Fucked Up at the Jackpot

​Fucked Up at last year’s Pitchfork Festival in Chicago was a sight to behold. Pink Eyes (Damian Abraham) chewed through a barrage of beach balls tossed to the stage, eventually wearing one as hat before stripping to his shorts to expose his beautifully formed potbelly. One of the guitarists jumped into the crowd. People walked away bloody. In summary: Fucked Up is great live.

But, that was a stage in the wide open spaces of Union Park. At the dungeon-like Jackpot in Lawrence, I was worried that the constrictive space of the venue might damper the band’s kinetic power. The Jackpot is a curious place: narrow, dimly lit, with cheap, low ceilings. But this claustrophobic setting seemed to agitate these punk behemoths even more. The crowd moshed furiously in widening and contracting rectangles of bouncing bodies, like a school of fish swimming in tandem with Pink Eyes’s movement on the tiny stage.