A friend of mine saw Wednesday 13 at a festival in Manchester this summer. He admitted that he hadn’t known who Wednesday was beforehand, but he ended up being one of his favourite artists of the entire weekend.
With all due respect to my mate, I can’t quite work out how he had managed to avoid him for so long. Joseph Poole has been knocking around for almost 30 years, doing what he does with the Murderdolls, Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13 and under the Wednesday 13 name.
What he does is captured perfectly on Un-Alive From Pol’and’Rock 2025, recorded in front of 750,000 people at the Polish festival. It is essentially the same show I saw him play at The Asylum in Birmingham later that year, only on a considerably larger scale.
If you’ve seen Wednesday before, you know the drill. It is a full-on horror show and tongues are always firmly in cheeks.
Following the ominous introduction of “Blood Fades To Black”, “Look What The Bats Dragged In” and “Too Fast For Blood” immediately establish the tone. Wednesday knows exactly what he is doing and feels like he would drag the entire crowd along kicking and screaming if he had to. He never does, because he has always possessed the ability to win an audience over.
“Rotting Away” brings death, destruction and mayhem that Alice Cooper would be proud of, while “I Want You Dead” is all about fists in the air. “When The Devil Commands” sees more horns than OnlyFans and is about as heavy as Wednesday gets.
Then comes “Summertime Suicide”, and you know exactly how catchy that one is. Speaking of which, “197666” is simply a glam-rock beauty, bringing some sunshine to the graveyard.
“There’s No Such Thing As Monsters” supplies a little nightmare in the middle of the set before “In Misery” takes things somewhere darker. Yet Wednesday never sounds genuinely depressed. Everything is too knowingly ridiculous for that. It is dumb, cartoonish fun, played by people who understand precisely what it is supposed to be.
“It’s A Good Day To Be A Bad Guy” might as well be his personal philosophy, while “Nowhere” is dedicated to Ozzy Osbourne. The gesture makes perfect sense, given the lineage Wednesday comes from, but the Murderdolls song is also a beauty and proof that he has essentially been this good for years.
“I Walked With A Zombie” arrives as song 13 – and you know he probably did – before Wednesday affords himself an encore.
“Bad Things” is as dumb and gleefully violent as it could possibly be. It also sounds as though it belongs at the Cathouse sometime around 1989.
That leaves “I Love To Say Fuck” to close the show. You can almost imagine Wednesday with an umbrella, strutting across the stage like some demented Gene Kelly performing his own version of Singin’ In The Rain.
Wednesday 13 is not unique. He freely borrows from the shock rockers who came before him, from Alice Cooper onwards. What sets him apart is the way he delivers it all with punk-rock energy, low-budget horror aesthetics and complete commitment to the joke.
He is also a quite wonderful live performer, and Un-Alive From Pol’and’Rock 2025 proves it.
Rating: 8/10
