Pyrotechnic deluge, shearing guitars and Gene Simmons spitting fake blood and fire: the group Kiss and its leader put on the show, passing through Hellfest, on the night of Thursday to Friday, for their farewell world tour.
This mythical American glam-metal group – one of the most melodic branches of the genre – is still stunning after 50 years of career. The ultimate tour End of the road, which ends in December in New York, their city, is nothing short of tearful. The quartet still turns out to be stage animals, even if the wrinkles dig into the make-up that made them famous.
At 71, Paul Stanley, singer, always smashes his guitar after the megatube I was made for lovin’ you and another title-signature, rock and roll nite, after two hours of performance. But the real leader is still bassist – and also singer – Gene Simmons, 73. The colossus alone ate the big stage of Hellfest, a French meeting dedicated to metal and its currents, one of the biggest in Europe (60,000 spectators overnight from Thursday to Friday, 240,000 expected over four days).
After Stanley’s two warm-up titles – Detroit rock city” and “Shout it out loud – the concert really starts with Deuce And war machine intoned by Simmons.
He and Stanley are the two founding members still present. But Simmons is really the face of this group where each musician hides behind a different make-up, between Kabuki theater and comic book superheroes.
Psychiatrist and addictologist
Made up like a devil, harnessed in leather and studs, perched on boots with excessive heels, Simmons harangues the crowd and constantly sticks out this tongue that is said to be the longest on the rock circuit. In key moments, the bass player is lit from low angle like in a B-movie horror, spitting fake blood or fire.
He appears valiant, making people forget this heat stroke in Brazil on stage in April: Simmons had to play seated that evening, a sad sequence relayed on social networks.
Kiss’ performance doesn’t have the power of Metallica, which played at the same place last year. But the New Yorkers remain at the top of the basket and show how much they have influenced many formations. On several occasions, the drums rise above the other musicians. A scenography defined in the 1970s and which can be found today with Gojira, a French metal band with an international aura.
The passage of Kiss at Hellfest, in Clisson, a small rural town about forty kilometers from Nantes in the west of France, attracted a disparate audience. Die-hard fans, made up like their idols, rubbed shoulders with a curious family audience. We even ran into Laurent Karila, a famous French psychiatrist and addictologist, wearing the group’s t-shirt.
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Leopard thong
As usual, the concert opened with a belching announcer “You wanted the best, you got it, here comes Kiss, the hottest band in the world”. But at Hellfest, there is always the improbable. Stanley, who speaks a little French, sang the Marseillaise, the national anthem taken up by the crowd, as an interlude, while a fan dressed in a leopard thong was carried by a forest of arms in front of the stage.
So it was one of the last opportunities to see Kiss. Even if the formation could be reborn. Simmons imagine “no problem” in the podcast let there be talk that “20-year-old kids are getting back into makeup” to perpetuate the brand.
No wonder: Simmons and Stanley did not hesitate to continue the adventure without two original members adored by the fans, Ace Frehley, solo guitarist, and Peter Criss, drummer, who left for the first time in the 1980s, then definitively in the early 2000s after a lucrative reformation. The make-up associated with Frehley (space man) and Criss (The cat man) have since been worn by other musicians.
A biopic must appear on Netflix in 2024 so that Kiss is still present on everyone’s lips.