"Guys, we did it. We made Ministry synthpop again," music journalist Annie Zaleski triumphantly tweeted Saturday, after the Chicago industrial band did the unthinkable and — exactly 41 years and one day after the release of Ministry's uncharacteristically poppy debut, With Sympathy — the band performed three songs from that polarizing album at Pasadena's Cruel World festival.
"Isn't it weird to watch Hell freeze over in real time?" posted another fan, after frontman Al Jourgensen, his singing Ministrettes, and his string-playing Ministring-ettes took a stage festooned with With Sympathy-style blood-red roses and Jourgensen intoned: "This one's called... 'Work for Love'!"
Casual Ministry fans — or fans who only got on board once the band ironically broke through with much less commercial-sounding industrial albums like The Land of Rape and Honey, The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, and Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs — might not fully grasp the significance of Jourgensen embracing a record that he had such an "such an aversion towards," he literally did not listen to it for four decades and famously burned the master tapes.
"My hatred for this record was so deep," the industrial-metal provocateur — who furiously disavowed the album and went on to orchestrate one of the most drastic career/image reinventions in music history — exclusively told Music Times' Lyndsey Parker last year. "As a matter of fact, the two-inch [master] tapes of it, the actual two-inch tapes, I had a barbecue party and I burned them on a barbecue. So, there's no existing original With Sympathy's. I just burned them."
It was a little over four years ago, right before the COVID-19 pandemic, that Jourgensen started to come around to his debut album (which he has long claimed he was forced to make by his record label boss at the time, Arista's Clive Davis), after he was dragged by a friend to L.A.'s Zebulon club to watch an early-Ministry tribute band called With Sympathy. That's when Jourgensen — who'd started warming to earlier Ministry material in 2019, when he played "(Everyday Is) Halloween" live for the first time in 30 years — spotted a few attendees wearing "Make Ministry Synthpop Again" baseball caps and suddenly became aware of the cult status that his debut album had attained. He then came up with the shocking idea to pull a Taylor Swift of sorts and re-record a few tracks from his With Sympathy era in his more modern style.
"[The new versions will be] a lot more guitar-driven, but not metal. It's pop — it's still pop. Just, we've done it in a way that I think everyone is going to enjoy and see the 40-year progression of how you wrestle with an alligator," Jourgensen told Parker last year. "Wait till you hear the new versions. You're gonna fall in love with us all over again."
And Jourgensen fulfilled that promise at this weekend's third annual Cruel World festival on the Outsiders main stage, when — following a stupendous set by recent Ministry tourmate Gary Numan, who performed his own landmark debut album The Pleasure Principle in full — Ministry played With Sympathy's "Work for Love," "Effigy (I'm Not An)," and "Revenge." The former two tracks had not been performed publicly since 1984. The "Al's Version" remakes offered the best of both (cruel) worlds for fans. They retained their poppiness and remained surprisingly faithful to the original 1983 arrangements — no shouty Cookie Monster vocals or machine-gun speed-metal guitars — but were definitely massive, metallic renditions. Imagine a post-punk Def Leppard, or basically just imagine Ghost. (Jourgensen's faux British accent was a bit missed, however, especially when he didn't pronounce "again" in "Revenge" as "a-GAYNE.")
As much as Jourgensen insisted last year that that he had "no fond memories" of making With Sympathy and still didn't quite understand the record's appeal, he seemed pleasantly surprised at the huge turnout and roaring reaction for his Cruel World set, so perhaps Saturday's triumph changed all that. And perhaps we'll hear those official re-recorded versions soon. Jourgensen and company's "Early Ministry" set also included three Twitch songs, two of which hadn't been played since 1987 ("Over the Shoulder," "Just Like You," and "We Believe"); Ministry's 1981 debut single "I'm Falling," played live for the first time live since 1984; and the band first post-Arista single, "All Day," also being dusted off for the first time in 37 years.
"We're gonna end this f---ing wingding with a certain holiday you may have heard of," Jourgensen quipped at the end of the show, leaving the black-clad crowd in a celebratory mood with, of course, "(Everyday Is) Halloween."
"Right before I got onstage, Al Jourgensen was playing songs from f---ing With Sympathy!" AFI's Davey Havok marveled immediately afterwards, when Dreamcar hit the Outsiders stage. "This is something I never thought possible, on so many levels."
Dreamcar — the new wave supergroup fronted by Havok and comprising Tony Kanal, Tom Dumont, and Adrian Young, whose more famous band No Doubt just reunited last month at Coachella — was another Cruel World highlight, with the band revisiting their one-off 2017 debut album and Havok's strident vocals ringing out spectacularly across Pasadena's Brookside Park grounds on a cover of King's forgotten KROQ gem "Love and Pride," which Kanal used to practice bass to in his teenhood Orange County bedroom.
Another supergroup, Lol Tolhurst x Budgie (the legendary drummers from the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, respectively) made their festival debut on the Sad Girls stage, with Starcrawler's Arrow de Wilde, looking like a Tim Burton marionette sprung to life, prancing out for a ferocious "Uh Oh" and Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock joining in for "We Got to Move" (both tracks from the percussive post-punk duo's debut album, Los Angeles). "Hello, fellow Goths of Los Angeles!" Tolhurst greeted the pale crowd melting in the SoCal sun. "Today, we are all Los Angeles."
But perhaps the day's most surprising special guest was "terrorist drag" performance artist Christeene, who collaborated with Soft Cell on their 2022 comeback album *Happiness Not Included, joining Soft Cell's Marc Almond on the Outsiders stage for his sleazy finale of "Sex Dwarf," perfectly capturing the transgressive spirit of that S&M club classic. Other Cruel World highlights included the Mission U.K., who majestically opened with the stomping battle cry "Tower of Strength" (the post-punk answer to Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir"); returning Cruel World artist Blondie, whose elder stateswoman of both pop and punk, 78-year-old Debbie Harry, breathlessly ran through 10 hits while draped in a mirrorball shroud and looking like a living work of Andy Warhol art; and headliners Duran Duran (who were Blondie's opening act in '82) kicking off their set with the appropriately Goth-adjacent Rio epic "The Chauffeur." But perhaps the most brilliant and victorious performance was by Simple Minds, who hadn't played America in six years, on the Sad Girls stage. Frontman Jim Kerr was in fantastic form, limber and boundlessly energetic with his voice sounding as pristine as his records, the state of the band very much alive and kicking. "You're going to make me emotional!" he told the rapturous crowd at one point. But the set's emotional high point was unsurprisingly the "laaaa, la-la-la-la" mass crowd singalong of "Don't You (Forget About Me)," the anthem of a generation. "I reckon some of you have been practicing for this, singing in the shower," Kerr chuckled. Other post-punk luminaries who performed at Cruel World Saturday included Heaven 17, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Stranglers, Adam Ant, Interpol, Placebo, the Faint, and Tones on Tail (whose Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins have now played all three years of the festival, in various band incarnations). But one dearly missed performer was the Alarm, who had to pull out at the last minute due to the ill health of band leader Mike Peters, who has battled cancer on and off for the past 29 years and was diagnosed last month with a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma called Richter's Syndrome. In between Dreamcar and Ant's sets, the Outsiders stage ran a video message from a stoic but smiling Peters, who gave an update on his condition and declared, "I've got a long way to go, but I'm determined to recover, to make it back to the USA at some point... and hopefully see you all at Cruel World in 2025."
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