By Guest Contributor, Lyndsey Parker
When the bill for Pasadena’s fourth annual Cruel World Festival was announced earlier this year, fans did a double-take, or even a triple-take, when ‘Til Tuesday were listed on the post-punk fest’s Gothically sepia-toned poster.
Quite a few Tuesdays — 33 years of Tuesdays, to be exact — had passed since Aimee Mann’s former new wave group last performed, and it had been nearly 36 years since the original lineup had shared a stage. And it had always seemed like singer-songwriter Mann, who embarked on a Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated solo career after she ditched her famous peroxide-blonde rat-tail, had wanted to distance herself from her ‘80s pop past.
But as Mann explained to Variety’s Chris Wilman, when her longtime manager (and former ‘Til Tuesday drummer) Michael Hausman received an out-of-the-blue Cruel World invitation from festival promoter Goldenvoice, she decided that getting the band back together would be an “interesting challenge” and “a bit like a puzzle to solve.” So, she Manned up, so to speak. She regrouped with Hausman (who retired from performing to become her manager, and hadn’t played since ‘Til Tuesday’s split) and her other original bandmates, guitarist Robert Holmes and keyboardist Joey Pesce; took some voice lessons (the former Berklee student actually claimed she was the band’s “weakest link” back in the day, due to her “super-high and kind of weird and sort of punky” vocals, although many fans would beg to differ); brushed up on her slap-bass skills; and accepted Goldenvoice’s offer, despite being “freaked out” by the idea. Understandably, ‘Til Tuesday’s big comeback on Cruel World’s main Outsiders stage, between synthpop sets by Yaz/Yazoo’s Alison Moyet and OMD, ended up being the most anticipated performance of the festival, which took place Saturday, May 17, at the Rose Bowl-adjacent Brookside golf course.
“I am so sorry you have to stand in the rain, damn it,” the dry-witted Mann told Saturday’s dampened crowd. (While Brookside’s Just Like Heaven festival, held just one weekend earlier, had been plagued by record 100-degree heat, it never got hotter than a drizzly 64 degrees at Cruel World, prompting many of the festival’s U.K. acts, including Moyet, to crack obvious jokes about “bringing the weather” with them.) But the cloudly Pasadena sly was the perfect backdrop for the evocative, chiming guitar-pop from ‘Til Tuesday’s three studio albums, like their underrated second and third singles, “Looking Over My Shoulder” and “Love in a Vacuum”; the sentimental road-trip story-song “Coming Up Close”; the Elvis Costello co-write “The Other End (Of the Telescope)”; and what Mann called the most dramatic entries in the ‘Til Tuesday catalog, “No More Crying” and “Don’t Watch Me Bleed.” (“In the ‘80s, you had to write the most dramatic songs possible!” she quipped.) The band also did a faithful cover of “Drive” by fellow new wave Bostonian the Cars, with Mann sharing an anecdote about how Ric Ocasek used to frequent Boston’s Newbury Comics record store when she worked there in the early ‘80s. (This intro was a bit odd, since “Drive” was actually sung by the Cars’ other late frontman, Benjamin Orr, but fans appreciated the intention and let it slide.)
At this point, ‘Til Tuesday had easily proven that they were always more than a one-hit wonder, but they of course ended their set with the “song that made us recognizable in airports across America” — the anthem whose high-MTV-rotation music video inspired an entire generation of ‘80s girls to loudly and proudly rip off their veiled pillbox hats, let down their rat-tailed hair, and stand up to bad boyfriends, “Voices Carry.” By now, ‘Til Tuesday had gone slightly over their strict 45-minute allotment, and since this well-oiled festival was running on an impressively tight schedule, the stage set began revolving mid-song, disappearing the band into the backstage blackness just as Mann was getting to that defiant “he said, shut up/he said, shut up!” coda. But somehow the moment was so uncannily, amusingly synched, it almost seemed like she’d planned this symbolic, dramatic exit. Mann hasn’t ruled out future ‘Til Tuesday reunion shows (“I’m gonna see how this goes,” she told Variety ahead of the festival), but if this gig was a one-time-only event, it was wonderful to hear her voice again in this rare context.
The day’s other stunning female-fronted set was by Garbage, with the off-the-charts-charismatic Shirley Manson taking the stage looking like a piñata at a Björk-themed birthday party (in the best possible way), wrapped in mermaid-green tulle, joking that she hoped her “vagina wouldn’t be on show” if she suffered a wardrobe malfunction. Obviously never one to mince her charming Scottish-brogued words, Manson also admitted, as a comically fitting introduction to “I Think I’m Paranoid,” that she was “gutted” to be playing opposite Devo, who were across the field on the Sad Girls stage, and that she’d been “really freaking out” during the previous day’s rehearsal that no one would show up to Garbage’s set. (She even wryly revealed that her former A&R rep had decided to check out Devo instead.) But as Garbage opened with their 2021 protest song “The Men Who Rule the World,” Manson, ironically, established that she was indeed the ruler of Cruel World that day.
