Empire Rockfest Friday Night Feat. Trooper, David Wilcox & Luscious

Rockfest Friday Night by Stuart “Roadie” Roberts

Photos by Stuart Roberts and Bernard Clark

Friday night at Rockfest was just the beginning of an all Canadiana music weekend featuring music veteran – “David Wilcox”, Canadian icons – “Trooper” and some rising stars in rock, “Luscious”.

Kingston’s “Luscious” with Brielle Leblanc rolled out the Rockfest welcome mat. Popular on the festival circuit this year (Ottawa Bluesfest, Line Spike Frontenac), our queen of cool brought more energy to the stage than that Energizer bunny. We think she hit all the hot spots on the stage. And some audience members looked exhausted watching Brielle in action as the band dished out songs from their repertoire like “Fire Me Up”, “Caution Sign”, “Bombshell” and gave the crowd a taste of “Mine” – their latest video release.

 “Trooper”, a touring attraction on the Canadian scene for almost fifty years and with millions of cross country miles that would make an air miles collector jealous were next up. With Paul Laine, handling lead vocals, this quintet of west coast rockers revved up music fans with radio friendly classics. We heard all the hits, “Boys in the Bright White Sports Car”, “Here For A Long Time” and “The Moment That It Takes”. They definitely left everybody wanting more, living up to their tag line, “Arrive. Raise a Little Hell. Leave”

It seems like ‘David Wilcox’ has been a touring fixture, all over the map for decades. Whether you’ve seen him wailing away in a club, or on a big stage like Rockfest, Wilcox’s reputation and popularity among his fans never seems to fade.

He performed all his standard favourites, “Do The Bearcat”, “Downtown Came Uptown”, “Bad Reputation” and “Layin’ Pipe”.  And that brought us to the end of night one at Empire Rockfest which definitely gave us an earful of some of the best music this country has to offer