Venue: New Age / Roncade (Treviso) / Italy
Concert date: 11/22/2007
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: €20.00
Unbelievable! With all the traveling I do, up and down Europe by every means imaginable, it happens that I end up at a gig completely on my own, with no company whatsoever. This time, none of the big talkers had the balls in the end to put their trust in a Bonfire show, or, frankly, in themselves. So an invitation to play the band’s 20th anniversary, coming from the New Age club in an Italian suburb of Treviso, right next door to Slovenia, was hard to resist. Sure, the Germans left their best years back in the eighties, but with the excellent “Double X” album released last year, and with this year’s follow-up, the live record “Double Vision” (2007), captured at the notorious “Firefest III.” festival (Nottingham, United Kingdom), they signaled that they’re coming back to the scene in a big way and are nowhere near done kicking ass with their rock n’ roll legacy. So the old bastards are still plowing through stages in the new millennium, with the undiminished intensity of their classic German-school hard rock presence.
Claus Lessmann (vocals), Hans Ziller (guitar), Jürgen “Bam Bam” Wiehler (drums), Uwe Köhler (bass) and, joining last year, second guitarist Chris “Yps” Limburg! So, as always, two full hours of driving and? I got there shortly before 8 PM. Mistake. It cost me another hour and a half of waiting before they opened the club. The first impression was grim. Had I come all the way to Treviso for nothing? There wasn’t a living soul in front of the club, and the front door was locked. Not even the poster that usually hangs on the entrance door. The only hope came from a van parked in front of the club with German plates from Ingolstadt, and the occasional thud of drums leaking through the walls. Just before nine, the space in front of the club finally started to fill up. The doors opened at 9:30 PM. Bonfire CDs, the newest releases included, were €10.00 each, which was very promising and unusual. Anyway, let’s go straight to the heart of the action.
BURNING BLACK: 10:00 PM. 10:35 PM
The young Italians made no secret of their influences and their obsession with Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. It showed not only in the sounds detonating from the stage, but also in the stage outfits the boys went for. The bassist looked like a literal copy of Steve Harris (Iron Maiden). Technique is the bare minimum these days if you want to make it in the music business. Finding your own voice and expressing it boldly is a different story. Luckily they sounded a bit like Judas Priest, a bit like Iron Maiden, and only for 35 minutes. The singer made no secret of his weak spot either: he just couldn’t carry the power of his vocal delivery from the middle register up into the higher or highest ones. Of course he tried to hide that lack of skill with the occasional scream (the way Halford does, only noticeably better), but where he should have kept the melody and power going through the climb, he simply crashed and burned. Thanks to the raspy singing style and the somewhat muffled timbre of his voice, Burning Black carry a fair share of obscure darkness in their music, which even pulls toward the sound of New Wave Of British Metal bands. The guitars were nicely tuned to each other in the harmonies, with a few slips in the transitions, the drummer dozed off in those a couple of times too, and the solos were like a heap of scales slapped together in a hurry. The tonality of those scales just doesn’t fit the classic, copied eighties riffs that strive for a strict magnification of the melody. Young and promising, may time bring them an enviable upgrade in every department. Both in expression and in the areas that knock on the door of business success. The songs Burning Black played in Treviso included: Fight The Dream, Prisoner Of Steel, Life Passangers, Heavy Metal Is My Law.
BONFIRE: 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM
And here they are, the legendary German hard rockers. These guys sank into total obscurity, but they’re waking up again. Last year they released their “Double X” comeback album, a real bandage after the average “Free” (2003), and of course that’s how the show started too. With Day 911 and But We Still Rock from that album. The quintet attacked with a typical all-or-nothing charge onto the stage.You could see right away that, as far as stage performances go, Bonfire outgrew small stages like the one at New Age long ago. But reality is different today, and if a melodic hard rock band wants to sweat it out live, it has to fight its way through the club scene too. Bonfire are truly frugal guys. Before the show started, a single person took care of the sound, the instrument setup and the stage lighting. He was the tech for all the instruments, the tour manager, everything in one. Before the show, Bonfire sold their merch themselves. Besides the gentleman handling the cash box, Limburg and Wiehler sat in armchairs in the lobby of the little hall. Neither of them hid their curiosity about how many Bonfire discs would sell. In short, the band took things into its own hands! And looks after its own survival. And does it very strictly.
