It’s that time of the year when everyone tries to take stock of the chaos of the past 12 months, so for the sake of documentation, I’ve made a list of all the bands I managed to catch in 2012. I was only offered a short sample of some of these acts at festivals, but a lot were at shows of their own. There were also a lot of really stand-out performances in this mix and it’s coincidentally the great time of annual top 10/20/25/50/whatever lists, so maybe I’ll get around to picking out some of my favourites as well.
Here’s who I checked out in concert this year, through work or out of my own volition:
- Action Bronson
- Alexisonfire (twice)
- Arctic Monkeys
- AWOLNATION
- Bad Religion
- Ben Caplan
- Black Label Society
- Black Lips
- The Buzzcocks
- Cancer Bats (twice)
- Ceremony (twice)
- Dan Mangan
- Death Grips
- Deftones
- Descendents
- DIANA
- Dillinger Escape Plan
- Explosions in the Sky
- The Flaming Lips
- Feist
- Florence + the Machine
- Fucked Up (thrice)
- Girl Talk
- Goatwhore
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor
- Gogol Bordello
- Greg Ginn and the Royal We
- GWAR
- The Hives
- Hollerado (twice)
- In Flames
- Jimmy Cliff & Tim Armstrong
- Justice
- Kids & Explosions
- Killer Mike (twice)
- Less Than Jake
- Lowlands
- Madness
- Marilyn Manson
- Mazzy Star
- MellowHype
- METZ
- Moneen
- Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
- NOFX
- OFF!
- Protest the Hero (twice)
- Pulp
- Radiohead
- Raekwon and Ghostface Killah
- Refused (twice)
- Rival Schools
- Slipknot
- Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre (feat. the Tupac hologram, Eminem, 50 Cent, Wiz Khalifa)
- Shotgun Jimmie
- Squeeze
- Suicidal Tendencies
- System of a Down
- Teenage Head
- Tool
- Trash Talk
- USS
- The Wooden Sky