Prima Donna changed the tone of the afternoon at Off Sunset festival,… a boy band selling t-shirts reading ‘Locked up your daughters’? First of all what daughters? Had they seen the crowd, there were only men there (men can’t have daughters? – Ed)! But the five or so girls attending the festival were already front row, all wide eyed for this high-energy rock band, who is, by the way, about to go on tour with Adam and the Ants next week. They were resurrecting glam rock in all its glory, and the singer, with his lace shirt and Billie Joe Armstrong haircut, was cultivating his slightly androgynous look while giving an extremely dynamic performance, climbing everywhere, jumping in the crowd and over fences, lying down and having a mini ‘I am sick of playing guitar’ crisis, by asking a beer and spilling it at the top of his head.
It was a pure adrenaline-charged set with power rock choruses, some sax and keyboard in the mix and the definitive rock‘ n’ roll attitude you expect from music veterans. They played ‘Psycho’ as a homage to Nick Curran, and even wandered into a ‘I Wanna Be your dog’ territory, totally appropriate considering what I was seeing around me.
Queercore Pansy Division was a gay riot as you can imagine, but musically, I thought they were the gay Weezer to be honest! But the crowd was having a very good time while playing with a giant penis balloon and a male inflatable doll, that were bouncing on everyone’s head. You could read ‘I want a divorce’ on their rainbow flag and ‘At least I am not Christian’ on Chris Freeman’s bass and, sure, with titles such as, ‘Dick of Death’, ‘James Bondage’, ‘Fem in a Black Leather Jacket’, ‘That’s so fucking gay’, all their songs were about gay sex pride, but these guys could rock, punk rock, and they even had a country song ‘He Whipped My Ass in Tennis (Then I Fucked His Ass in Bed’, a disco song (‘No Protection’) because ‘everyone knows how much gay people love disco’. The crowd was acclaiming each one of their offensive and hilarious songs, and guitarist Joel Reader, the only heterosexual in the band, explained that cocksucker, the worst insult in the English language, ‘should rather be reserved for people you like because it is the nicest thing you can do to someone’, just before shouting ‘I’d rather fuck an asshole/Than be one just like you’ during the song ‘Some of my best friends’. Yep, that was the type of conversation going on and during their set, I heard more insults to the Catholic church than during an atheist convention,… I just loved them!
Bassist Chris Freeman even did a costume change, and came back wearing a glittering dress to rip off the pages of the Bible while singing ‘I’m gonna be a slut’,… ‘The Catholic Church can eat a dick, and I am not saying this in a good way’, said guitarist Joel Reader, before covering the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘it’s a Sin’. People were punching into the inflatable penis with even more energy, and nobody wanted this happy debauchery of power rock to end as they called the band for an encore!
The San Francisco quartet Imperial Teen (actually most of the bands were from San Francisco, no surprise there) closed the night with their catchy and multi-voiced-harmonies poppy songs. Four people together had never sound sweeter, and these male-female harmonies produced sugared hooks and sing-along choruses with some light handclaps and a palpable and stamping energy. 
‘We switch instruments a lot’ they said before trading places. ‘We saw a lot of asses in the crowd earlier,… are there still a lot of asses or is it too cold now?’ said Jone Stebbins, ‘I know, it’s never too cold!’ she added. Some of their songs were like sonic kaleidoscopes, changing shapes and colors at each guitar riffs and harmonies.
‘This song has never sounded better’ they all agreed on after singing their hit song ‘Yoo Hoo’. They are a half-gay band, since two of them Roddy Bottum and Will Schwartz are gay, which may have explained their presence at the festival, but they weren’t displaying any of Pansy Division’s hilarious and outrageous flamboyance or some of the previous bands’ aggressiveness, instead, their bouncy and bubbly light pop filled with sharp hooks was a breath of fresh air in this summer night.
Setlist
Sugar
You’re one
No Matter What You Say
Our time
Yoo Hoo
Ivanka
Million Dollar Man
Room with a view
Runaway
Butch
Punk
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