At five o’clock in the afternoon, Alice Cooper, reliable as ever, gives Welcome To Rockville a stadium-sized circus of horrors. With the temperature creeping toward 100 degrees, the Master Of Shock remains ice cool as he doles out decapitations, executions and fights against a massive Frankenstein’s monster at Daytona International Speedway.
He should check over his shoulder, though. Because Spencer Charnas is looking to usurp his cartoonishly carrion-stained throne. While headliners Guns N’ Roses close out the first day of this year’s bash, over the other side of this gargantuan site, he and Ice Nine Kills are giving Daytona a gory but charming lesson in camp, wonderful, ’80s B-movie violence.
There’s stabbings with big knives. At one point he shoots Agent Smith from The Matrix in the head. At another, he emerges as Freddy Krueger with a big, fearsome glove. He duets with viral sensation MAPHRA for her first-ever live performance. And as is now tradition, during the banging Hip To Be Scared Spencer, dressed in a pristine white shirt, braces and mack, does the bit from American Psycho where Patrick Bateman kills Paul Allen with an axe in the face, to – naturally – enormous cheers.
Spencer himself is a ringmaster to rival Coop. And, like his much older counterpart, he has the perfect grasp on why the grotesque and the horrible can be really, really funny. A flaming foetus swung around by its umbilical cord by Art The Clown from Terrifier is perhaps not something for polite conversation, but here, to the biggest crowd on this stage all day by some distance, it’s an absolute scream. And talking of Scream, Ghostface comes out to direct a string quartet. Marvellous.