn’t playing with them though!

So while I was grateful for the chance to go, it didn’t change the fact that aside from KONGOS & VCK, I wasn’t a huge fan of any of the bands before the night – Seether are okay and EoDM totally won me over but Enter Shikari were total shite and we didn’t hang around for the emo headliners, Bullet for my Valentine.

Like my last time at Grand West (watching Rammstein) I did take some photos but they’re all courtesy of my dodgy little point & shoot, so they’re pretty terrible. Shame, I give that camera a lot of grief but all things considered it actually handles situations like this pretty well.

The concert kicked off around 2pm on Women’s Day – Chris & I arrived a little late because our main concern was seeing KONGOS and everything else was sort of a bonus. Van Coke Kartel were wrapping up as we got there, but the plus side was that they ended with my 2 favourites: Voor ons stof word and that other one about haaling asem.

They were rocking out pretty hard as always but it felt a bit weird, no doubt because the venue was a little empty and it was still really early; things would pick up…

KONGOS have found a lot of love here in their partial homeland, and deservedly so. I really enjoyed their gigs late last year and earlier this year as part of their SA tour and was looking forward to seeing them again. They were cool, but I found myself wishing they’d end their songs sooner instead of dragging the endings out, hmmm…I think the dynamic of the venue turned me off a bit, I’m used to seeing them up close in smaller spaces and while I think they put on a great show, it wasn’t my favourite performance of theirs.

I remember the first time I heard Eagles of Death Metal – it was via their ridiculous music video for I want you so hard around 6 years ago. I didn’t know much about the band beyond that track and the sense that they didn’t take themselves too seriously…

The latter turned out to be true: they were thoroughly entertaining and very funny. From comments like ‘you will never have being rocked so hard by a mustache before’ and ‘I mean it, you guys are better than Hollywood’ to genuinely sincere-sounding compliments like ‘playing in front of you, I feel like a silver dollar wrapped in a million bucks’, the charismatic frontman Jesse Hughes (AKA Boots Electric) totally made the concert for me. The band even took a bow at the end, which was super endearing.

And the music was loads of fun too.

The last time I was at Grand West with Chris was a good 8-10 years ago. We took some time to relive our childhood in the kiddies’ game section and in particular the shooting range. Chris managed the highest score possible by hitting everything and so he got a prize, a weird little rubber horse with no discernible purpose other than to make him ridiculously happy. So the games might look a bit different from what I remember but Grand West’s tradition of crappy prizes seems to have endured…

Later we joined the queue to the Spur outside the concert area and finally got a table after what felt like ages.

All our dilly dallying meant we’d missed the bulk of Enter Shikari’s set – which, after we watched their last 2 songs, we decided was a very good thing. Their shouty combo of metal and break beats was not my thing at all, though the crowd seemed to be growing more enthusiastic.

I’m kinda indifferent about Seether; I like a few songs (Fine Again, Gasoline, Country Song) but am not really a huge fan. Chris likes Broken and knew nothing else, and was rapidly running out of steam by this point. We agreed to stay for a few songs and then split, luckily for us, Seether opened with Gasoline, followed by Fine Again and then Broken. Boom! Thank you very much and we were out of there.

I might’ve been tempted to stay if the band showed a little more charisma but alas, they hardly seemed to acknowlege the audience at all.