Live review: Hollywood Vampires and The Jesus and Mary Chain at The O2, London on Wednesday, August 12 2026
By STEVE MASCORD
PUNCTUATION is important but still not 100 percent efficient. “Rock’s dead” is generally presented as a disputed pop culture observation but “rock’s dead” can also be a select group of un-alive individuals.
In any case, early portents tonight were not particularly good.
The Jesus and Mary Chain were boring for anyone weened on arena rock and I couldn’t get it out of my head that half of Van Halen, Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, had to get out of this venue a couple of months ago because it was too big for them. Yet the self-professed “world’s most expensive bar band” can fill it (albeit in scaled-down, curtained-off mode) and charge £250 a ticket because they have a movie star as a member.
Life’s not fair.
Indeed, the most interesting thing during the early part of the night is the AI powered bar at the back of the arena at floor level. You swipe upon entry, it takes £10 off your card and then it links you to your card using facial recognition. You take your £9.50 beer and leave, it refunds the 50p to your card. My fellow gig goers were looking at the entry to this bar with fear in their eyes, like it was a Martian lander out of War Of The Worlds.
When the Hollywood Vampires hit the stage after the Jesus and Mary Chain perform in near darkness (there is some heaviness late in their set, musically, but this is shoe gazing 101), things don’t immediately get more interesting than the AI bar.
“I Want My Now” is a very average song, like an offcut from a forgettable Alice album.
But maybe it was those £9.50 beers doing their work and maybe it was Alice, Johnny Depp, Tommy Henriksen and Joe Perry. Things got better. Mostly it was, I think, the images of dearly departed musicians that kept flashing up on the screen, including Australia’s Bon Scott, Malcolm Young and Olivia Newton-John. I did not see Michael Hutchence projected on the rear of this gigantic stage but maybe he was there.
It kind of drawned gradually: this is a genuine tribute to departed musicians. It’s coming from a good place, Cooper turning what would otherwise be morbid into something playfully ghoolish.
And sure, we get “School’s Out”, “Living On The Edge” (the latter from a dead band?), “Heroes” and “Baba O’Reilly” but there are also more obscure tracks from the Killing Joke, The Velvet Underground and the Jim Carroll Band.
Alice Cooper band’s Glen Sobel is on drums, go-to Chris Wyse is on bass and Henriksen’s lash at “Highway To Hell” – with Joe Perry playing the part of Angus – is bloody magnificent.
And it’s a good crowd. The German-English couple from Southhampton on my right go to lots of pub gigs and rattle off bands I’ve never heard of. The Royal Navy veteran on my left, less so I suspect. These days people don’t go see rock bands whose names they don’t recognise and it takes a movie star to get them to do so tonight.
That’s lamentable but not necessarily a bad thing.
Ronnie Wood gets up to play two songs, one of which is “Brown Sugar”, a song his day-job band refuse to perform for ideological reasons. Some of the social media commentary on the footage is blatantly ageist and a warning to all of us regarding our impending invisibility and worse.
When I go for one more beer at the AI bar, I am angrily ordered to leave. It is broken. I must check if I got my 10 quid back.
An AI bar using facial recognition that breaks down – could there be a more fitting end to a night of jolly worship of rock’s dead?
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