Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Šešče (Prebold, Žalec) / Kulturni dom Šešče / Slovenia
Concert date: 28.04.2018
Attendance: 250
Ticket price: 13,00€
30 years have passed since the Fuck Off Commercial festival was founded. That makes it the oldest heavy music festival in Slovenia, and this year it’s celebrating a pretty serious jubilee. To mark the occasion, the legendary Styrian metal storm-bringers Interceptor fired up their mildly rusty joints once again (well, they’d been dormant for a good bunch of years). They spat in their hands, rolled up their sleeves and contributed a key ingredient to the anniversary edition of this much-loved festival on the Savinja river. The festival is fatefully tied to Interceptor and to all the history stretching even further back, to the days of Epidemic Zone, the band Interceptor actually grew out of. So we’re in the Lower Savinja Valley. In lovely Šešče, with Prebold on the other side of the hills and Žalec not far from here either. If you ask anyone around here who they belong to, they’ll tell you straight: they’re a Savinja local.
The organizers thought of everything. Really, every last little detail. And what mattered most was that noble value we’ve somehow been seriously neglecting over the years. Unity. The Savinja folks showed incredible togetherness that evening, the kind of togetherness you can only learn from. From the neat tickets and wristbands to the press passes. Friendly, pleasant staff at the box office, among the security guys, behind the bar and everywhere else. Outstanding energy, positive vibes and, of course, a proper party. Tuned to the hellish notes of heavy sounds.
A little before nine in the evening. On stage: Ljubljana’s Big Bad Wolf. The crew who put out their debut “Outrage of Modesty” in February. A quintet that’s fiercely fired up and flint-tight. A hugely successful blend of old-school revivalism, with elements of speed and thrash metal and rock’n’roll. The band played their whole studio debut and tacked on Ugly at the end, an older number taken from their EP. As expected, guest violinist Andrej Kopač jumped in on Rattlesnake. The band once again won me over with their focus, charisma and songwriting punch. The quintet as a whole. The only awkwardness for the band came from the fact that, for now, there were fewer people in the venue than you’d expect. The festival had barely opened and most of the crowd was only just starting to trickle in. The big bad wolf howled with real power again, maybe with a bit less fire than in mid-March at Orto bar in Ljubljana, but I’m sure that with more solid support from the crowd, it would have felt completely different.
After the angrily howling furball from Ljubljana, it was Braslovče’s Fuck Logic who climbed on stage. “Fuck logic,” in other words. It’s that feeling when you finally flunk math for a change. A potent mix of old-school thrash metal with elements of death metal thrown in. A quartet with completely original material. And a quartet that invited a special guest on stage. Čedo from Radio Jam. Since Radio Jam are hard rockers, you could sense that Fuck Logic with Čedo on stage were going to pull off something outside the context of Fuck Logic’s usual musical culture. In memory of Sergej Vučer, a huge AC/DC fan, they played Hell’s Bells together, with Čedo on vocals delivering an extremely fitting vocal take on the original. The band is announcing a studio debut. Judging by what I saw and heard, they don’t lack commitment, and what they badly need now is even more gigs, and with them even more experience and mileage. To give the guys extra wings and punch. They’re on the right track and I believe the debut will be a temptation worth every sin.
I arrived in Šešče that evening in a pretty chatty mood. Straight from the far west of Slovenia, with a stopover in Kamnik, then a soul-crushing crawl through the endless bends and speed limits of the Tuhinj Valley, I’d been sipping beer at Florjan for a mere 1.80€ at 4 p.m., yet I hadn’t even bothered to find out what the running order was. Expecting black metallers Marax, I stepped up in front of the stage, where it definitely didn’t smell like black metal opening bars, especially when the second taped intro started playing, the theme from the legendary Yugoslav comedy “Maratonci tečejo častni krog”. Of course. Because the famous interceptor had just landed on stage, resoundingly named Interceptor. Led by the band’s ultra-marathoners Gregor Čulk Jr. and Marjan Pader (guitar), plus Dragan Bagarič (bass), returnee Simon Cukjati (guitar) and Davorin Štorgelj (drums). This time Čule opened by calming the audience down, telling them to come closer, because he wasn’t planning to throw himself off the stage this time: “Come closer, I won’t throw myself off the stage!” Those who knew a few stories behind that Čule line of course burst out laughing.
