Confuse The Cat Give 20-Odd Lost Souls a Proper Scrubbing in the Heart of Metelkova (2007)
Venue: Menza p.k. Metelkova / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 08.04.2007
Attendance: 25
Ticket price: 5.00€
Menza pri koritu on Metelkova hasn’t gaped with an emptiness like this in ages, not until Easter Monday. 09.04.2007. What happened to all those Slovenian alternative kids? Have they gone totally soft, peeling and grating horseradish and gorging on Easter eggs, hunkered down behind the stove at home? The gig, thrown together in a mad rush, a mere ten days from first contact to the band’s arrival in Ljubljana, which is to the credit of Menza boss Sašo, of course flatly refused to start at the announced time. Simple: there were no people.
Time flew by over a beer. It was a real pleasure, actually, to visit the good old friendly city again after so long, with its friendly real-socialist “post-tolar” drink prices. The little hall, which can cram in about 300 people and has a stage of enviable size, got a visit from a measly 25 souls. Counting the bar staff and the band, maybe barely over 30 heads.
23:45. The band finally decides to plug into its machinery. A great mix of new wave: nervously wired Talkin Heads meets Adrian Belew’s King Crimson-era vocals, with the rough sighs and cockney dialect of Robert Smith (The Cure), blended with a gentle whiff of New Order! This core of the band, wrapped in authentic punkoid stage mayhem, had a lot to say and show tonight.
Three guitars, vocals, bass, drums. Charismatic leader, singer and guitarist Christophe, confidently authoritative, no inhibitions, no shame, aggressively self-assured and fully immersed, kicks and goes nuts in every direction. Typical outbursts of anarchy, staged brawls, destructive rampages of street gangs. Not even the Sex Pistols story is far from this. A tight, compact performance by the whole five-piece, the kind where the “groove” shocks you into leaving your eyes and ears up on the stage.
The band presented their current studio album “We Can Do It” (2006), their third, and most of the show was made up of songs from this record. They opened the gig with a cover of AK-47 and worked most of the new album into the set, starting with Expert, then Senkrecht Waagerecht, Akela, We Can Do It, the instrumental Lord. Let Me Do No Wrong, which went straight into The Deepest Blue, Shockwaves and Principessa.
The regular set wrapped up in under an hour. Not a single hothead in the audience sidled up to the stage to cheer the band on, even though the guys up there more than deserved it. They didn’t care that the hall was empty. Quite the opposite. They cashed in on their great mood with a full-throttle, no-limits stage attack. Standing out above all was the leader – singer Christophe, with spit and sweat literally pouring off him in streams. He theatrically dropped to the floor a few times, rolled and tumbled around down there, nearly molested one of the monitors and writhed on the pole standing in the middle of the Menza pri koritu stage like a seasoned stripper. Total disconnect!
The band was hot-blooded and came straight back on for the first encore. When it was practically all over, the lads got totally fired up and, after a 10-minute break, came back once more and repeated AK-47 and The Deepest Blue. Potency at its peak, impossible to tame. An honest, natural approach where you can always call a spade a spade, loud and clear, with lyrics stuffed with cynicism, mockery of society and the cheeky truth as seen by the rebellious Confuse The Cat. Freedom!
The guys make smart use of wandering over simple two-note fifth chords, especially on the bottom three strings, which they strum together in twos or threes, and that naturally accentuates the harmony of these chosen melodic moves. It strongly recalls the darker years of something like The Smiths, and if I turn to U2’s debut, I reckon you’d hardly find a better comparison. A rowdy airing-out, dismembering and deflowering of a God-fearing Monday that succeeded across the board. Guys, thanks for a proper kick of naked rock authenticity straight to the noggin, the daft kind I, computer poet and stay-at-home that I am, had been missing badly and irresistibly (ravenous with hunger)! With all the encores, the gig clocked in at just over an hour!
After the show, Jani and I chatted with the band’s singer (Christophe Vandewoude), who didn’t hide his delight at the chance to play in Slovenia with Confuse The Cat. The guy wasn’t bothered in the slightest by the empty hall. In the same breath he expressed huge thanks to the organizer for the hospitable welcome and added that he’d happily accept another invitation to play in Slovenia again. The pleasant post-gig mood was slightly spoiled by a visit from the police, who evidently get terribly bored at night and pick for their rounds only those places where they feel seemingly safest and always have the upper hand. The main thing, though, is the fact of rock’n’roll’s renewed victory in all its immaculate, direct light, a penetrating image only a “confused cat” heated up to the right working temperature can muster!
