Blind Guardian Soar on the Wings of Slovenian Fans, Throw One-of-a-Kind Metal Party (2006)

I’m standing there with a beer in my hand. What a shattering observation, right? Anyway, the clock struck 8:00 PM! Punctual! Right on the dot! Astral Doors, that is. The Swedes were presenting their latest studio album “Astralism”! With a singer who can sing close to Dio. If it had stopped there, it would’ve been great! But the problem is he simply wants to sing like Dio, and so does the whole band. What set Patrick Johansson apart from Ronnie James Dio yesterday was mostly just his presence. The tall singer easily outweighs Dio by at least double. A giant of a guy compared to Ronnie, that tiny little chick. But the vocals are eerily similar. And so is the band’s whole expression. At one point I thought I heard We Rock, later Stand Up An Shout. Yep, you guessed it! From there it was a short hop to Heaven & Hell and Holy Diver, too. In short: technically nice, solid, and the guys made full use of the time they were given to introduce themselves to the Slovenian crowd. Definitely the right band to warm up for Blind Guardian. Great playing, a somewhat weaker sound with the lower registers breaking through, but still… Quite a decent handful of people were pumping their hands in the air and holding their fists up for Astral Doors for those 45 minutes. A nice set, but like I said, thoroughly obsessed with Ronnie James Dio!

The sight of the hall was a surprise! You could definitely have squeezed another 200 people in there. The show was supposedly sold out almost a month before October 14, 2006. And when you showed up at the scene of the crime, you could still buy a ticket at 8:00 PM.

 

BLIND GUARDIAN: 9:30 PM – 11:15 PM
Let’s leave the non-musical stuff aside. Thunder rolled, the clock struck 9:30 PM, and a huge “Yeeeeahhh!!!” from the crowd greeted the sudden blackout of the hall. Suddenly came the clanging of cold steel of every conceivable size, the cries of the wounded and the doomed on the battlefield, Sauron’s warning to the lord Morgoth to get a move on and abandon the lost position while there’s still time,… The hall came alive and in an instant drowned out the narration of the intro. And there they were: Blind Guardian. Down in front of the stage it was roaring, the “poor souls” were crushed against the barrier, and a few drops even sprayed from above onto the photographers, unluckily squeezed between the stage and the steel barrier, since beer was already merrily sloshing from one end of the hall to the other. G7 were perfectly well-behaved this time. If only they’d stay out of the photographers’ way in the future, that’d be a nice gesture, but instead one of their poor guys planted himself dead center and posed together with the band, who were chewing mercilessly through Welcome To Dying and Nightfall! Maybe a study trip for Slovenian security crews to Planet Music in Vienna or the Orpheum in Graz, as far as this kind of concert event goes, wouldn’t hurt at all.

According to some tales passing by word of mouth, which apparently travel at the speed of light through the small valley of Šentflorjan, the band was badly hit by a virus, and the show the day before Ljubljana at Vienna’s Planet Music supposedly left the crowd with long, sagging faces, because Blind Guardian didn’t play the promised set in full. Well, in Ljubljana it was different after all. But let’s take it nice and slow, one thing at a time.

You could feel that Hansi Kürsch was expertly conserving his strength, and Blind Guardian also seriously shuffled the order of the songs, adapting it to a somewhat ailing singer. Of course you could tell Kürsch wasn’t singing at full power, and that the sections where he should’ve been screaming in his raspy style, he sang instead in a clean manner, even an octave lower. But with great feeling. He handled both approaches like a pro: the clean one and the furiously raspy one. On top of that, the keyboards were barely audible throughout the show, except occasionally during all three acoustic songs, in the intros and outros of individual tracks. Then there was the problem of at times indistinct guitar harmonies, which Marcus’s guitar riffing inadvertently covered up.

And yet, here stand Blind Guardian before us! You know what that means. Who has the most loyal and most fanatical audience in metal? Blind Guardian definitely belong in the top ten of such bands. The fact that their tours on German soil are sold out in advance and that in Romance-language countries the crowd, in a rush of temperament, literally sings along to everything, says it in a nutshell: the greatness and respect that few bands enjoy today. The Mediapark hall was also completely on its feet, from the first to the last person. Everyone, as far as the eye could see, had their hands in the air. Likewise, everything alive in there was singing. So the Slovenian crowd didn’t let the band down at all during the show.

Like I said, Blind Guardian weren’t 100% on stage, and yet once again they were carried on the wings of the audience, who breathed a completely new dimension into the show, one that’s damn hard to find and experience these days. The key is loyalty, dedication and devotion. And only lovers of heavy metal music can conjure up something like that, the metal crowd, that is. Hallelujah! The bitter taste left in my mouth by Deep Purple’s half-hearted show on October 5, 2006, at Hala Tivoli, and the even more lukewarm crowd response there, even though there were three times as many heads at Purple (poor turnout!!!), faded in an instant. Mediapark was bursting at the seams, and Blind Guardian knew they simply couldn’t let their devoted crowd down. Hansi was thrilled and right at the start greeted the audience, saying that Blind Guardian were truly happy to finally, after long, long years of waiting, be playing in Slovenia for the first time in their career. Lots of people from neighboring Croatia were at the show. Of course the Croats couldn’t rein in their national passions, with which they have to draw attention to themselves even where it doesn’t belong and with which they impose themselves on the whole world, and so quite a few Croatian flags were waving in Mediapark too, meaning Blind Guardian probably went on with the tour after the show thinking that Slovenia has some special breed of fans devoted to the chess culture of playing with red and white pieces.

