Location: Zagreb (Croatia), Boogaloo
Concert date: 16.11.2005
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: 60,00HRK
While the legendary Black Sabbath, with antics that include low blows at a professional level, have lately been steadily squandering their reputation in the eyes of every right-minded music fan (just remember Sharon Osbourne’s infamous outbursts at this year’s Ozzfest, when she dragged none other than Iron Maiden, who played there before Black Sabbath, through the mud in front of an already easily led American crowd), the legendary fella, one of the greatest voices of “bad to the bone heavy hard rock” and, at the same time, one of the most underrated names to this day, Tony Martin, is once again lifting up and reviving the legacy of Black Sabath’s so-called “third era” (1986 – 1995). So, if I may do a bit of my own pigeonholing: the late-romantic gothic Black Sabbath period, the one in which they cooked up, through a brilliant blend of melody and penetrating punch, creations that are downright indecently easy on the ears, like the albums “TYR”, “Headless Cross” or “Cross Purposses”. In that era they broke away from the semitone riff-whining typical of the Ozzy years and really delivered albums that are a fantastic textbook example of a simple riff topped with a melodic, robust (in every register) vocal. In that era Iommi could brag that next to the striking Martin on vocals and Nichols on keyboards he had an indestructible dream rhythm tandem in Cozy Powell / Neil Murray.
However you slice it, we can thank only Tony Martin that the tones of these mighty rock, yet sadly overlooked, classics still ring out from time to time. This November Tony also released his second studio album, called “Scream”, and he’s been busily touring concert halls all year. So it happened, luckily, that he was invited to Zagreb’s Boogaloo Club too. The Zagreb show was confirmed late, practically mid-tour and only around the start of November… bad, bad… I caught the news by pure chance.
8 p.m., Boogaloo practically empty (dancers, waiters, 5 Tony Martin fans from Slovenia, which was about as many as Croatia had of its own). A tavern, with a dance floor in it, and what a surprise! Students were using it as their training ground for Latin dance classes. The entrance to the hall was through the next door over, but to get a beer you had to sit right where the dance floor was set up. Funny, on the pillars and walls themselves there were posters stuck up with the “working” title “Black Sabbath Night with Tony Martin (ex-Black Sabbath)”, and right next to them guys and girls were swooning to the beat of rumba and samba. For a rocker truly “a night to remember”, enough to leave you speechless! Heh, what if Martin ends up dancing around on stage to Latin rhythms too. Cha-cha-cha and Black Sabbath hand in hand, brrrr… surely a deadly combination. The ticket cost a laughable 50,00 HRK. All in all, it smelled of first-class exotica.
Warming us up were the locals Big Rock. They “opened their half-hour set with a Black Sabbath song (the self-titled one, what else). The band is a quartet: bass, electric guitar, drums, vocals. With Big Rock the Croatians proved once again that they’re a nation with an exceptional feel for rock music. The guys brought a great Black Sabbath song vividly back to life and sounded solid, tight and supremely confident on stage. The bassist and guitarist are, by the way, members of Undercode, whom “brave little Slovenes” may remember from the Grave Digger or Paul Di’ Anno gigs in Ljubljana years ago. The vocalist nailed Ozzy’s intonation perfectly and Big Rock were very convincing in that spirit too, and further on with Ozzy’s solo hit Crazy Train. The band also presented two songs of their own, with a raw rock riff. The return to Black Sabbath roots followed with Iron Man, another excellent cover, and then the set closed with Wrathchild. Given that there’s just one guitar in the band, it was a very smart pick, since Wrathchild doesn’t demand any death-defying guitar acrobatics. On the other hand, it’s definitely one of the most boring live-flogged Maiden tunes, a reputation Iron Maiden themselves have done plenty to earn. Anyway, Big Rock made very good use of their chance and showed themselves to be a band with an enviable stage performance.
