Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Theaterfabrik / Munich / Germany
Concert date: 14.03.2010
Attendance: 1100
Ticket price: €32.00
Saxon are Saxon, plain and simple. Their iron-clad eighties repertoire is rich and huge. This year marks exactly 30 years since the band released the albums “Wheels Of Steel” (1980) and “Strong Arm Of The Law” (1980). Toward the end of the eighties Saxon finally “cracked” and went from stadium giants to a mid-sized club band that can fill a hall with 1,000 to 1,500 people without breaking a sweat. They secured their survival on the rock horizon above all thanks to the fanatical loyalty of the German crowd. Saxon, whom we finally welcomed back to Slovenia a good year ago (after Kobjeglava in 1995 and Ljubljana in 1983), play every year and never stop. They live for rock, and they sing about it not in just one song but in a whole heap of them. Their fresh European shows, which they “shaped” into yet another, albeit shorter, European tour called “Battalions Of Steel”, didn’t bring them any closer to us than Munich this time.
It was a Sunday, with a fresh but bitingly cold wind that greeted us in a thoroughly unfriendly mood at the Theaterfabrik hall, which holds around 1,200 standing. Theaterfabrik sits practically inside the Kunstpark Ost cultural complex, and it opened its doors at 6:30 PM. Until then we wandered around aimlessly like lost souls, because there’s not a single spot in the area where you can hole up on a late Sunday afternoon to kill time somewhere warm (or otherwise humane). Well, the locals don’t have to worry. They sit snug and warm at home, with tickets they bought back in October 2009, waiting for 8:00 PM, when they’ll storm the venue as one. Saxon released the album “Into The Labyrinth” last year, but they’ve more or less wrapped up its live promotion, whatever the tour title says. They’ve already put several classics back into the setlist, which suggests that through the rest of 2010 they’ll keep dropping songs written after 1990 and replacing them with classics. This tour was actually supposed to happen back in October of last year, but the guys only managed to play part of the autumn 2009 tour, with dates exclusively in the UK. The cause of the cancelled European leg was singer Biff Byford’s illness (a throat infection).
For the support act they picked a not-so-lucky name this time. Big Ball. A quartet that copies AC/DC, which you can tell from the name those potent Germans gave themselves. 35 minutes of warm-up in a rock n’ roll-dirt makeup weighed down by the AC/DC legacy, with a vocalist who sounded more like eighties Accept than Brian Johnson, still managed to entertain the German crowd, who’ve seen it all. But when you think of all the originals, you missed absolutely nothing if you slipped to the back during a band like this, left your eyes and ears untouched and had a beer over a chat. Half an hour of “served time”, then.
At 9:00 PM the legends took the stage. The hour was pleasantly “early” for a headliner. I couldn’t have wished for anything nicer, since it meant we’d be back in Ljubljana by three or four in the morning! Jeez, it hasn’t even started and I’m already thinking about the end. What a fan! The start of the show was what you’d expect. Three rolling steamrollers, among which only the newest, Live To Rock (“Into The Labyrinth”, 2009), let the crowd catch its breath, brought the Saxon standard to the stage. The standard they’ve stuck to for the last decade. A good decade. What am I babbling about. At least the last 15 years. More than rock-solid guitar duo Paul Quinn and Doug Scarratt, drummer Nigel Glockler and, of course, the first and only irreplaceable Saxon figure, vocalist Biff Byford!
Did I forget anyone? Damn! Nibbs Carter should have been on bass. But the guy wasn’t on stage. Because of family obligations (a sick wife) he had to skip the tour. And who turns up in the bassist’s spot? A name that’s little known, or totally unknown, to the uninitiated, but not to heavy metal fans. Danish musician Yenz Leonhardt, who has also picked up the affectionate nickname “Yenz Cheyenne”. This dude is busy all the time. He plays bass in three bands at once: Iron Savior, Stormwarrior and Savage Circus. On top of that he helps out on tours with the Italians Lacrimosa and has rubbed bass strings with the melodic rockers Kingdom Come. Let me also mention that this very same Yenz was the singer and bassist of the Danish band Brats, which after Yenz left grew into Mercyful Fate, where his successor was none other than the most enlightened King Diamond himself. So we’re talking about a man of great experience. And he stepped on stage as the replacement for Nibbs Carter!
Saxon also brought the “Solid Ball Of Rock” (1991) classic Requiem (We Will Remember) back into the setlist, and Biff dedicated it to guitarist Mick Cocks of the Australian rock n’ roll outfit Rose Tattoo, who sadly died of liver cancer at the end of December 2009. Through this song the sound of the two guitars still came across unbalanced, and the melodic single-voice lines of the main motif were simply buried under Quinn’s riff. The sound got somewhat better later, but Saxon are always loud. The smaller the room they play, the more the noise “bulldozes” your ears. So at Saxon shows (unless you’re at a festival site or a hall that holds several thousand people) it’s always better to move away from the stage toward the middle, where the picture is usually satisfying and the instruments are in balance (vocals included). And that’s how it went this time too. Biff is an old fox who nothing can get to. He’s an excellent actor and a skilled windbag. In a heartbeat he can have the audience eating out of his hand. His voice is still very well preserved and his singing convincing. As always, Biff gets some extra “push” from the mixing desk, but those aren’t canned higher registers. It’s merely an emphasis on echo effects.
