Immaculately Stoned? Not Quite
Stone Gods, the band consisting largely of ex-members of The Darkness, benefit from the 2nd stage being nearest the camp site entrance with the new site design and this makes for a pretty big crowd.
Musically they veer between solid, contemporary sounding rock and quite dated sounding 80s hard rock. In their favour they work the crowd well for an early slot and get a good reaction but with only half an hour at their disposal they don‘t really maximise the opportunity. They do, however, give a tight performance and emergency stand-in drummer Robin Goodrich does a fine job replacing Ed Graham.
The problem with Stone Gods is that despite the solid hard riffs, they simply don’t have the big hooks that (and the comparison is I’m afraid inevitable) The Darkness had. There is the odd better song such as ‘Don’t Drink the Water’, which is faster and catchier but then forthcoming single ‘Knight of the Living Dead’ plods along and isn’t really saved by its more upbeat finale.
They successfully manage to get the crowd going towards the end with ‘Defend or Die’ but the overall impression is decent, not great.