Tony Martin fired up the audience with the hard-hitting, galloping The Law Maker and immediately showed that the man is still in top vocal form, while the band sounded like one unit, decisive and dangerously razor-sharp from the very first beat, just as it should be. In a word, they stormed the stage completely uncompromisingly. The only problem was the sound. It was bad, not clear enough. And it didn’t improve much over the course of the show. The main culprit was the room’s poor acoustics. You could tell especially in the solos, which simply got lost in the otherwise typically massive wall of distorted Sabbath riffing. The guitar tone was a classic approximation of Iommi’s sound, though Jon Harford’s guitar in particular (Tony’s son, who played the guitars on Tony’s new studio album too) shone through above the sound of Fabio Cerrone (Hemisphere), especially in the solo of Headless Cross.
That horrifying, steely, 100-ton sound, shot through with immense melancholy. That was the live sound that enveloped the hall that night and wrapped it in proper, true-blue blackness. I haven’t enjoyed this much melancholy at a single gig in a long time. Black Sabbath, what can you do. Melancholy, convincing in every sense of the word, so the atmosphere was the real deal. Goosebumps crawled all over .Okay, the sound wasn’t optimal, but masterpieces rolled out one after another, and the one that stood out most was the fantastic semi-ballad Dying For Love (from the album “Cross Purposes”), which was especially breathtaking given how much feeling went into the performance. Tony explained to the audience that it was written under the inspiration of the war horrors raging in the Balkans at the time. Among those on stage, the biggest impression was left by drummer Denny Niedham, who showed off a superior mix of power, speed and precision, which the crowd rewarded a few times with roaring applause. Stepping into the drum shoes of the legendary Cozy Powell is no smaller a responsibility and challenge than stepping into the guitar boots of, say, Ritchie Blackmore. Martin surprised those present by adding Children Of The Sea to his repertoire (a song from the Black Sabbath era with R.J. Dio on vocals), which he wittily introduced with the words “my tribute to Black Sabbath”. Martin presented the new album with two stylistically very different songs. The first, placed in the first part of the setlist, was called Bitter Sweet. A semitone “BS Ozzy era” hybrid with a doom feel, while the second, Scream (the title track of the album), is a composition that suits Martin far better. It’s a song of many atmospheres and varied motifs, packed throughout with melody, with an excellent instrumental middle section where multi-instrumentalist Tony Martin surprised us by playing the song’s Celtic motif on an electric violin. I mustn’t forget that on stage next to Martin stood keyboardist Geoff Nichols too, who handled most of the backing vocal lines and who kept Martin company in Black Sabbath. The peak of the regular set was of course the ending! It started with a fantastic rendition of Shining and finished with the one we’d all been waiting for impatiently throughout the whole show, naturally Headless Cross.
The encore was set up so that Martin would get maximum feedback from the crowd. And with a Black Sabbath repertoire, the easiest way to get that is of course to throw in a pinch of their prehistory with Paranoid. Those present naturally jumped into the air and almost stayed up there, but Martin brought them back down to earth with a fade-out of the main riff of Heaven And Hell, which teased us just enough that we wanted more. Instead of the whole of Heaven And Hell, Martin chose to stay with the Sabbath album Paranoid and carried on with another Sabbath classic, War Pigs. That left the crowd fired up long after the show.
Sadly the crowd was small, maybe 200 people at most. So you couldn’t feel any real contact, that proper magic between the band and the audience. Too bad. Folks aren’t what they used to be either, then again rock music is nowhere near what it used to be. Anyway, the nearly two-hour show, despite the below-average sound, turned out solid, and on the other hand, for 50HRK you can’t exactly expect the level of a gig in the middle of New York’s Madison Square Garden. We relived what we came for. And Martin proved to be a man full of drive and energy, very proud of the band and of everything he did for Black Sabbath. He didn’t hide that during the performance. With “Scream” and a new lineup, Tony is returning to the scene after a long time as a solo artist again and wisely sticking to the waters where he’s strongest. Let’s hope we’ll witness more of his top-notch vocals in the future!
Setlist
1.) The Law Maker
2.) I Witness
3.) Eternal Idol
4.) Bitter Sweet
5.) Hand That Rocks The Cradle
6.) TYR/Valhalla
7.) Children Of The Sea
8.) When Death Calls
9.) Devil And Daughter
10.) Dying For Love
11.) Scream
12.) Shining
13.) Headless Cross
—encore—
14.) Paranoid (segues into Heaven And Hell)
15.) War Pigs
