Cabaret

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Reading Festival 2006

Friday 25th to Sunday 27th August 2006
Little Johns Farm, Richfield Avenue, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 8EQ, England MAP
£135 for weekend (including camping), £60 any day

Daily capacity: 55,000

As well as many other musical high points and some fantastic bands on show, Reading also had a crazy cabaret of the most bizarre kind. Some of the carnival presented by Ronnie King sure wasn’t for the feint hearted. Between the musical acts the cabaret offered some gross out performances with nudity including necrophilia, blood lust, fire, sadism and suspension by meathooks over the two nights!

Early highlights in the Cabaret tent included Big Al’s performance in the Stars Up Their Arse Karaoke doing a great rendition of Meatloaf and stopping the bottles flying towards the stage. Tim Ten Yen provided some eccentric songs in a Mike Flowers/Divine Comedy style with songs about anemonies, bears and his own psyche! Goldierocks then provided a few bangin’ tunes to bring us all up before the midnight hour and the start of the bizarre cabaret!

All this plus the rather eccentric and talented Son of Dave once of Crash Test Dummies fame who played harmonicas and stamped his feet to blues numbers he fed through an old Vox amp. It sounded lovely.

Roxy Velvet is up next with her erotic cabaret, stripping off and doing a fan dance much to the delight of the men (and some women) in the crowd. Son of Dave returns for a bit before Esme turns up in a wedding dress to shock us with ‘Nice Day for A Meat Wedding’ to a Goth soundtrack she strips off, takes a huge amount of coke, covers herself in champagne and then eats various parts of her dead husband laid out on a table beside her. She starts by crawling over his decaying body licking him and smearing herself in his blood. Then she cracks open his ribs to delve into liver and organs to smear over her breasts, before throwing them at the crowd. Next it’s chopping off and then licking his dick, before consuming his heart and for a finale feasting on his maggot-ridden head! Grotesque.

Mr Methane relaxes the crowd a little with his fart humour before Son of Dave returns for more music to soothe. We’re relaxed again and not prepared for Roxy Velvet’s return. This time she has a blood lust in her sexy nurse’s outfit. So, she strips off and sticks needles in her chest (ouch) before writhing erotically in a fountain of blood and cutting her stomach open to pulse in sexual ecstasy until she spasms to death. Not surprising a few members of the audience faint and one girl needs medical help.

Fire Tusk Pain Proof circus could also do with medical help Lucifire has captured a necrophiliac clown, and tortures him on a rope for a while, soon he becomes Tusk and is subjected to lying on a bed of nails while a patio tile and an apple on his chest are chopped at with an axe. Bruising. Then the drooling Tusk has a staple gun fired into his back to attach balloons to him these are then burst by a smoking Lucifire throwing darts (Bullseye) into his back. Then he is thrashed with a burning whip and finally he joins Lucifire for a fire display. It’s been pouring with rain but it stops just before the end and we walk out into a clear night, but one with pools of water underfoot. We discuss whether we’ll go and see the cabaret again tomorrow when Lucifire says she’ll suspend herself above the crowd from meathooks in her back. Ouch!