HW: Dracfest '97 Guardian Review

[J Strobridge]

Found this in the Guardian today - looks as if the writer (Dave Simpson)
only made it in time for Sunday's entertainment......

"It was billed as 'a celebration of 100 years of Bram Stoker's Dracula',
and while 'celebration' - implying light, not darkness - was an
inappropriate description, Dracfest's organisers had unearthed an array
of the undead.   The line-up included the walking corpses of Hawkwind
and The Damned, along with the rarely sighted 'God of hell fire' Arthur
Brown.

Sited in a marquee in the shadow of the notorious Whitby Abbey, as
featured in the Stoker novel the plan is for Dracfest to become an
annual 'mystical' pop/cultural festival along the lines of Glastonbury.
The two locations certainly have one thing in common.   With no inward
rail connection {{NB: this is not true!  or at least only true on
Sundays in winter - js}} Whitby is nigh-on impossible to reach by
normal means.   Shortly before dusk, with an eerie mist descending,
our stagecoach (oh, all right, Vauxhall taxi) sped off, leaving us
surrounded by all manner of boys and ghouls.  A thousand vampire
worshippers huddled around in black clothes with green hair.   Faces
were freshly painted white (2.00 pounds from a nearby stall).

Suddenly, out of the darkness came the Creature.   The Creature was
dressed in black and his teeth appeared to be made out of chipped paint.
'Welcome to my nightmare!' screamed the Thing, who it soon became
apparent was Malice Cooper, a somehow more fearsome 'tribute' to Alice.
For over an hour he frothed and raved in a voice that was - rather
comically - more like Iggy Pop, then climbed on to an onstage gallows
and died another death.

We sought the spirit of Dracula and eventually found a young man who was
plainly out of his skull...he carried it on a stick.   Skulking around
the stalls, however, we were impressed by details.   Toilets contained
no mirrors, and amongst a myriad of eateries there was pointedly no
stake house.    However, our biggest dose of horror was the sight of an
irate Welsh lady demanding to know why Marc Almond had pulled out.    'A
missed flight,' was the official explanation.   From Transylvania,
presumably.

Toward the witching hour The Stranglers came to, er, bat with some
aplomb.  Although Hugh Cornwall's singing replacement Paul Roberts can
be disturbingly cabaret, their instrumental passages - with Jen Jacques
Burnel in finely malevolent form - are still a wicked delight.   As
Burnel's bass rumbled and hits came and went, eventually so did we,
leaving early to attend to a frightening array of bite marks on our arms
and necks.   'Insects' a local explained.   A likely story"


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J.D.Strobridge at ed.ac.uk                         eset08 at holyrood.ed.ac.uk
                                                ELIJSA at srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk
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