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Machine Head’s Robb Flynn on drive-in gigs: “Stupidest fucking shit I’ve ever seen”

By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 23 June 2020

Opinion is divided about the drive-in gigs that have been announced as a stop-gap measure until COVID-19 social distancing rules are sufficiently relaxed to allow proper concerts and festivals to return.

Well, I say opinion is divided. Not so much between those who think it’s a brilliant idea and those who think it’s a fucking rubbish idea. More between those that think it’s an OK short-term compromise and those who think it’s, well, a fucking rubbish idea.

How well concerts that involve punters sitting in or next to their cars will work may well depend on the genre. Would it work for a metal outfit like Machine Head? “Fuck no”, says frontman Robb Flynn.

He spoke about the drive-in concert concept with Kerrang! “I just watched some stupid drive-in show the other day where people sat in their cars and honked when they liked what the band was playing”, he told the magazine. “It was the stupidest fucking shit I’ve ever seen”.

“If cover bands want to do that shit, it’s cool”, he then conceded. “They should have fun. But the whole point of a Machine Head show is having those 5000 people screaming every word, pressed against the barrier, getting sweaty and piling into giant circle pits – just that cathartic release of energy. If the only option is drive-ins for a while, I can wait”.

And in you’re thinking that’s partly because Flynn is an optimist that reckons live music will ultimately swing back into action sooner rather than later post-COVID – by early 2021 at the latest – well, you’d be wrong. In fact, he is very much in the pessimist camp.

“I don’t know if things will ever go back to ‘normal’ again”, he added during his chat with Kerrang! “But I think it could be four years before things get close”.

He went on: “I think this pandemic could go on for at least two years – coming in waves, getting better in summer and worse as we go back into flu season – then it could take another two years for people to get over that shell-shock of having been locked down for so long. Like the Spanish Flu in 1918, it’ll take time for the economy to recover, and for people to have the confidence to go back out there”.

No one really knows how long it will be before live music properly returns of course, and a four year timescale is particularly doom and gloom. I mean, if it was anything like four years before gigs got properly back to normal, I think even the full-on drive-in naysayers would be getting in their cars and watching some music through a windscreen if they had to wait that long.