Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Seebronn (Rottenburg a. d. Neckar) / Germany
Concert date: 28.07.2017
Attendance: 7,000
Ticket price: €109.00 (three-day ticket)
Rock Of Ages is a festival with a much shorter history than the infamous Bang Your Head!!!, but both fall under the same local promoter, the editorial team of the magazine Heavy Oder Was!? Rock of Ages is Bang Your Head’s younger brother. It features hard rock bands, mostly rock veterans whose »inventions« helped shape the rock’n’roll map as we know it. Of course, there are also stylistic detours, but they only enrich the festival’s offering. So you’ll find an AOR band here, a blues rock band there, or even an eighties pop rock diva like Kim Wilde, who turned up on this year’s bill. Still, with names like Marillion, Saga, Gotthard and Thunder confirmed, we hardly had to think long about heading to Rottenburg a. d. Neckar once again.
Let’s take it in order. Day one. Program-wise, the least interesting day of the three-day festival was opened by melodic rockers Eden’s Curse, based in the Scottish city of Glasgow. Why Glasgow, if the crew is multinational? Because that’s where their boss and bassist Paul Logue lives (a Scot, of course). Last year Eden’s Curse released a new studio album, »Cardinal«, which was also well represented in the set list of their ROA festival slot. Vocalist Nikola Mijić is a frontman of Serbian descent, guitarist Thorsten Köhne is German, Joe Clelland is English, and the new keyboardist Christian “Chrism” Pulkkinen is a Finn. Along with the Scot, that’s an impressive mix of nationalities. The band blew the place apart in three quarters of an hour! No wonder renowned names like Bruce Dickinson and James LaBrie have had praise for this group after hearing and seeing them. Mijić in particular was stunning with his exceptionally beautiful and polished voice. He handles singing in English superbly, and on top of the mostly melodic and authoritative singing he adds that raspy, velvety timbre too. Honestly, the stage was full of singer, and he made the best use of it of anyone in the lineup. The second “runner” was the band’s leader and bassist Paul Logue. Meanwhile, the committed but static Köhne, with painstaking, hair-splitting precision and a full, fat guitar tone that filled a huge amount of space in the sound, delivered some really full and nicely seasoned solos. The band played the following songs: Prophets of Doom, Masquerade Ball, Black Widow, The Great Pretender, Jericho, Sell Your Soul, Unbreakable, Evil & Divine and Angels & Demons, and after the show they turned up among the crowd, where the guys signed autographs.
Next onto the stage came a seriously interesting act. The glam punk rock band Hello. The Brits, who started out back in 1971, are kept alive today by the only original member, singer and guitarist Bob Bradbury. What’s left of the glam label is really just Bob himself. Teased-up hair, dyed of course, makeup around the eyes. He’s in the company of three extremely technically skilled and considerably younger musicians. Given that Bob is often tied to the microphone since he has to sing, most of the dust-raising on stage was done by the hugely active bassist and saxophonist Corrie Shiells and the brilliant guitarist Siimon Ellis, while Bob’s own son, Jake Bradbury, set the tempo. Although the name Hello is wrapped in a bit of obscurity today, for a while they stood alongside Slade, Sweet and Mud as the very tip of the first British glam rock invasion. You can tell the band doesn’t play much, because they actually don’t have enough material to fill the time slot they were given at the festival. Sure, they didn’t skip the hits ‘Let It Rock’, ‘Tell Him’, ‘Love Stealer’, Star Shudded Sham’ and the closing ‘New York Groove’ that everyone knows, but the band also stuck in a few needless time-wasters, like the covers I Love Rock’N’ Roll (Joan Jett) and 20 Century Boy by T. Rex. Last year Slade played the ROA festival, so this year the tradition continues with Hello. Ellis literally exploded at one point. In that sense he’s actually a way too good guitarist for Hello, and he showed off outstanding mastery. An attractive and exclusive show from Hello, then! Bradbury hasn’t lost his mojo yet! The agile, charismatic vocalist is an incredibly skilled frontman who got under the crowd’s skin in no time with a few heartfelt words.
Another attractive performance followed. Albert Hammond took the stage with his backing band. This is a man who counts as a sort of gray eminence and “uncle in the background,” since he made his name less through performing on stages than by writing songs for other artists. Over his career he managed to create a number of songs that became huge pop and rock hits! Radio evergreens! Since Hammond is their author, he has the license and the green light to perform them on stage. Albert Hammond, appearing here as a singer-songwriter, isn’t known as a particularly brilliant performer. He’s not a born singer. His boyish voice was often too indecisive and inexpressive to breathe the right stamp into the material he was performing, so he could only barely get close to the bite of the original versions of the hits he wrote. That goes especially for I Don’t Wanna Loose You (Tina Turner), Don’t You Love Me Anymore (Joe Cocker), I Don’t Want To Live Without Your Love (Chicago), The Air That I Breathe (The Hollies), One Moment In Time (Whitney Houston) and Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (Starship). The songs he wrote for his own singer-songwriter career fared better, also a heap of radio evergreens: Everything I Want To, When I’m Gone, Down By the River, It Never Rains In Southern California, I’m A Train and The Free Electric Band. Hammond, who could lend his voice to some punk band, was clearly propped up by his backing band, who did their job brilliantly and with great distinction, but otherwise? The mountain shook and gave birth to a mouse. Nothing special.