Highlights of Garbage’s Outsiders stage set, which featured Veruca Salt/Smashing Pumpkins veteran Nicole Fiorentino on bass, included ‘90s hits like “Stupid Girl,” the weather-appropriate “Only Happy When It Rains,” the darkly romantic Romeo + Juliet theme “#1 Crush,” and the fist-pumping, face-melting, field-shaking “Push It” — all fitting in seamlessly alongside the live debut of the chant-along future festival classic “There’s No Future in Optimism” from Garbage’s upcoming fantastic eighth studio album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light.
Garbage probably could have squeezed in two or three other crowd-pleasing songs if Manson had kept her banter to a minimum, but since she’s one of the best and most crowd-pleasing banterers in the biz, no one in the audience (which was actually quite large; Manson needn’t have worried) complained. Manson gushed with endearing sincerity about being on the “cusp of tears” to share a bill with her teenhood heroes, saying the gig was “a dream come true” and even telling an anecdote about fangirling backstage over Madness singer Suggs. “We come from weird places nobody’s ever heard of. … This song is dedicated to me and my band from when we were little,” she said, as she adorably introduced “When I Grow Up.”
Earlier in the day, Alison Moyet drew one of the rainy afternoon’s biggest crowds, explaining that she would keep her own usual chatty banter to a minimum in order to cram in as many hits as possible — including Yazoo favorites like the bittersweet loneliness laments “Nobody’s Diary” and “Only You” and the absolute bangers “Situation” and oft-sampled “Don’t Go,” the latter two making all frantically dancing revelers on the Brookside grounds feel like they were upstairs at Eric’s. The art-pop chanteuse’s resonant and robust contralto — a voice so iconic and distinctive that her unofficial successor, Andy Bell (who formed Erasure with Moyet’s former Yazoo partner, Vince Clarke), used to practice to her records — sounded untouched by time, while she looked even more glamorous than she did 40 years again with her slinky black knitwear and steely, Cleopatra-eyelinered stare. There is only her, indeed.
Closing out the apparently inappropriately named Sad Girls stage were “This Town’s” irrepressibly happy local heroines and 2021’s She Rocks Award honorees, the Go-Go’s. Their set leaned heavily on their herstoric debut album Beauty and the Beat, including deep cuts like “How Much More,” “Skidmarks on My Heart,” and “Lust to Love” as well as the breakthrough singles “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat.” The latter was mashed up with a new dance craze, along with the Pony, the Watusi, and frontwoman Belinda Carlisle’s signature step-touch arm-flailing, as guitarist Jane Wiedlin led the crowd through a spelled-out snippet of Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” The band’s 1994 single “The Whole World Lost Its Head” also got an update, with topical lyrics penned by bassist Kathy Valentine that mentioned Stormy Daniels, Melania Trump, Elon Musk, COVID, and pinky pussy hats. Carlisle donned bifocals to consult her new lyric sheet, while Wiedlin proudly strummed a gold-glitter guitar plastered with a “FUCK DJT” sticker.
The Go-Go’s were admittedly sometimes a bit scrappy (at one point, a flustered but amused Carlisle paused and asked her bandmates, “Are we playing different songs again?”), but that was all part of the fun for these first-L.A.-punk-wave pioneers, whose set was accompanied by a looped slideshow of old-school Hollywood fliers and drummer Gina Schock’s vintage candid Polaroids. “Just like the Masque!” Carlisle chuckled, while the lavender-pixied Wiedlin described the Go-Go’s as “kind of sloppy — but good!” Valentine, looking like her childhood idol Suzi Quatro (if Quatro had starred as a Bond girl in Goldfinger, that is) in a thrifted lamé unitard, wisecracked, “We’re the same band we were in 1980!” Wiedlin actually pointed out that the Go-Go’s have had the same lineup, with a few hiccups and hiatuses, for 47 years — “Not bad at all!” — and when expressing her amazement that they were appearing at this festival, she seemed to reference her 1989 cameo as Joan of Arc in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure as she joked, in a San Dimas surfer-bro accent, “If you had told the Go-Go’s that we would play Cruel World a year ago, we would have been, ‘No way!’ But now we’re like, ‘Waaaaaay!’”
Other women who ruled Cruel World 2025 were Northern California folk/Goth/doom-metal provocateur Chelsea Wolfe, and the cooler-than-you ice-queen twosome of keyboardist Shannon Hemmett and bassist Kendall Wooding, from Canadian post-punk quartet Actors, who impressed the crack-of-noon crowd (and amused as well, when Actors frontman Jason Corbett jokingly introduced “How Deep Is the Hole” as being about anal sex). L.A.’s own Tara Busch, the mastermind of audiovisual electronic project I Speak Machine, ably filled the Stephen Luscombe role in Blancmange, as that British electropop outfit played their first U.S. show in 39 years.
And another comeback artist, Light Asylum, who has not released any music since her first and only self-titled debut album in 2012, commanded the stage entirely on her own, just her and a drum machine. The Brooklyn darkwave goddess, whose real name is Shannon Funchess, exuded joy and gratitude as she repeatedly thanked fans for “being so patient for the past 13 years,” debuted two new untitled songs, and promised that new music was coming soon. Hopefully Funchess will be back for Cruel World 2026.