The band dedicated this concert to Sergej and Tomaž Vučer. Two key building blocks of this festival. The men responsible for its birth. Sergej wrote most of Interceptor’s lyrics, while Tomaž played bass in Epidemic Zone. In that spirit, the band had already announced they’d squeeze a hefty dose of songs from their first two records into the set. But keep in mind the band has been inactive for quite some time and only got together for this one concert. Given the group’s reputation and status, this event is one of those that will surely go down among the most important events in Slovenia’s metal universe in 2018.
The band radiated serious tightness, from the Pader-Cukjati guitar tandem, while time was ruled by the extremely dynamic, active and sharply precise rhythm duo of bassist Dragan and drummer Davorin. And then, of course, there he was. The one and only. Master Čulk, “head and beard” and all. As I’ve always said: when you watch Čulk on stage, you know where he belongs. On stage and nowhere else. This is a man built from head to toe to entertain people. From his mere presence, the gesturing, the posture, the grimaces, everything he does up there. Plus all the comments and other “nonsense” that swarm through his mind at any given moment and that he generously shares with the people. Of course, the hall had filled with a clientele who know all the musicians like the back of their hand, and vice versa. So Čule greeted quite a few of the visitors from the stage, thanked several times those who took care of the logistics and running of the festival, first and foremost Mufi, who thus became Master Mufi, and the band played brilliantly. Sound-wise too. The sound was great in every respect.
And so it went. After the somewhat expected Homo Stupidus, which opened the show (it’s their last single, released in 2008), the band set about revisiting songs from their first two albums, which was already stirring up some of the heavyweight veterans in the crowd quite a bit. So the band traveled back in time through the setlist, and dedicated two numbers specifically to the memory of Sergej and Tomaž Vučer. A tried-and-true first-class choice, then, for catapulting us into a godless and blasphemous graveyard metal mass. And Pomarančina Goba zla had to be in there too, of course! Also making the cut was the slick Paparazzo from the third album “Mora”, where, as expected, the charismatic Marjan Pader stretched his vocal cords too. Misprized Death, with guest Boštjan Bahč on wind instruments, Pader on twelve-string acoustic guitar and of course Čulk with clean vocals. The band closed the regular set by playing Highway To Hell. That was the second AC/DC cover dedicated to the band’s big fan Sergej Vučer. The band did it “their own way.” So AC/DC got their version of the song in graveyard metal format.
The encore brought Zadnja žrtev, which originally belongs to Epidemic Zone and which the band already recorded on the album “The Beginning” (1993), and then the show closed with Sepultura’s Inner Self (Sepultura being the band that certainly played an important role in defining the sound and style of early Interceptor). In short, all the small and big history of this legendary band in one piece, in one place. Full-blooded and passionate. After this concert, Interceptor went back into dormancy. Whether they’ll reactivate or not remains a mystery. I won’t hint at anything myself, but after what they showed, you can feel that the potency, the charge and the passion are still in these guys. The energy is there, the fire of purification should have driven out the demons of the past, and if the constellation of stars in the sky is right, then surely the Savinja metal machine will roll once more across Slovenia’s metal sky and wrap it in its graveyard metal blackness again. So let’s give time some time.
The ungrateful role of the night, though, had to be played this time by the newborn black metallers Marax. This is a quartet featuring the female black metal vocals of singer Anin. There’s also Cordura’s Tim Draksler, who once helped out in Interceptor, just as Bagarič did in his Cordura, and despite the hefty corpse paint, he wasn’t hard to recognize by his characteristic look, his guitar and his little beard. The band played their EP “The Abyss Of Illusion”, released in mid-April this year, essentially giving it its live premiere. As a non-expert on black metal, I find it hard to say where to slot the band stylistically, but it’s certain they draw inspiration from the rich Scandinavian phalanx and legacy of this kind of music, led by Dimmu Borgir and Old Man’s Child, and I also got an association with the project Covenant. The band built up the backdrop with taped synth curtains and orchestrations, showed a nice level of complexity in the composing and a good measure of theatricality, which Anin took care of. Dark stuff, in other words. Too bad the waiting phase was so long. I think almost three quarters of an hour. In that time (before the show) the crowd had seriously wilted under the weight of an excess of alcohol derivatives, and the number of listeners, in hours that were leaning hard toward morning, got thoroughly decimated too. A shame for the band. But every beginning is harder than you’d like it to be. The band also added a few covers of their idols to the show and so still managed to piece together 40 minutes. Definitely a band worth every bit of attention. Not just because they cultivate their own musical identity within black metal, but also because of singer Anin, who is certainly the band’s special feature.
As I enthusiastically hinted at the start, the Fuck Off Commercial festival was a success in every respect. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed that kind of unity, that kind of connection between people and that kind of organizational muscle in Slovenia, as I did right in Šešče.
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