Last year In Extremo were picked as one of the festival-day headliners at ROA. This year their countrymen stepped in to defend the honor, Subway To Sally. Not as main headliners, but as part of the current of bands that play German medieval minstrel music in a metal way. In other words, bands that enjoy tremendous support, especially and almost exclusively on German soil. The septet once again showed off a picturesque arsenal of old-world instruments, with the theatrical figure of singer Eric Fish naturally taking the central role. Hurdy-gurdy, baroque oboe, violin, viola, Geyerleier (a four-string instrument similar to a ukulele, just with a totally different, “fishy” shape), mandola, mandolin, a Renaissance eight-string lute, whistles, bagpipes and more. This time without smoke screens and pyrotechnics. Their popularity was confirmed by the tightly packed crowd that was waiting for the band. They opened the show with Grausame Schwester from the current »Mitgrift« and then quickly switched over to the hugely popular wedding-style songs Henkersbraut and Herzblutt (Kleid aus Rosen – during which Fish devoted himself completely to deep discussion and contemplation with a rose that someone, per prior arrangement, tossed to him from the crowd). Next came Unsterblich, Falscher Heiland, Tanz auf dem Vulkan, Für immer, Böses Erwachen, Arme Ellen Schmitt, Sieben and Veitstanz. The band showed outstanding tightness, confidence and consistency in every moment of the set. You can feel that the crew and the comrades at the core of the lineup have been together a long time and that the membership hasn’t gone through many changes over the years. A hugely successful recap of what we can also enjoy on the studio originals. A very solid sound, courtesy of the sound engineers, also did its part, and so did the crowd, which fired back a bit more energy, especially on the songs everyone knows by heart: Für immer, Böses Erwachen, Sieben and Veitstanz
As is well known, Bang Your Head is traditionally tied to the persona and work of Twisted Sister. That has gradually carried over to the Rock Of Ages festival as well. Twisted Sister wrapped up their career last year (they also played the BYH festival in 2016), but that doesn’t apply to their singer Dee Snider, who put out a new studio album last year. Snider has already headlined ROA once (and BYH too). So he burst onto the stage without his “TS outfit,” with an hour and three quarters at his disposal. The backing band was drilled to play mostly the current studio album, which Snider presented at length. But everyone at the festival came to hear Snider because they knew he’d play Twisted Sister classics too. Snider fired off the first of them very soon. The Kids Are Back! The crowd went nuts! Then the man let the audience stew for about half an hour, until the band tackled the extended version of the most notorious Twisted Sister hit and really the BYH (and ROA) anthem, We’re Not Gonna Take It. First in an acoustic, mellow version, and then of course in the best-known one. A richly stretched-out version, with the choruses repeated multiple times. He practically turned it into a proper operatic aria. As is well known, Dee loves talking between songs. Or rather, lecturing. He preaches about all sorts of experiences and feelings, and addresses the crowd with a heap of funny stories from his life. This time was no different. It’s simply part of Dee’s stage folklore. Interestingly, toward the end Snider also played the Soundgarden song Outshined, which he dedicated to the late Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell. Of the Twisted Sister material, the man played only two more songs: The Price in the second half and the closing I Wanna Rock. Even in the encore, he passed on Twisted Sister material and instead played another new song from the album »We Are The Ones«, called So What. A concert as expected. Snider is Snider. Comedian, actor, entertainer. He never loses the thread, and he masterfully turns every situation during the show to his advantage and makes a whole theater out of it. A bowl full of fun, in other words. The crowd did expect more, especially more Twisted Sister. Honestly, that would have been enough for them. In any case, Dee Snider is not Vince Neil, and unlike the “con man” Neil he delivered a full-blooded show, with no hiding backstage in between and no leaning on the other members of his backing band. Snider doesn’t play hide-and-seek. What you see is what you get. A concert charged with real energetic voltage and full of dynamics, with the spotlights of course throwing most of their light on the notorious vocalist. Snider brought along an extremely well-rehearsed band that played with full force and great commitment. Midnight slowly rolled over into the second festival day, which brought a considerably denser program, and more interesting acts too!
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