Mad Cool Festival Valdebebas, Madrid, Spain 6th-10th July 2022 Glorious Spanish sunshine and stellar performances from Frank Carter, Wolf Alice, Metallica, Muse, Royal Blood and more have set the bar impossibly high for Madrid’s next Mad Cool Festival.
After braving many rainy mud-splattered festivals for the sake of the music, I was intrigued to see how different Madrid’s exotic sounding Mad Cool festival would be. Queuing up for my arrival beer in the pouring rain and regretting I’d not packed anything waterproof, it felt just like home. Luckily, as soon as the music started that initial rain was promptly replaced by a week of sweltering 37 degree sunshine.
Opening the weekend on the Main Stage was American bluesman Seasick Steve. The physical embodiment of his music, he looked exactly like he sounded, with a flowing white beard and authentically grungy clothing, he perched onstage wielding his curious collection of homemade guitars like some kind of Mississippi Gandalf.
Taking up only a modest footprint onstage, he was joined only by drummer Dan Magnusson. The pair played their way through some of Steve’s grizzled blues numbers like Thunderbird. Dirty slide guitar came squealing out from behind the steady marching drum beat, its rhythm rolling along like an old freight train as it clattered along the rails. As the warm orange Spanish sun began to blaze down on the crowd, Seasick Steve’s earthy blues music evoked the muggy swamps of southern America, generating an atmosphere of feel good grooves which were a great way to kick off a week of incredible music.
Mad Cool boasted two mainstages so close to each other that people at the back of stage 1 only had to rotate their heads 90 degrees to the left to be ready for the next act to hop onto stage 2. It meant they could program the bands back to back and as soon as Seasick Steve finished, it was 20 seconds before London’s indie royalty Wolf Alice arrived on Stage 2.
The band played a genre-defying set with some early classics like Moaning Lisa Smile and the brilliantly heavy Giant Peach, alongside softer, more anthemic, recent material like Last Man On Earth and Don’t Delete The Kisses. Lead singer Ellie Rowsell abandoned her guitar for Formidable Cool, an accurate description of the band’s onstage energy, to give it the maximum swagger required, dropping to her knees at one point to howl into the sky with an earth-shattering scream.
A neck swivel to the main stage for Yungblud. His set of pop punk singles, aimed squarely at Gen-Z closely resembled a HIIT workout as he sprinted over every single inch of the stage screaming his heart out.
With the sun still absolutely scorching, I was wondering how I was going to handle the mosh pit for what I suspected would be one of the highlights of the weekend on the Region Of Madrid stage for the mighty Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes. Opening with the bouncing fourth album single My Town, things were off to a flying start. Even without the guest vocal from Idles’ Joe Talbot that we’ve become accustomed to, it still rained down every drop of energy onto the tumultuous crowd.
The set was full of the usual Frank Carter shenanigans which, despite seeing him many times, never fails to entertain me. A masterful front man, with both an intimidating ferocity but also an extremely welcoming energy, as displayed with his “safe space / girls only” mosh pit, and by literally welcoming someone onstage to play bass for Wild Flowers. Some crowd surf, but Frank prefers a more stand-up-paddle-boarding approach, towering over the crowd and striking one hell of a silhouette against the azure blue Spanish horizon.
With a career spanning mix of recent singles like Sticky and Go Get A Tattoo and monstrous early singles like Juggernaut or Devil Inside Of Me, The Rattlesnakes are a perfect storm of both heart and venom. A highlight of Mad Cool 2022, that set the bar impossibly high within hours of the 5-day festival even beginning.
A rock & roll heavyweight was needed to follow The Rattlesnakes, and Day One’s headliners were the indomitable Metallica. The show was two solid hours of sheer power, everything you could want from a Metallica show, Devil horns, pyrotechnics, epic singalongs and thrash metal head-banging galore. Opening the show with a scene from the classic Western movie, The Good The Bad And The Ugly, and soundtracked to Ennio Morricone’s majestic Ecstasy Of Gold, the atmosphere was charged with an epic level of anticipation.
Getting Enter Sandman out of the way early was a masterful and immediate change up to fifth gear, Metallica did their absolute best to maintain the pace with plenty of classic tracks like Ride The Lightning, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and Nothing Else Matters. An unexpected airing of their classic metal cover of Thin Lizzy’s Whisky In The Jar prompted an almighty singalong with plenty of air guitar.
