Rock for People: Billy Talent steals the show from Machine Gun Kelly

It’s night and the show of flying drones is just finishing above the main stage. On a generous stage Rock for People the outlines of a giant ziggurat, or stepped pyramid, are already emerging. The lights go up, rapper and singer Machine Gun Kelly appears on top of the structure. He is holding a pink guitar in his hands, a giant sun is shining on his back from the canvas.

Thirty-three-year-old Colson Baker, as the artist from Texas, USA, is called, stands a good fifteen meters above the five-member band, which begins to play the first notes of Papercuts.

Machine Gun Kelly became famous as a brash rapper with a hard-to-hit cadence of words, but three years ago he also released the album Tickets to My Downfall full of melodic songs on the border between pop and punk. When performing at Rock for People, he alternates both positions. After two guitar tracks, he presents a single that is only two weeks old Pressure referring to the trap genre.

The band gives an almost acting performance. Each musician is dressed differently, they experience the play theatrically. When they’re not on instruments, they’re swinging them like rappers or frantically bobbing their heads to a metal-style beat.

Energy leakage

The drummer wears a kind of steel mask over his face, swings his hands high in the air, twirls his mallets between his fingers between every other beat. It plays precisely, just like the effect. This is characteristic of the whole concert. As the flames whip around them, the musicians resemble extras from the Mad Max movie series. The stage is often lit in pink. As soon as the space is broken up by geometric shapes created by lasers, the scene evokes the sci-fi film Tron for a change.

But with all that choreography, it’s hard to get rid of the impression that Machine Gun Kelly is more like the central character of an hour and a half long story.

The carefully rehearsed show is governed by the ticking of a metronome, every second is programmed, despite the presence of the band, everything sounds from playback, including the singing. Machine Gun Kelly “sings” from the crates, even though on stage he’s actually waving a microphone in the air and heckling the audience.

One moment a rocker, one moment a rapper, in the end he mostly seems like a melancholic and a little tired clown. Within one song, he goes from a guitar ballad to a frantic rap and then to heavy metal.

People in the cauldron under the stage are chanting the abbreviation of his name “MGK, MGK, MGK”, others are jumping around near the noodle stand. But most of the listeners seem to have come more out of curiosity. It fails to build atmosphere, perhaps because each stronger moment drowns out the silence between songs.

At the same time, fires burn, lights glow and lasers sweep across the stage, from which loud, punchy music pours. A lot of energy radiates from the stage, but it escapes somewhere into the air. As if Machine Gun Kelly were in a frozen room, drowning under a window that was wide open.

In the second half of the concert, the tempo slows down and does not pick up again. The finale sounds the most embarrassing. “Thanks so much, enjoy the rest of the night,” Machine Gun Kelly gushes after the song My Ex’s Best Friend and just like the band leaves. The Pressure clip is playing on the screen, the novelty is playing for the second time that evening. According to the program, the performance was supposed to end in fifteen minutes. The crowd fumbles for a moment, then slowly disperses. The biggest star of the evening finally disappeared without applause. Before the audience knew what was happening, it was over.

The charm of simplicity

The main actors of the day at the airport in Hradec Králové, where the festival takes place from Thursday to Sunday, are punks Billy Talent. The Canadian quartet comes on stage while the lights are still on. It doesn’t need pyrotechnics or flashy lighting effects. All it takes is twenty solidly played songs of a few chords.

Guitarist Ian D’Sa opens the concert with a deep, heavily distorted riff of an older song Devil in a Midnight Mass. A straightforward introduction is followed in rapid succession by one song after another. The audience knows most by heart.

In the end, punk veterans Billy Talent got the biggest applause on Friday. | Photo: Petr Klapper

“This record turns twenty years old this year. That means we’re fucking old. Thanks for being with us all this time,” singer Benjamin Kowalewicz introduces the track River Below from the album simply called Billy Talent.

They started in 1993 and since then they haven’t changed the line-up, which is noticeable. They deliver solid performance, even after three decades they do not lose energy. There is no threat of routine.

At one point, singer Kowalewicz throws off his jacket, underneath is a black t-shirt with a white heart on his chest. Probably as a reminder that loud and aggressive punk rock represents a safe island of belonging and empathy in an otherwise rather inhospitable world. “Punk rock is about being kind to other beings,” he declared at the turn of the millennium, the now deceased Joe Strummer, singer of The Clash.

The message of those words can be felt in the air even during Billy Talent’s performance. “You told me you wouldn’t be afraid of heights anymore,” Benjamin Kowalewicz repeats in the track’s chorus Afraid of Heights from 2016. “In a perfect world, her face wouldn’t exist / In a perfect world, a broken heart would heal by now / In a perfect world, I wouldn’t go to therapy / In a perfect world, I wouldn’t want to throw up from all of this,” he then retorts into the cutting guitars of song Perfect World about unhappy love and an inhospitable world.

Miniature drones fly above the audience. During the song Rusted From the Rain the punk group turns into a rock ensemble. To the dense ballad, people hear and sing it word for word.

“Now we’re going to play you a brand new song. No one in the world has heard it before,” Kowalewicz then announces. A wave of tension runs through the crowd. But that lasts only until the first first notes Devil on My Shoulder, the band’s biggest hit released in 2009. It is one of the last items on the setlist. Billy Talent says goodbye without big gestures, but to a piercing applause.

Fallen Leaves as played by Billy Talent this Friday at Rock for People. Photo: Petr Klapper Video: More Than Meets The Eye

A perfect world exists

When something is happening on the main stage, the other Rock for People stages tend to go quiet. At such times, the area seems empty, people are sitting in chairs, girls have colorful chemlon braided into their hair. In the back, people smoke hookah on carpets. In front of the big logo of the festival, the imaginary center of the action, preparations are underway for the fire show.

It’s getting dark, the smaller so-called Táborák stage is full as always. People sit around a fire, play acoustic guitars and sing. It sounds right now Song 2 by the UK’s Blur. Looking around, it seems that the perfect world that Billy Talent was singing about a few hours ago might exist after all. At least for Rock for People visitors.