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It’s ghouls’ night out for the second half of Wednesday 13’s sold-out Weekend Of Horrors and the Garage is rammed with zombies and spooks as EVIL SCARECROW [7] prove themselves the perfect openers.

Wizards of audience participation – who else could prompt shouts of “Bra!” and “Girl’s pants!” from their crowd? – they get everyone robot dancing to Robototron, howling along to Hell Dog and even side-stepping to Crabulon. They may be utterly silly but judging from all the cheers, they’ve just cranked their fanbase numbers up big time.

Evil Scarecrow: who needs a frontal lobe anyway? (Image credit: Derek Bremner)

But the dial on the cheer-o-meter spins to 11 when WEDNESDAY 13 [8] and his band come out. It’s frightening to think 10 years have passed since his debut solo album Transylvania 90210 and, although he’s been rotating selected tracks live for years, hearing it in its entirety is a reminder of just how dark and gothic it was.

Wednesday throws in a few extra treats from Skeletons, Calling All Corpses and Fang Bang to further raise our spirits, but the cheesiness and horror props that made him a bit of a comedy act are gone. There are no Murderdolls classics, no Frankenstein Drag Queens favourites and no Bourbon Crow-soaked interludes at all.

The result is a tight and slick gothic metal show. Maybe Wednesday has decided it’s time to be taken more seriously, and you know what? It works.

Contributing to Prog since the very first issue, writer and broadcaster Natasha Scharf was the magazine’s News Editor before she took up her current role of Deputy Editor, and has interviewed some of the best-known acts in the progressive music world from ELP, Yes and Marillion to Nightwish, Dream Theater and TesseracT. Starting young, she set up her first music fanzine in the late 80s and became a regular contributor to local newspapers and magazines over the next decade. The 00s would see her running the dark music magazine, Meltdown, as well as contributing to Metal Hammer, Classic Rock, Terrorizer and Artrocker. Author of music subculture books The Art Of Gothic and Worldwide Gothic, she’s since written album sleeve notes for Cherry Red, and also co-wrote Tarja Turunen’s memoirs, Singing In My Blood. Beyond the written word, Natasha has spent several decades as a club DJ, spinning tunes at aftershow parties for Metallica, Motörhead and Nine Inch Nails. She’s currently the only member of the Prog team to have appeared on the magazine’s cover.