CREEPER
PUPPY/DELAIRE THE LIAR
Melo-punk heroes make a dramatic exit
As soon As Creeper announced this gig, billed as ‘One more callous night in the city’, rumours of a split started flying. Accordingly, everything about tonight seems to hold a heightened sense of purpose. The supports – posthardcore duo DELAIRE THE LIAR and genre-mash masters PUPPY – each receive a feverish response, before
CREEPER make a dramatic entrance from behind a white curtain and put in the performance of their lives.
Frontman Will Gould layers on the melodrama amid a twin-guitar baroque punk attack from guitarists
Ian Miles and Oliver Burdett, and absolute adoration greets keyboardist Hannah Greenwood during an emotionally raw Crickets. Only Koko’s sound gremlins let them down marring Into The Black with soupy acoustics. Then, right before final track Misery, they hit us with it. “Not only is it the last show of this album campaign, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do,” announces Will before the band remove their Callous Heart patch jackets and disappear. A black and white montage follows on a screen, ending with the words “Even Eternity Ends”.
When the lights go up the stunned crowd, many in tears, are frozen to the spot, unsure if they’ve just seen their favourite band call it quits in front of their eyes. Some fans, however, will notice that Will’s words mirrored David Bowie’s 1973 Hammersmith Apollo speech when he ‘killed off’ his alter ego Ziggy Stardust; could we have just witnessed an elaborate end to the Callous Heart era? After all, this is the band who held a funeral for tracks they didn’t want to play anymore and once faked their own kidnapping. Who knows, but whether this truly is the end or the beginning of a new chapter in their ghoulish anthology, it feels like the perfect way for Creeper to exit stage left.
DANNII LEIVERS