Back to the front of the stage. There were a modest 150 people, ten fewer rather than more. But the crowd made no secret of how well they knew the repertoire, and the female part of the audience was especially loud. Claus proved to be an outstanding frontman. Between songs he kept longer chats going the whole time to keep everyone feeling good and the atmosphere charged with positive rock n’ roll energy.
Bonfire couldn’t have put together a better set list, since out of 19 songs played in total (not counting the drum solo, which was a completely unnecessary filler) a full 13 came from their most successful period, from the first three albums in a row, “Don’t Touch The Light” (1986), “Ready 4 Reaction” (1987) and “Point Black” (1989). The guys delivered a compact, superbly tight performance soaked in adrenaline catharsis, full of bombast thanks to their biggest hits, which rolled out one after another that night. The biggest surprise came toward the end of the evening, when the guys tackled an old song by Loverboy singer/guitarist Paul Dean called Sword And Stone, originally found on Paul’s solo debut “Hardcore” (1988). That song, originally written and composed by members of Kiss, was dressed up by Bonfire in their own version and released on the EP “Shocker Soundtrack” (1989). That release is a real rarity, and the song came out again on the Bonfire best-of album “Golden Years” in 2002.
The guys also treated themselves to a few devilish skits, the standout being the water spitting between Claus and Hans, the original members of Bonfire. Claus started the gag, getting within half a meter of Hans and spitting water in his face. Hans looked completely surprised (though it’s really a well-rehearsed trick). Claus tenderly wiped his buddy off with a towel, since Hans was right in the middle of a solo. Of course Hans didn’t stay in his debt for that slobbery act, but after executing his revenge he theatrically fled the stage to avoid anything worse happening to him, and when Claus introduced the band to the congregation, he once again theatrically crawled back onto the stage on his knees.
People liked the closing stretch best, especially the sequence of Bonfire’s obligatory crowd-igniters Bang Down The Door and Ready 4 Reaction. The evergreen ballad Who’s Foolin’ Who also went down great. The evening of explosions of Bonfire’s famous melodic hard rock obscenities came alive in full glory again when the guys came back to play both encores. It’s customary for “loverboy” bands to start the encore with a ballad. We saw that for ourselves this October at Gotthard’s show in Graz. A bold move, but not a fatal one in this case, because you can afford this kind of trick when you’re sure it always earns high approval from the female part of the audience. And yet there’s another reason behind it. Before the encores, the guys had played only two songs from the studio debut (the obligatory Don’t Touch The Light and Hot To Rock). And the first encore was completely devoted to that debut. The sweet You Make Me Feel was followed by the poisonous little projectile SDI, then the guys disappeared backstage for a short while and came back to make New Age go wild one more time, this time with the perverse rock n’ roll orgy Hard On Me (“Point Black”, 1989).
The whole show lasted a few minutes over two hours. For just €20.00. Excellent sound, excellent performance. No brakes. Packed to the brim with positive energy the whole way through, with genuine goofing around and the authoritative command of Claus, who, to be honest, no longer has such a distinctive and fresh voice as in his prime, but what the hell! Every one of us has an expiration date.
The trip to see Bonfire, which paid off richly by any measure, was marred only by the small turnout. You got a ton of fun and, above all, great music (as all the die-hard fans, however many are still alive, would of course say, and they wouldn’t be wrong in the slightest)! With ever louder rumors that Bonfire might visit Slovenia in February 2008, this experience in the little town of Roncade was an overture of sorts and a priceless one. Above all, it served as proof that melodic hard rock is still very much alive and kicking today. Even in 2007, when it’s been pushed into a complete anti-trend underground, while the money is pulled from people mostly by bands that don’t just not know how to “play” rock, they can’t! Eh, these eternal frustrations of mine! Away with them, so we don’t spoil the great taste left by Bonfire’s genuine rock n’ roll striptease!
Setlist
1. Day 991
2. But We Still Rock
3. Never Mind
4. Under Blue Skies
5. Hot To Rock
6. Don’t Touch The Light
7. Tony’s Roulette
8. Proud Of My Country
9. Sleeping All Alone
10. Who’s Foolin’ Who
11. Blink Of An Eye
12. American Nights
13. Sword And Stone
14. Sweet Obsession
15. Bang Down The Door
16. Ready 4 Reaction
—encore 1—
17. You Make Me Feel
18. SDI
—encore 2—
19. Hard On Me
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