A Day for METAL Like No Other – Saxon and Iced Earth Spark a Metal Resurrection in Zagreb (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Boogaloo / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: February 21, 2009
Attendance: 1,500
Ticket price: 200.00 HRK

Saxon and Iced Earth on a joint tour! For any true lover of heavy metal sounds, catching at least one show on this tour is a must, practically a lifetime obligation! Both bands boast remarkable careers. Saxon are real veterans, a kind of authors of the metal bible, who had their big commercial breakthrough through the eighties, packing the biggest stadiums and arenas alike. Their songs from that era are cult classics, heavy metal evergreens, so to speak. Even so, Saxon are still young at heart. The band acts youthful, puts out albums regularly that are more metallic than at any point during their commercial heyday, tours regularly and turns up as a fixture at festivals all over the world. On the other hand, Iced Earth’s greatness isn’t dimmed one bit next to Saxon. Younger in years, but when it comes to their body of work, especially from 1991 to 2001, they’re a band that wrote some truly fantastic albums. Iced Earth have always been famous for a fantastic rhythm section, and whenever the talk turns to their singers, it’s always about the very idea of top-class metal vocals (Mathew Barlow, Tim “Ripper” Owens). With Matt Barlow’s return to the band, their “rating” has shot up again, since it was with him that they hit a kind of career peak at the turn of the millennium.

The concert epic of these two powerhouses was set up so that both bands were headliners for every single night. Iced Earth always hit the stage first, Saxon followed, and the two bands split the combined two and a half hours of stage time into equal halves.

True, we Slovenes already had the great honor of welcoming both bands, with a nice turnout, at the show in Ljubljana on February 20, 2009, but their stop the very next day in Zagreb, just 125 km away in our southern neighbor Croatia, absolutely could not be skipped. After all, that would have been a real sin, but more on that below.

The clock struck well past eight in the evening. Surrounded by a swarm of heavy metal fanatics, I slowly make my way toward the entrance of Zagreb’s Boogaloo club. Inside the hall, Zagreb metallers Inciter are already roaring, a local band then, highly respected for their quality, who cultivate a sharp, classic, technically superbly tight form of thrash metal that could appeal to fans of old Metallica or Annihilator, but with a dash of a much more modern “groove” sound. Sadly, I wasn’t destined to catch their set, and by the time I stepped through the doors of Boogaloo, the first break in the hall had already arrived, with Iron Maiden anthems on the speakers. Boogaloo had a real festive atmosphere, and I don’t remember a crowd like this in this club, and I haven’t only been here a handful of times. The show must have been definitely sold out, because right before Iced Earth’s set you couldn’t push through the crowd at all. A jam had already formed in the passage between the bar and the hall. We were squeezed in nice and tight, no two ways about it. And when Iced Earth took the stage, the hall roared to life. Packed to the last corner, by eye well over 1,000 people, maybe 1,300 to 1,500 (hypothetically, of course, counting everyone including those in the bar and those still hanging around outside the hall).

Iced Earth kicked off their dramatic stage circus theater standing perfectly still, upright on two legs, heads bowed, as the opening intro of the fresh Iced Earth album “The Crucible Of Man” (2008), titled In Sacred Flames, unfolded. The lights come up, the band scatters across the stage with Behold The Wicked Child and whips the crowd into pure hysteria. The band had to fight off some mild sound troubles early on. Schaffer’s rhythm guitar in particular was seriously loud and somewhat drowned out the other building blocks of the Iced Earth stage sound. In the early stages of the show, it was above all Matt Barlow’s vocal that suffered in the mix because of Schaffer’s volume. Drummer Brent Smedley also allowed himself a minor slip from the right tuning frequency in the opening stretch, missing a transition on the drums between the sound collage of the Invasion intro and the song Motivation Of Man, and his blunder was met by band boss Jon Schaffer, far from a happy camper, with a sharp look from under his brow in the direction of the culprit.

After that the sound was sorted out pretty quickly, and Iced Earth bewitched everyone with remarkable stage tightness and a technically razor-sharp rhythm section that served up a hellish, torpedoing march, into which the famous Floridian “palm muted” “thrashy” riffs of the classics Vengeance Is Mine, Pure Evil and Violate settled magnificently. Facing them stood the classics with more melody and anthemic singalongs, like Burning Times, Watching Over Me, which the crowd greeted with especially intense emotion, Dracula and Melancholy (Holy Martyr). In short, an excellent balance of aggression and signature Iced Earth melodies made for a top-notch performance by the band in every respect. The band was hugely helped by the big stage, by a hall bursting at the seams from being so packed, and by a crowd going wild, following every inhale and exhale of the band on stage with a thunderous response, and which, united from the front row all the way to the far end of the hall, waved their arms in the air and gave themselves over to the resurrection of the Iced Earth hell.