James Hetfield made more than one reference to La Familia de Metallica and was pleased to welcome all the new faces. The encore could only be their 1986 genre-defining metal blueprint, Master Of Puppets. It’s a track which has propelled the band into a whole new generation of ears, thanks to its inclusion in the recent finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
The final band of the evening were the wild and unpredictable electro punks Fever 333. (Their unhinged furious energy as they catapult themselves all over the stage like pinballs make them frankly impossible to photograph, but you know that if you could only get them in frame whatever shot you’re left with will be amazing.) Standout tracks like Burn It Down fused nu metal guitars with electronic beats similar to bands like Linkin Park in their prime, but don’t let that fool you into thinking Fever333 aren’t living right on the cutting edge.
For the climax of the show, singer Jason Aalon Butler scaled the stage rigging to the very top. This stage was high. I was getting vertigo just looking at him. But channelling his inner Alex Honnold, he zipped back down to earth in seconds.
Day Two saw the likes of Aussie garage punks Amyl & The Sniffers play 70 minutes of blistering retro punk without letting up even for one song. Frontwoman Amy Taylor’s unique voice and pointed lyrics offset the uncluttered, three chord flair of the backing band in an enjoyable way. Tunes like Gacked On Anger and Balaclava Lover Boogie were a highlight, not just for the fun titles, but by the way the crowd were bumping away in a thousand tiny mosh pits.
British indie pop band London Grammar, had managed to land the coveted sunset set, and they suited that ambiance perfectly. As day turned to night, the ethereal and soaring indie vocals of Hannah Reid drifted across the field, set to the magnificent backdrop of the Spanish sunset.
American rockers Highly Suspect took over the Amazon Music Stage just before midnight. Singer Johnny Stevens walked on stage cloaked in a disguise of a big hat and sunglasses which remained firmly fixed throughout the show. He was also sporting a tiny little rucksack which he took great care in popping on the microphone stand. What was in that bag? I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it, hoping he would rip it open and reveal something for the climax of the show, like a firework flare or t-shirt cannon, but sadly the mystery was never revealed.
The stage came alive with electrifying guitar work and pounding riffs as they launched into opening track Bath Salts & Bloodfeather. However when they dropped their massive single My Name Is Human with its monstrous chorus, there was a notable leap in energy, quickly followed by the equally monumental tune Lydia, which featured a guest spot from Conor Mason of Nothing But Thieves.
Finally it was time for Reignwolf to close the evening. A one man powerhouse of gnarled spluttering blues rock riffs exploding out of 1 single guitar player, Jordan Cook. He was accompanied by a drummer who more than once upped sticks and left Reignwolf to it.
Cook’s incredible guitar sound was made up of a series of guitar amps stacked on top of a bass amp doing the work of a band three times his size. A similar approach to Royal Blood but in contrast to Mike Kerr’s military precision with his taut and defined bass sound, Reignwolf’s noise was gloriously chaotic, clutching the guitar hissing and spitting like a snake in his grasp as the fuzzy feedback screeched and wailed.
And as if wrangling that madness wasn’t enough, he did most of this one-handed while he held the microphone with his other hand, or jumped behind the drum kit and knocked out a beat with one hand and a grizzly riff with the other. An extremely talented showman. Sure he could make his life a bit easier by delegating some work to a bass player and a drummer, but where’s the fun in that?
Friday (Day 3) began with the trio of American sisters Haim. Some brilliant guitar-led tunes hovering between pop and rock, and occasionally a bit of R&B. There was a pretty hefty amount of awkward stage banter and a bizarre sketch with a fake telephone call that didn’t land at all, but it didn’t matter because the music was great. The set highlight was My Song 5, a proper rocker, Haim’s live rendition easily surpassed the studio version.
Friday’s sunset slot was handled by the excellent American band The War On Drugs. Wistful anthemic Americana indie rock was a brilliant soundtrack to the dying sun as the heat finally cooled to a tolerable level. The swirling guitar and driving beats sounded to me like a West Coast road trip, like you’re cruising down a sun bleached highway with Bob Dylan in the backseat trying to plug his synthesiser into the cigarette lighter of your beat up old Buick Riviera. Yes I’m unable to drive and I’ve never been to America, but that’s where my mind went as I dozed off in the sun, drenched in the sound of The War On Drugs.
