{"id":590997,"date":"2026-08-12T14:08:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T14:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/590997\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T14:08:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T14:08:24","slug":"meet-party-cannon-the-candy-coloured-group-turning-death-metal-branding-on-its-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/590997\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Party Cannon, the candy-coloured group turning death metal branding on its head"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the decades, I’ve sat through more design conferences than I can count, and Party Cannon’s logo turns up in an unreasonable number of them. It’s the case study everyone loves: a death metal band from Dunfermline who ditched the illegible black spikes that dominate the genre’s logos and went instead for the bright, bouncy, rainbow lettering of a child’s birthday invitation. Spotting them on a festival lineup poster is not difficult.<\/p>\n

So when I saw they were playing the main stage at independent metal festival Bloodstock 2026, I knew I had to meet them. I’ll be honest, though: nothing quite prepared me for the gig itself. <\/p>\n

Hundreds of fans turned up dressed as bananas, waving inflatable octopuses, dinosaurs and beach balls as the group launched into their brand of what they call “party slam”. A giant phallic prop, which grew steadily larger throughout the set, bounced across the crowd. At one point, their mascot Vominic Stonebones dragged the singer offstage after a comedy routine involving a folding chair and a fake awards adjudicator. <\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

It was all gloriously silly, and the crowd knew exactly what was expected of them. Turn up in costume, crowdsurf on a beach inflatable, and don’t take a second of it too seriously. <\/p>\n

What struck me most was how precisely the audience had absorbed the band’s own tone. These weren’t fans being entertained from a distance. This was a crowd performing the joke back at the group with total commitment. And that’s a lesson that anyone in branding can learn from. <\/p>\n

The men behind the mayhem<\/p>\n

Firstly, though, how did Party Cannon’s unique approach to visual design come about? As Chris explains, they began out as a fairly conventional group, before their original singer told a story about wasting money on a novelty party cannon that never worked. The other members found it so funny that it became a song title, then later the whole identity. <\/p>\n

“It wasn’t a case of: ‘If we do this, we’ll stand out on lineups,'” Chris says. “I wish I was that smart. If I was that smart, I wouldn’t work a nine-to-five desk job!”<\/p>\n

The props and stage sets, including the ever-growing inflatable that had just bounced across the crowd, are Martin’s domain, something he took on properly once he joined the band around 2021. He’s candid about the budget behind it all. <\/p>\n

“As you know, art is normally made out of limitations, right?” he says. “If I had all the money in the world, I’d be making these brilliant PVC signs. But I’m using cardboard, I’m using EVA foam, and stuff that you can get out of a B&Q.” <\/p>\n

Again, with modesty, he describes taking Chris’s “sandbox” of silly song titles and stage banter and building physical props to match it, rather than arriving with a grand visual concept of his own.<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Katja Ogrin<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Tom May<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Tom May<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

That phallic prop sometimes gets over-analysed by fans, he adds. Martin recalls one tour where a fan pulled him aside to explain it was clearly a satire on guitarists performing onstage self-gratification. “I just like drawing cocks, mate,” he told the fan, deadpan. “Sometimes people get it too much,” he tells me. “They’re reading far too much into it, when it is just playtime, having a bit of fun.”<\/p>\n

The music is serious. Everything else is not<\/p>\n

But why did a band like this take so long to arrive, and in a genre usually built on horror and menace? “There’s a lot of bravado and masculinity in the way of it being like, I call it the horror movie, I want to murder you, blah, blah, blah,” says Martin. “When in actual fact we write songs about Mario Kart and fellatio: things that are always good.” <\/p>\n

For this reason, Chris sees Party Cannon as an accidental gateway into hardcore metal: a friendlier front door for people who might be put off by a more conventionally aggressive band name. But he admits this, too, basically happened by accident. “I didn’t set out with any goals,” he said. “I feel like it kind of came to me.”<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/p>\n

Photo: Sophie Jones<\/p>\n

So are they worried about other bands copying their approach now that it’s such a recognisable playbook? Martin waves the idea away philosophically. “Nothing original has ever been done, and with the amount of bands that we see on a regular basis, it’s just like osmosis,” he says. “If someone takes the signage, good luck to them. I wish them all the best.” <\/p>\n

Branding masterminds, or just lucky?<\/p>\n

Sixteen years into the band’s life, none of them sound remotely tired of it, even if Martin admits the physical cost of throwing himself into a banana-costumed crowd every night is starting to add up. “Every big gig I jump in the crowd, and my kidneys hurt because I’ve been beaten up quite a lot today,” he says, only half-joking. “I’ll know it’s time to ease off if I start peeing blood.”<\/p>\n

My conclusion? These aren’t the branding or market masterminds that a dozen conference talks have imagined them to be. Or perhaps they are, and simply don’t realise it. Either way, the real branding miracle here is not so much just a clever logo, but the sheer, infectious commitment of everyone involved in Party Cannon\u2014band and audience alike. <\/p>\n

From a joke that started with a broken novelty item and evolved into thousands of people crowd surfing in fruit costumes on a Friday afternoon in Derbyshire, none of this is something you can plan in advance on a whiteboard. You can only build it, one daft prop, one rude work, and one dedicated audience at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the decades, I’ve sat through more design conferences than I can count, and Party Cannon’s logo turns…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":["post-590997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}