Sebastian Bach brought ‘The Party Never Ends’ tour to Victoria’s Capital Ballroom.
The former Skid Row lead singer, who seems to like coming to the capital city, was spotted at Ditch Records the day before the show. The last time Bach was in Victoria was October 2024.
Victoria is the only Canadian stop currently scheduled for this tour and Bach made light of the odd routing.
“We’re looking forward to having a fun night tonight. We came all the way here from Portland Orgeon,” Bach told the Capital Ballroom audience. “Then we gotta drive to Boise fucking Idaho. It’s a short little drive. Victoria, BC to Boise, Idaho, it’s like an hour or something. I dunno, two hours.”
The band then jumped into ‘Here I Am’.
If you’re a Skid Row fan, you got almost entirely Skid Row songs, many of which were off the band’s debut self-titled 1989 album.
Between performing Skid Row mega hit ’18 and Life’ and ‘Can’t Stand The Heartache’ Bach got nostalgic about the 1980s.
“I think maybe the 80s was the most fun we fucking had. Do you know what I love about the 80s more than anything? Is that nobody ever talked about politics at all ever! We used talk important shit in the 80s. We used to talk about drinking beer. We used to talk about smoking a little mother nature. We use to talk about playing frisbee.”
He then asked the audience if they wanted to go back to the 80s, play some frisbee and drink some beer before breaking out a white frisbee to toss to the audience as the next song started. Unfortunately, the audience didn’t seem to get the memo that they were supposed to throw it back to the stage through the song instead of trying to keep it. It took quite a bit of coaxing by Bach to get the game going. Crowd members who did attempt to toss the frisbee back were not very good throws. Bach would eventually autograph the frisbee and do one final toss to a lucky fan.
The show wasn’t all Skid Row. Bach also had a couple songs from his 2024 solo album ‘Child Within The Man’ in ‘Freedom’ and Future of Youth. During the break after the latter, Bach joked, “When you’re 57-years-old and you rock this hard you need to catch your breath for a second. I don’t know whether I need another coffee or my first glass of red wine for the evening.”
He then made references to his rolls on Trailer Park Boys and Gilmore Girls, even briefly singing a portion of Gwen Stefani’s ‘Hollaback Girl’. He then went into a medley of ‘Monkey Business’ and Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘I Don’t Know’. At one point he noticed a fan wearing an Ozzy t-shirt and brought her on stage. Another fan was wearing an Ozzy hat and threw it to Bach who put it on briefly before tossing it back.
Sebastian’s Bach’s 15-song set was an hour and half with no encore.
Bach had two bands from California in support. Starting off the night was Los Angeles alternative rock band Blaze Francisco. When I looked up the band before the show, a recent Spin.com feature described their sound as “The Crow movie soundtrack collapsed into the singularity and exploded back out as something both familiar and completely unprecedented.” When they started playing on stage, that description made a lot of sense.
According to the band’s Instagram, this is Blaze Francisco’s first national tour. Technically they could also say international with the Victoria date. Also based on my research, two members of the band were conspicuously absent. I had seen a couple videos on YouTube that had guitarist Liza Light and bassist Phillip Nielson, but neither were on stage at Capital Ballroom.
A highlight of their set for me was a cover of Republica’s ‘Ready to Go’. It was a surprising 90s song to cover, but I would later discover their cover was also on a two-song CD they were selling at their merch table.
The second opening band was Los Angeles metal band Stitched Up Heart. They were were hand picked by Sebastian Bach as an opener for his March 2020 show at Capital Ballroom, but we all know what happened that particular month that would cancel that tour, and every other tour worldwide.
Before the night started, I noted the extra lighting towers set up at the corners of the stage thinking Sebastian Bach was going to have some crazy lighting. Nope. The lights and smoke machines were just for Stitched Up Heart. The rigs were struck down after their set. You don’t often see an opening act get more lighting than the headliner.
With Sebastian Bach being in the hair metal era, the mix of a 90s influenced hard rock band and modern metal band for openers was interesting.
Stitched Up Heart would fit well being paired up with Poppy or Victoria’s Spiritbox. Lead singer Alecia ‘Mixi’ Demner has great stage presence and excellent command of her metal scram and growling vocals.
I overheard many audience members impressed with both opening acts.
