Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Urban Bolta
Location: Victoria Park / London / United Kingdom
Concert date: 23.07.2010
Attendance: 25
Ticket price: 160€ (weekend ticket)
On the sixteenth of May, the rock world stood still. Ronnie James Dio was gone. An icon, a magnetic personality and a musician devoted to his music and his fans with his whole heart. His voice lifted him up among the stars, and his down-to-earth nature only cemented his place there. Dio’s departure from this world naturally meant the end of his band Dio, and it also put a stop to Heaven & Hell, the lineup of his former Black Sabbath bandmates. They had a whole bunch of shows announced for this summer, and those naturally went down the drain the moment it became clear that Dio had serious health problems, even though they were only officially cancelled at the start of May.
One of the dates circled in the Heaven & Hell calendar was July 24, their slot at the High Voltage festival in London. It’s a brand-new festival that took place for the very first time this year and offered its visitors a really interesting lineup. Alongside the bands we run into on stages all the time, there were a few exclusive appearances from that other category, the kind that are worth their weight in gold. The notorious trio Emerson, Lake & Palmer shared a stage for the first time in a dozen years, the new project Down ‘n’ Outz made its very first appearance ever (Def Leppard vocalist Joe Elliott teamed up with the Quireboys and together they play Mott The Hoople covers), and the most interesting exclusive of the festival for me personally was the final show by the aforementioned Heaven & Hell. The die was cast: the remaining three decided to play the (home) London show after all, dedicate it to the memory of their longtime friend, and invite two guest vocalists to fill His spot. That honor went to Glenn Hughes and Jorn Lande.
Heaven & Hell played as the second-to-last act of the opening day, after AOR veterans Foreigner and before the evening’s headliners ZZ Top. A good 20 minutes of downtime were needed for the crew to set up the stage for the long-awaited appearance of the heavy metal troubadours. In the meantime, a face unknown to me escorted the widowed Wendy Dio to the far right side of the stage, where she settled into a comfortable chair and watched the proceedings from the side. Then the stage was swallowed by fog and the taped intro “E5150” kicked in over the speakers. The crowd roared for the first time as the thinning fog revealed the outlines of those well-known figures: guitarist Tony Iommi took the right side as usual, bassist Geezer Butler the left, Vinny Appice sat behind the drum kit, and way over on the left, like a shadow in the dark, the band’s permanent touring member Scott Warren slipped unnoticed behind the keyboards (better known as Dio’s collaborator from the album “Strange Highways” (1994) onward). The way out of the intro brought the first touch of Iommi’s fingers on his guitar, and the onslaught began with The Mob Rules, which shot the first of the guest vocalists, Jorn, out onto the stage. Jorn Lande is a Norwegian musician of the younger generation who has been steadily gaining respect in music circles in recent years with consistently good work, so as a devoted Dio follower, he was the one who got the honor of walking the stage between Butler and Iommi. Jorn’s performance was thoroughly professional, and his piercing, powerful voice decently tamed the classics I, Voodoo and Die Young over the course of the evening.
The song Country Girl pushed the evening’s second guest vocalist onto the big stage for the first time: Glenn Hughes, a longtime friend of Dio’s with decades of musical experience in various projects, including being the lead Black Sabbath vocalist in the mid-eighties. Hughes knew exactly how to cash in on all that experience. Unlike Jorn, he added a touch of his own interpretation to the songs, so he didn’t stick to the originals at all costs but cleverly bent them to his inner feelings. He swung from delicate sophistication to a somewhat more aggressive vocal pose, which led to a bunch of dynamic turnarounds. Hughes once again lived up to the name of a great musician, and with a convincing performance he too had no trouble matching Children of the Sea, Bible Black and Falling Off the Edge of the World.
Jorn and Hughes traded off all the way up to the epic Heaven and Hell, when both of them stood on stage together, each conducting from his own side a wave of vocal support from the fanatical crowd in the front rows. An encore followed with the expected Neon Knights, spiced up by none other than former Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo, who shot onto the stage unannounced from the side, half-ripped the mic out of Hughes’ hands and sang a few lines himself, then ended his adventure on his knees in front of Iommi before bolting back backstage. An eccentric outburst or a tribute to the heavy metal god? Probably a bit of both… The surprised Hughes didn’t let it throw him and confidently carried the show to its end. Iommi’s unmistakable riffing and the tightness of the Butler – Appice rhythm section proved once again how much miles of experience count, when even under the pressure of a tough situation, hands and heads stay where they should.
The hour-and-a-quarter journey through the Dio-era work of Black Sabbath was loaded with emotion. While Iommi, Butler, Appice and Warren did their job without any emotional slip-ups visible to the naked eye, Hughes had a very hard time keeping his emotional side in check on the other side of the stage. Between his speeches and glances aimed at the sky, he kept sobbing, which he hid behind big sunglasses. The most touching moment came about halfway through the Heaven & Hell set, when a visibly worn-out Wendy Dio took the floor and, with Iommi cheering her on, said a few words to the crowd along the expected lines, about how her late husband loved us all. In moments like that you truly realize your own mortality, and Wendy’s tears on stage immediately sparked a heartening, synchronized chant of “Dio, Dio!” from the crowd below. That chant echoed in my ears long into the night, right up to the moment I closed my eyes and realized that I too had been part of the last Heaven & Hell tribute to a great man. Ronnie James, thanks for everything!
Setlist
1. E5150 2. The Mob Rules 3. I 4. Country Girl 5. Children of the Sea 6. Turn Up The Night 7. Voodoo 8. Bible Black 9. Falling Off the Edge of the World 10. Die Young 11. Heaven and Hell —————- 12. Neon Knights
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