Besides the excellent setlist the guys delivered, an important factor in the balance was certainly Matt Barlow’s vocal. I had the honor of seeing the man live for the first time in Vienna, way back on February 9, 2002. Then Barlow left Iced Earth and returned to the band at the start of last year. The guy hasn’t lost a speck of vocal power. If not earlier, the whole hall was convinced of it during the only “Horrow Show” (2001) song of the night, Dracula. The foundation of that song, besides the devilish riffing, is extreme singing that demands firmly holding a vocal position in the highest possible registers, creating a polished vocal melody and putting in as much power as your natural talent combined with training allows. Barlow proved he has all of that and that, in this department, he still blows away most heavy metal singers on planet Earth. The power of the extreme registers of his voice was both thrilling and downright hypnotic. Most of the songs on the setlist work far more naturally for Iced Earth today, after Barlow’s return, than in the Tim Owens era, though it’s interesting that in the material from “Framing Armaggedon” and the song Declaration Day, you could still miss Tim Owens on vocals. Both singers are extremely expressive figures who leave a decisive mark with their voices, in the studio and on stage alike, one on which the atmosphere of the songs themselves depends. Since the bulk of the “Iced Earth classics” belongs to Barlow, he is logically Schaffer’s first Iced Earth choice. At any moment. With Barlow back in the lineup, Iced Earth are once again cleverly using their shows to build their name in the hunt for popularity among the metal masses. Truth be told, because of longer breaks without European shows, and because Barlow was out of the lineup for a while, the band sacrificed quite a chunk of the popularity they had ridden all the way to the end of the “Horror Show” tour. Watching Barlow at work during Dracula, you’re left breathless.

After what we experienced at this Iced Earth show, there’s nothing else to say but: “Welcome home again, Iced Earth!” They took the hall to pure ecstasy and rewarded the crowd’s enthusiasm with the fantastic “Dark Saga” classic The Hunter, which they had played on this tour only two days earlier at the show in Budapest. At the same time, they firmly threw down the gauntlet and challenged Saxon head-on, making them think about what tactic to pick to save their skin and at least even the score. As I said. This Iced Earth show proved that the old magic has returned to the stage and that the band is rising like a phoenix from the ashes once again. Let’s hope a tour with the band as headliners happens in the near future, with a set at least two hours long.

Before the Saxon show, which followed on the stage, the crowd below the stage shuffled around a bit, and those who gathered in tight ranks there were above all lovers of retro heavy rock and old-school metal craft. The sizable stage space allowed for additional stage sets to be put up. The drums were raised firmly on an extra riser, and in front of them stood one more smaller makeshift stage, accessible from the left or right side, which lets the audience bring to life and take in the classic stage play of a Saxon concert. I should add that the backdrop was fitted with a gigantic Saxon slogan. None of that was there in Ljubljana the day before. So all that was missing on stage was the famous Saxon eagle, and the cup would have been full.

Shortly before ten the stage goes dark again as familiar silhouettes push through the bluish washes of light onto the stage. The standard lineup, with Biff in the middle and both guitarists to his left and right, Nibbs Carter on the far left, and of course Nigel Glockler in the back behind a drum fortress raised a whole story higher than the front line. Saxon held nothing back this time. They knew what their predecessors were capable of, and riding the wave of the wild hall, they hit hard with excellent stage chemistry from the very first note. The band was incredibly active and, for their venerable age and veteran status, didn’t spare any energy on gymnastics and acrobatics. The repertoire was tailored to presenting the new record “Into The Labyrinth” (2009), but the old foxes vividly mixed old classics in with the new tracks. The first of them especially theatrically set off the crowd’s emotional outpouring, when Biff wished the audience to fill their heads with heavy metal thunder. The torpedoing is far from over with the song of doomsday riffing and rhythm rally Witchfinder General (“Lionheart”, 2004), and the boys rein in the horsepower a bit afterward with the splendid classic 747 (Strangers In The Night), which the whole hall joins in on right alongside them. Another jump to the new album follows, with the onslaught Demon Sweeny Todd and the more rockin’ Hellcat, and then Biff takes a little break and puts a question to the audience. It’s the classic question to the crowd that happens on every Saxon tour: “What do you want us to play now? Dogs Of War? What about Broken Heroes, or Motorcycle Man?” He wrapped up the bit with: “Or let us play both?” and you won’t believe it: “This song is called Broken Heroes.” Aaaa!!! A classic from one of Saxon’s finest records of the eighties, “Innocence Is No Excuse”, set off salvos of ovations. Hands in the air from the front row to the very back, the Saturday night fever in Boogaloo growing beyond all limits, and the band created that famous magic especially in the subcutaneously seductive riff of the chorus, when the whole hall joined in singing. A truly solemn moment of the show. Biff wasn’t lying, and when he said they’d tackle both songs, “motor jebeni kotač čovjek” followed. With Motorcycle Man I’d like to point out a noticeable jump, which in fact has been nothing new with Saxon for a good decade, but still. It’s an eighties classic that was recorded in the studio in the early eighties with a single bass drum pedal. Glockler, who is obliged to use a double bass drum pedal, held nothing back on that count this time either, and with his stomping in particular Saxon turned it into a truly infamously possessed rush of extreme metalization, which flared up in all its intensity once more with Power And The Glory. What a discovery for revitalized Saxon. The double bass drum pedal. Glockler wittily wove it into Wheels Of Steel, Princess Of The Night and Denim & Leather too. Though out of all the Saxon drummers tried so far I personally am a fan of Fritz Randow, whom Saxon fired from the band for too frequent dabbling in alcoholic opiates, Glockler proved yesterday that you don’t mess with him! He blew us away.