Anyway, let’s get back to the show. The crowd greeted every song with enthusiasm, and the atmosphere created didn’t even match the one from January’s Helloween show. What a silly comparison, really. At Helloween the audience is split into as many factions as there were different lineups in Helloween’s career. With Blind Guardian it’s not like that. Either you’re totally theirs or you’re nothing at all. No half measures! A unique chemistry, a unique approach, everything revolves around the trio of Kürsch, Olbrich, Siepen, and has for twenty years straight. As united as the band is, so is the crowd. The energy was incredible. The goosebumps simply couldn’t be tamed yesterday, there was so much good vibe and positive energy in the air. “What on earth are they up to in the north?” Hansi wondered, all “curious”, and wrapped up with: “Let us knock at the gates of Valhalla!” The crowd lost it. Valhalla ended with an extended outro. When the two guitarists finished their riffing, only the drums were still ripping through the air like cannon fire, backed by the audience, who joined in, perfectly in tune, on the lead line of the chorus. Magic! During the show, people loudly demanded Majesty several times, but Blind Guardian didn’t play it. Instead, here came Bright Eyes! At the shows of the current tour so far, Blind Guardian have alternated between these two songs on the set list. For Ljubljana they picked Bright Eyes – one of the most beautifully crafted anthemic marches of their career, which Hansi introduced beforehand: “I would like to see all your shiny bright eyes!”

Kürsch proves that in recent years, since he stopped wielding a bass guitar on stage, he’s visibly improved his stage game too, now that he’s got just a mic in his hands. Especially in gesturing and keeping contact with the crowd. On bass the band again got help from hired gun Oliver Holzwarth, otherwise a member of the excellent, reunited German prog rockers Sieges Even. Michael Schüren pounded the keys. In short, the stage lineup is exactly the same as on the previous Guardian tour. I lie! The drums! Frederik Ehmke, as the new member, brilliantly replaced the superb Tomen Stauch and justified his spot in Blind Guardian with flawless work.

Blind Guardian also included in the set list the 14-minute epic poem And Then There Was Silence, if I may be superficially bold  – their very own Rhyme Of  The Ancient Mariner, which meant that with this song we got the compositionally most complex performance highlight of the Ljubljana show. Otherwise, a special magical moment of the show was the performance of the acoustic, Celtic-inspired A Past And The Future Secret. We were all waiting for Bard’s Song. And it wasn’t there. The band closed the regular set with And Then There Was Silence.

They opened the encore with the surprise of the night, And The Story Ends. Then Hansi walked up to Andre and whispered a few words in his ear. The two guitarists took off their guitars and swapped them for acoustics. Now it’s The Bard’s Song. No, no, no! Harvest Of Sorrow. Damn, are they really going to leave us without it? That whispering in the ear a moment earlier meant that Hansi had decided to sing Harvest Of Sorrow instead of Lord Of The Rings, which was originally on the set list. That decision proved Hansi’s voice was indeed worn down, since Harvest OF Sorrow is far easier to sing than the originally planned Lord Of The Rings, and so a logical choice for the singer. Too bad. With Imaginations From The Other Side, fans of classic Blind Guardian finally got their due. In all honesty, quite a few explosive classics were missing from the set list, among them Majesty, Born In A Morning Hall, Somewhere Far Beyond, Journey Through The Dark, Lost In The Twillight Hall… On the other hand, the guys didn’t overdo it with material from the new album, which was more than welcome, since they played only two songs from “A Twist In The Myth”.

The guys left us a second time. And yet they came back once more. “You probably all already know which song’s next?” Hansi asked. And then came that moment. The Bard’s Song – In The Forest, a song the audience always sings in its entirety, with Hansi merely intoning the first verse for the fans: “Now you all know…”, and the rest of the song belongs entirely to the crowd. The addition of keyboards and bass in the outro was very welcome, boosting even further the incredible atmosphere created by the two acoustic guitars and, of course, the unforgettable audience. But Blind Guardian didn’t stop there at the end. They decided to slam it down one more time with all the metal wailing they’ve got. This time too it was a performance of the expected classic Mirror, Mirror, which drove the audience nuts yet again. Afterwards the band just wouldn’t tear themselves away from the stage, and took a few moments to say goodbye to their faithful fans, sending them off with a decent shower of guitar picks!

The Blind Guardian show will apparently remain this year’s central concert event in heavy metal, as far as visits by foreign bands on their own headline tours go (leaving Metal Camp aside for a moment, of course). The sold-out Satyricon left extraordinary feelings at the beginning of the month, while Blind Guardian came to delight above all lovers of classic metal melodicism. Since there’ll be no Iron Maiden in Slovenia again this year, fans of melodic metal with clean vocals were rescued by Blind Guardian. The band didn’t seem to be at their best, but the audience carried the level of the atmosphere, and the band itself, to the point where all you can say is: “That’s it!” Because the best thing is seeing a 1000-strong crowd of happy people who, even after the show, can’t come down from all that satisfaction of having shared moments with Blind Guardian. Some fans were thoroughly soaked in beer and bodily fluids, faces flushed and wrecked as if they’d just come out of a brutal battle in which they’d won not just one victory but the whole war. In short, an unforgettable evening, an unforgettable metal party, through unforgettable and unique magic! Let’s hope for more events with this kind of intense emotional charge here at home in the future!