Fucked Up was playing in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday at the FYF fest, and I was happy to have found a good spot front row on the left side, but got immediately disappointed when frontman Damian Abraham decided to sing the entire set out of my sight! As soon as the show started, he removed his layers of clothes, jumped in the pit and bent his half-naked body over the crowd, spitting his vocals with an out-of-control rage. Yeah, I was kind of frustrated I couldn’t see him 99% of the time, as the guy didn’t put a foot on stage the whole time! But his good humor was there, all the time, helping the security guards catching people surfing the crowd, shouting some warm ‘Thank so fucking much’ all the time, basically being the nicest guy in the world while rocking raucously.
As soon as they played, the energy (and the dust) went to the sky and the dense crowd started their intense crowd surfing; soon it was a human tide, boys and girls landing in the pit and getting evacuated one by one by the security in red alert
‘Sean Carlson and Phil are the P.T. Barnum of our generation’, said Abraham talking about the FYF organizers, who started the festival 8 years ago as a small underground thing in Echo Park, ‘Who would think it would be this big?’ he continued, and he kept talking a lot between the high energy, false-hardcore songs that the five musicians left on stage were executing with total efficiency, staying totally impassible and quite indifferent to their frontman’s antics.
Still doing a close body-to-body with the crowd, Damian was calling all the people his ‘homies’ as he was hugging moshers and surfers, shaking security guards’ hands to thank them for their help, and suggesting that we all move to Canada, depending on the results of these elections, if we wanted to benefit from his country’s nationalized health care,… ‘I like your marijuana policy!’, he added, implying California and Canada could both benefit from a new union.
The band obviously played songs off their famous ‘David Comes To Life’ album, such as ‘The Other Shoe’, ‘Queen of Hearts’, as well as older ones such as ‘I hate Summer’ that Damian dedicated to ‘everybody here who’s a little overweight’! There were a few other funny stories, like one about being sure that his penis was working, now that he has two babies, ‘It worked may be twice’, and the one about moving the festival in January when it is only mildly hot because this current hot weather was some no-fat-dude-outside weather,… what can I say the guy was hilarious and in total great shape, looking and sounding like a raucous and furious teddy bear everyone wanted to hug very tight.