Biff poured a whole pallet of plastic water bottles out among the people and doused himself with them during the show. He constantly shook hands with the crowd and so kept them close in a permanent checkmate position, so they dutifully followed him and ate out of his hand. The old punk just knows how to checkmate a crowd!

The show spun ahead at a rapid pace and all of a sudden we found ourselves in the midst of crusading war marches with Crusader, which lifted the hall to the stage one last time. A song that’s a mandatory fixture of the iron repertoire and without which the band simply must not walk on stage. The band comes back for an encore, which they open with the freshly released single Live To Rock, which fits the encore perfectly. A short break follows and then the continuation with the classic Princess Of The Night, during which Scarratt and Carter leave the stage. “This is Paul Quinn, and we call him? Paul Quinn!” was Biff’s address to the audience, after which “Quinney” was given the sign to open the song with its famous riff. But the Boogaloo assault wasn’t over yet, and Saxon prepared an absolute neck-breaking highlight to finish, the heavy rock classic Denim & Leather. And the sum of all sums? An absolute heavy metal bomb that thrilled everyone in the hall. Wildly playful old-timers, excellent solo duels between the two guitars, Biff masterfully steered the vocal lines through the show, even though the mixing desk crew likes to occasionally add too much “echo delay” when needed, but still. The man still holds up fascinatingly, keeps the situation under control and justifies in every way his famous figure as the one-of-a-kind Saxon leader.

And to finish, the classic, universally unwelcome comparison of the Zagreb show with the show a day earlier at Ljubljana’s MediaPark hall. On the Zagreb stage, both bands squeezed out even more energy and offered even more concert bliss. They stretched the setlist. Iced Earth by one song (The Hunter), Saxon by two (Hellcat, Motorcycle Man). The reasons lie in the bigger hall. In width, length and height. Then a longer and wider stage, which let Saxon actually set up their stage scenery in full, then the much higher attendance, and finally one more very important element. The far greater ecstasy shown by the Croatian crowd’s response at this show. In fact I can say, even though I’m not a regular at Boogaloo, that Iced Earth and Saxon staged without a doubt one of the best metal shows in Zagreb in the last 10 years. As if golden times for metal had been born and fairy-tale-like drawn themselves up again for two and a half hours of life. Unforgettable two and a half hours, before the last drum hit echoed through the hall and the last riff salvo poured out in Denim And Leather  and, after more than half an hour of battling for coats in front of the cloakroom while leaving the hall, snowflakes outside greeted us and cooled our metal heads, heated far past boiling point.

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik 

Setlist

ICED EARTH:
1. Intro
2. Behold The Wicked Child
3. Invasion
4. Motivation Of Man
5. Setian Massacre
6. Burning Times
7. Declaration Day
8. Vengeance Is Mine
9. Violate
10. Pure Evil
11. Watching Over Me
12. Ten Thousand Strong
13. Dracula
14. Melancholy (Holy Martyr)
15. My Own Saviour
—encore—
16. The Hunter
17. Iced Earth

SAXON:
1. Battalions of Steel
2. Heavy Metal Thunder
3. Witchfinder General
4. 747 (Strangers In The Night)
5. Demon Sweeny Todd
6. Hellcat
7. Broken Heroes
8. Motorcycle Man
9. The Letter
10. Valley Of The Kings
11. Wheels Of Steel
12. Power And The Glory
13. Crusader
—encore I.—
14. Live To Rock
15. Princess Of The Night
—encore II.—
16. Denim And Leather

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