After All These Years (2011)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Cvetličarna / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 13.04.2011
Attendance: 800
Ticket price: 29 €

For a few reasons, I’ve always seen Parni Valjak more as a club band than as a big-stage concert attraction. Probably because between 1988 and 1993 I only got to see them twice, both times at the Black Jack club/disco in Črnuče. Those really were the only two chances, since for almost a decade the guys, for various reasons, very rarely showed up in Ljubljana, or on the Slovenian concert scene in general, apart from those two gigs. Still, the undeniable fact remains that they handle big concert stages and smaller club ones equally well.

Parni Valjak were never famous as great musical philosophers. Critics often accused them of “borrowing” from the Rolling Stones. Which is actually true. The track Stranica dnevnika, for example, comes from Angie, Lutka za bal from Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and you could find more…

At the end of the seventies, though, Valjak found their own sound pretty quickly, thanks above all to Hus, who is the 99 percent author of Parni Valjak’s entire output. The eighties were golden for Parni Valjak too, as they didn’t put out a bad album in that whole time. Their slide downhill began at the end of the last millennium with the albums Zastave and Pretežno sunčano?, which, despite a few “hits”, turned out pretty average. But worse than that, they’d started running out of energy at their shows too, which any attentive listener spotted very quickly. They carried on anyway and actually realized pretty late (only in 2006) that there was no fuel left in the tank, and put the guitars in the corner. Back then I predicted they’d be back on stage within five years. I wasn’t far off, because they lasted only three years without stages.

These days Valjak sound better live than ever. The guys keep proving they’re one of the best, if not the best, live band from the former Yugoslavia, easily outclassing even the younger, ambitious bands that have sprung up (and keep springing up) in the newly formed countries over twenty years of independence. Thursday’s show in a packed Cvetličarna was flawless in almost every respect. ALMOST! The song selection was definitely a negative surprise, since it belonged at a bigger concert for a wider audience, and certainly not on the club circuit. I really missed the old songs, for example (Prevela me mala, Javi se, Ona je tako prokleto mlada, Moje dnevne paranoje…). On top of that, the guys completely neglected one of their best albums, “Glavnom ulicom”. The only minor surprise was Ostani s njim (from the album Uhvati Ritam, 1984).

The middle of the concert was pretty dull and lost in average dirges from more recent times, like Dok je tebe, Stvarno nestvarno, Aleluja, Sunčanom stranom and one of their biggest commercial hits – Jesen u meni. Hand on heart, I’m properly sick of that last one, and it never moved me all that much anyway. The same album (Anđeli se dosađuju, 1986) has Tvoji koraci, which is in every way a far better song. I do get that Jesen u meni goes down much easier with the broader masses, while Tvoji koraci is more material for music connoisseurs. Judging by the question mark (?) on the set list next to the word JESEN, maybe there’s still hope the guys will strike this song from their live repertoire once and for all.

The guys did pull the so-so impression of the middle section up a bit afterwards with a few rockier numbers. We got Lutka za bal, Ugasi me, Sve još miriše na nju and U prolazu. The set list also had Hvala ti and Godine prolaze, which weren’t played. Shame, I’d have been especially happy to hear the first one somewhere in the middle of the evening.

A concert that was otherwise executed superbly thus ended up ringing hollow. At least from the standpoint of someone who has followed the band since the very beginning and knows damn well what potential the guys have, what they’re capable of and what they can serve up. The song selection would fit better at the announced bigger autumn show at Arena Stožice and would satisfy fans of mostly their latest period. For the club scene, where as a rule you find the real, longtime fans, they could have spared us the crowd-pleasers and spoiled us with treats from their rock-solid back catalog. The classics from Hus’s most creative songwriting period were missing.

A bitter aftertaste lingers, because the newer ballad and mid-tempo dirges just don’t do it for me. You can expect a similar repertoire at the autumn show in Ljubljana’s beauty, Arena Stožice, so, judging by what I heard on Thursday, I’ll most likely steer clear of it as widely as I can. I also met Hus, Aki and Preksi personally in the early nineties. Whenever we ran into each other at their gigs or someone else’s, we always had a chat. I’ve seen their shows in plenty of dives, but their latest period tells me that, on my side, the love affair is partly over. The old albums obviously stay in my collection, but live, let the guys play for the younger generations who are happy with their newer music. Thanks, Valjak, for a great (first) 30 years. And in any case, I wish the guys lots of success in the future.

Setlist

01.Ljubavna
02.Zagreb ima isti pozivni
03.Dok si pored mene
04.Zastave
05.Ostani s njim
06.Gledam je dok spava
07.Dođi
08.Molitva
09.Pusti nek’ traje
10.Dok je tebe
11.Stvarno nestvarno
12.Ivana
13.Uhvati ritam
14.Jesen u meni
15.Stranica dnevnika
16.Nakon svih godina
17.Aleluja
18.Sunčanom stranom
19.Moja je pjesma lagana
20.Prokleta nedjelja
21.U ljubav vjerujem
22.Lutka za bal
23.Ugasi me