Biff also showed his cunning with a teaching moment for bassist Yenz. The “newbie”, who had to morph into Saxon’s bassist in a hurry, opened with the classic Strong Arm Of The Law at Biff’s order. That was the only moment the band let him onto the center of the stage. Otherwise he had to obediently play bass on the far right (as seen from the stage toward the audience). He certainly didn’t let anyone down. A thick, cranked-up tone, tearing and digging at the bass with a pick, and the whole thing was entirely satisfying! When Biff first introduced him to the crowd, Yenz wanted to fire back a “comment” about heavy metal’s age. And what does Biff, smeared with every ointment, do? Evidently only Biff gets to speak in Saxon when the band is on stage. The moment Yenz opened his mouth to say something into his mic, Biff drowned him out on the main monitor with a loud remark: “Yeah! We’ve heard this one last night!” Last night? Biff, who are you kidding? The Munich show is your first on this tour. So “let sleeping dogs lie” was the moral of the story, and of course “follow only the orders you’ve been given and nothing more, understood?” That’s the Saxon dictatorship for you.
The crowd sang the choruses in full. Saxon are at home in Germany, and the audience here can’t and won’t let them down. Once again the energy was exceptional thanks to that German devotion and solidity that nothing can undermine or shake. Saxon remain highly respected!
After a good bout of raising hell through the newer Witchfinder General and Metalhead, the band calmed things down with an excellently played classic, The Eagle Has Landed, and then wound up the audience’s ears with a medley of Warrior from the 1979 debut and Battle Cry (“Rock The Nations”, 1986), into which they “wrapped” the “Lionheart” track Man And Machine. From there on we stayed exclusively in the first half of the eighties with the band! Sixth Form Girls from the album “Strong Arm Of The Law” (1980) was especially thrilling, as the band brought it back into the setlist after a really, really long time – decades.
The “fast – slow” order is practically standard for Saxon by now. This time too the songs in the repertoire followed one another that way. 20.000 Feet, which could easily have swapped places with Heavy Metal Thunder as the opener, was followed by one of the holiest Saxon anthems, Broken Heroes (“Innocence Is No Excuse”, 1985), a song that is a peak of a Saxon show all by itself, while the rest of the setlist up to the finale lined up, as expected, in a strict sequence of “must hear” classics.
With that much mileage you can expect nothing less than a great performance. Yenz did a fine job in Nibbs’s role, but a Saxon show with the energetic, fully immersed redheaded bassist, who whips his mane around wildly as he runs from the mic to the riser by the drums and back, is a different story altogether. So Saxon came across a bit more “wooden” and stiff on stage than usual. Still, “Quinney” pulled off a few silly stunts. During the solos in Princess Of The Night he climbed up over a spotlight placed at the edge of the stage and literally rode it while soloing. Unlike Scarratt, he was by far the more agile of the two guitarists this time. Scarratt got his own solo spot in the intro to Wheels Of Steel, following the established routine, where he sweated out a few more drops. Saxon still burn brightest in the eighties classics today, and they cut best of all in the mid-tempo songs with chunky, trivial but juicily full guitar phrases, as is the golden rule in The Eagle Has Landed, Broken Heroes, 747 (Strangers In The Night) and of course Crusader.
Saxon rarely slip up. They have so much experience and routine that they can mask mistakes with ease. As if nothing happened. This time too they handled everything with total confidence, and they smashed through and “smuggled” another Munich show home with flying colors. Saxon are still dusting everything off with big swings after more than 30 years of existence, and nothing seems likely to stop them. The band confirmed that not just by showing up in Munich again, but also through singer Biff, who at one point in the show announced the band’s march on this year’s Bang Your Head!!! festival, on 15.07.2010 in Balingen, where Saxon will once again drag along their old buddy, the “lit-up” Wheels Of Steel eagle. The legends of the new wave of British heavy metal are still unstoppably grinding, clanging and jingling with their crusader iron and the blades of their sharp tips. They remain a classic heavy metal attraction. A moment of nostalgia for the golden days when heavy metal was still young and dewy. They carry out their mission spotlessly even after three decades.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Heavy Metal Thunder 2. Live To Rock 3. Motorcycle Man 4. Requiem (We Will Remember) 5. Witchfinder General 6. Metalhead 7. The Eagle Has Landed 8. Medley: – Warrior – Battle Cry – Man And Machine (ends with Battle Cry) 9. Sixth Form Girls 10. Strong Arm Of The Law 11. Broken Heroes 12. 20.000 Feet 13. 747 (Strangers In The Night) 14. Princess Of The Night —encore 1.— 15. Wheels Of Steel —encore 2.— 16. Crusader 17. Denim And Leather
Photo gallery