Muse are known for putting on an epic show and they are incredible to watch, and yet somehow I still had my tiny little mind well and truly blown apart with their headline performance, an outstanding, theatrical live show. A cryptic video introduced the band into a post apocalyptic universe, Muse arrived on stage in hooded silver masks like something out of Squid Game. An enormous statue of the same masked face and a massive hand holding a flair at each end of the stage emerged behind them as a scaffolding structure spelling out giant letters WOTP, emblazoned in fire signified the opening track, Will Of The People.
The Muse set was jam-packed with singles like; Super Massive Black Hole, Hysteria, Stockholm Syndrome, Madness, Plug In Baby, and Uprising. I wondered if having Metallica on the Mad Cool lineup had influenced the Muse setlist choice because this show was heavy, and I loved it.
Newest single Won’t Stand Down is an exciting sign of things to come from Muse. The breakdown in this song is the heaviest, most outright metal thing they have ever done. This was followed by an encore of unreleased track Kill Or Be Killed, which is going to burst a few eardrums when it’s released. It opened with a wonky pitch-shifting guitar part reminiscent of Tom Morello or Jack White but morphed into a ferocious chugging beast, sounding like Slipknot in Space.
No Muse show would be complete without a ludicrous bit of sci-fi stage wizardry and they’ve taken it to an almost Spinal Tap level of madness with the appropriately named song Behold The Glove. As Matt Bellamy rose one arm aloft, hand entombed in a sparkling electronically bejewelled silver glove. He played it like a Fisher Price toy for eccentric millionaire children, the crowd raised their own hands in solidarity. It was bizarre and brilliant. I can safely say I’ve never seen anybody play the glove so well.
English metalheads Don Broco kicked off Mad Cool Day Four and sadly my final day in Madrid. Leon Bridges serenaded the crowd with a cool chilled out set of vintage R&B, entrenched with plenty of Motown Soul. The Mainstage was then host to alternative rock icons, Pixies. Bassist Kim Deal’s joyful demeanour is a contrast to singer Frank Black’s stoic thousand-yard stare. The ever expanding crowd really got behind the big hits like Where Is My Mind and Monkeys Gone To Heaven with singalongs throughout.
I couldn’t get to Kings of Leon and instead found myself gearing up for another British band, Easy Life. They kicked off with the massive single Pockets and the atmosphere immediately became electric. Their laid back blend of jazz, indie and hip hop was charged up and amplified for the live show and hungrily devoured by the crowd, who offered back every bit of energy they absorbed from the band. With half the crowd on each other’s shoulders, fist pumping the air to every tasty beat drop, the vibe in the Amazon Music tent was joyful.
Closing out the night was Brighton’s riff machine Royal Blood. A two-piece powerhouse of wildly catchy melodies, bone-shaking drum beats and gargantuan bass riffs. Thanks to their late slot with few clashes, Royal Blood had the attention of the entire festival. A fact that wasn’t lost on singer Mike Kerr who couldn’t help but remark on the size of the crowd and had to take a minute just to drink it all in. Opening with the title track of their latest album Typhoons, the newer disco-inspired material slots right in with their earlier heavy rock tunes. Boilermaker is a particularly danceable tune with a swaggering drumbeat, designed to make you sway.
Drummer Ben Thatcher playfully withheld the closing note of early single Little Monster as he launched into an epic extended drum solo before eventually Mike Kerr slashed the tension away by hitting us with the main riff, one last time.
For the final song, Mike Kerr slowly dished out four satisfyingly sinister notes on his bass, demanding a cheer after each run. Left side, then right side, the usual crowd baiting stuff which is required when you’re playing to an audience of this size. Those four notes are the building blocks of the brilliant breakdown for one of their finest songs, Out Of The Black. The moment finally arrives and the bruising extended riff is replaced by the deliberately restrained, machine gun fire, drum beat before an almighty drop as the thunderous main riff is unleashed.
I was heartbroken I couldn’t stay for the final day. Jack White and Blood Red Shoes were almost enough for me to rebook my flights, but I did manage to get four incredible days of live music in unbeatable weather. It’s going to make packing my wellies for my next British festival that little bit more painful. Here’s hoping Mad Cool can pull off an equally stellar lineup in 2023.
For more info, and tickets for Mad Cool Sunset Festival September 2022: http://madcoolfestival.es/
Words and photos by Jack Flynn. You can find more from him at his authors archive, and as @jackflynnphoto on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well as his photography website.
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