Live from the Cruel World festival: Morrissey, Blondie, Bauhaus, Devo and more

Live from Brookside at the Rose Bowl, this weekend’s Cruel World music festival features some of the biggest names from the 1980s new wave and goth scenes, including honorary Angeleno Morrissey, English goth O.G.s Bauhaus and New York’s CBGB breakthrough stars Blondie, plus Devo, the Psychedelic Furs, the Violent Femmes, Australia’s Church and local legends 45 Grave and Christian Death.

Produced by Coachella promoter Goldenvoice, Cruel World time-travels back to that moment when synthesizers were supplanting guitars and rebel teens born into baby boomer hegemony were hungrily seeking new sounds, ideas and hairdos.

Today is sold out, but tickets remain for Sunday.

Times’ music reporters Randall Roberts and Suzy Exposito will be braving the heat and reporting live from the festival throughout today and tonight.

5:20 p.m. Remember AFI? If you floated between the punk and goth tables in your high school cafeteria, you probably do. This weekend, band members Davey Havok and Jade Puget rolled out their industrial dance-pop project Blqck Audio for a rare performance. In a scene straight out of a Gregg Araki movie, Havok led the angstiest day rave Pasadena’s ever seen. — SE

5:18 p.m. John Lydon, who as Johnny Rotten upended pop culture with his band the Sex Pistols, took the stage at Cruel World in an oversized blue and white plaid suit and clashing plaid tie. Performing with his post-Pistols band Public Image Ltd., Lydon yowled and bellowed through songs from across the band’s career, and did so with a presence that hasn’t at all diminished with age. He was a scary-looking youngster who’s become a scary old man — with a cynicism that has sharpened with age.

When, during “Swan Lake,” he sang, “Never really know / Till it’s gone away / Never realize / The silence in your eyes,” he did so with the passion and fury of a man staring at the abyss. — RR

5:10 p.m. Armed with only a microphone and a red Solo cup, Robert Alfons, who performs under the name TR/ST (pronounced “trust”), spellbound the crowd with the physicality of his performance. Dressed in a nude mesh glitter shirt, Alfons undulated across the stage as footage of concertgoers, dancing spiritedly to his fiendish synth-pop, rolled in the background. — SE

4:28 p.m. Overheard in the VIP area, about 300 yards from the Sad Girls stage, where Missing Persons’ Dale Bozzio was singing the lyric, “Nobody walks in L.A.”

“Ooh, is that Missing Persons playing ‘Walking in L.A.’?”

“Yeah it is!”

“Hmm. I’d go over there but I don’t feel like walking.” — RR

4:18 p.m. There’s a Joy Division-shaped hole in this festival — and the earth at large — but at least we had Los Angeles darkwave band Cold Cave to bring the beat to the Outsiders stage. Fronted by the enigmatic singer Wesley Eisold, the band charged through their four-on-the-floor dance cuts with the painstaking precision of the world’s gloomiest heart surgeons, including tracks from their latest EP, 2021’s “Fate in Seven Lessons.” Eisold, a published poet, had little stage banter: “See you tomorrow,” he said coolly, tossing aside his sleek curtain of hair before retreating from the stage. — SE

3:15 p.m. Is there anything more insensitive to the plight of the undead than scheduling one of their favorite bands at the brightest and hottest time of the day? Surely promoters understood that light diminishes energy in black-clothed cultures.

“All I got is a black cross and two crabs in my left eye,” sang pink-and-purple-haired Dinah Cancer of L.A. goth punk band 45 Grave on “Black Cross,” a circumstance likely exacerbated by the harsh midday sun.

She concluded the song with another rage against the here-and-now reality. “Cancel the world, erase history / There is no future as far as I can see.”

Well, except for the future that happens later today, when the sun will set, a breeze will drift through Brookside, Devo will tell us how devolved we’ve become and Morrissey will confess how miserable he remains. — RR

3:10 p.m. As far as I can see, the hottest real estate at the goth fest is in the shade, under the trees. The competition is cutthroat — but this heat is nothing that L.A. goths can’t handle. For the more photosensitive among us, the nice ladies running the “Visit Pasadena” tent are handing out free parasols. — Suzy Exposito

Christian Death performs at the Cruel World festival.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

2:30 p.m. The vintage T-shirts were on full display at Cruel World, the new wave, goth and proto-alternative festival that just got underway at Brookside at the Rose Bowl. Fans signified their passions while preparing for a searing day in Pasadena, where acts including Devo, Morrissey, Blondie and a few dozen others will celebrate the sounds of the ’80s, in temperatures hovering in the 90s.

Ceremony, Dead Can Dance, Psychedelic Furs, Idles, the English Beat, Iceage, the Clash, X, the Smiths, Epitaph Records, Joy Division: each T-shirt a confirmation that goth and punk culture transcends age and ethnicity.

(One misfit was overheard talking about seeing Rush on the “Hemispheres” tour. Dude, you are at the wrong festival!)

Early in the day, influential So Cal goths Christian Death, whose work starting in the late ’70s focused on grim themes and anti-religious provocations, offered a sun-scorching greeting in the form of “The Alpha and the Omega.”

“Abandon all your hope, all who enter here,” sang guitarist Valor Kand. “If you’re not dead and cold, then you’re the enemy.”

As far as we can tell, we’re all still alive and we’re already very hot. — Randall Roberts