This new one-day event is an attempt to import California’s four-year-old Cruel World festival to the UK, and as the parent US event is a devotedly Anglophile affair featuring almost exclusively original British post-punk and goth bands, the promoters could feasibly have called this offshoot Coals to Newcastle.
The early 80s were, indeed, an incredibly fertile time in British music, and it could be depressing to see so many of its prime movers recalibrated as nostalgia turns. Yet the bill is such a stylistic mixed bag that it’s hard to draw many conclusions besides the simple truth that some have aged a lot better than others.
