Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Vila Manin / Codroipo (Udine) / Italy
Concert date: 06/27/2010
Attendance: 5000
Ticket price: €35.00 (presale) / €41.00 (day of show)
We all know the internet has scrambled bands’ body clocks. Even the rock dinosaurs and other prehistoric rampaging beasts have been forced to adapt. The internet “download” has literally catapulted bands onto the stage. They tour all the time, often several times a year. Touring is becoming the only real source of income for bands. As a result, ticket prices keep climbing while set lengths keep shrinking. And the trend rolls on into 2010, digging in deeper, hardening, gaining legitimacy, with audiences swallowing it more and more as just how things are.
One band with the status of a Permo-Carboniferous amphibian is our good old chasers of rusty virgins and exterminators of Jack Daniel’s finest, known to friends as Motorhead. Their tradition of summer festival slots has actually landed them the one standalone show, which they wedged in between the festival dates. This time in neighboring Udine. If you remember last July, Motorhead played three of these standalone shows in Italy. This time, just one.
The sultry day was kicked off by Milan’s Bulldozer. The band, which turned 30 this spring, is a respected and well-known name on home turf. Totally wrong for opening a Motorhead show, but that’s who the promoter picked. Bulldozer are, after all, legends of Italian metal. The band was dead for almost 20 years, then suddenly got back together the year before last. The reunion brought us a farce you could call Bulldozer-spiced slapstick theater, which mostly entertained the handful of Italians down front, while the rest of us suffered through the stage sadomasochism from a safe distance. It’s supposedly inspired by some forms of black metal, mainly thanks to the frequent blast beats with ragged riffs laid over them. The indistinct wheezing of extreme vocals we’ll throw in too, and there we are. A deadpan essence of the band’s primordial beginnings, which only the particular receptors of Italian ears seem able to process. Half an hour was more than plenty. I wish the band well, and I wish the rest of the crowd, who travel to Italy from abroad to see proper big bands of global stature, above all that they never end up in front of a stage with Bulldozer again. This band is worth consuming only at home, meaning strictly at Italian festivals.
Good old chancellor Lemmy Kilmister and his crew took the stage at exactly 9:30 PM! Interestingly, no more than 4,000, maybe 4,500 people showed up to greet Motorhead this time. That’s a real surprise, since last year’s mayhem in Padua at Vila Contarini caused a two-hour delay because the front barrier got wrecked. That was the day 10,000 madheads poured onto the grounds and everybody shoved for the front row. This time, a crowd half that size in Codroipo made for a show tailor-made even for those who go to concerts to “retire.” I’m talking about the calmer kind of listener. But the devil won’t leave you alone. You simply can’t stand still at a Motorhead show. And yet plenty of figures sprawled out in the soft, comfy grass of the Vila Manin grounds, far, far from the stage, proved me wrong on that one.
So let’s turn to the stage. Motorhead came on like the well-oiled machine they are and, as expected, dished out plenty of fun. Lemmy’s voice is in decent shape and, in this new era, still relentlessly roaring, hoarse and broad as a transatlantic steamship, except Lemmy hasn’t hit an iceberg yet! After a superb opening mood, courtesy of the iron-clad classics Iron Fist and Stay Clean, the band moves on to newer material, which cools the crowd down a bit. In this stretch the highlight was Lemmy’s intro for Rock Out: “This song is called Rock Out with your cock out!” Through the opening ballet, Campbell and the chancellor sway shoulder to shoulder, and the band is already grinding out riffs on the indispensable Metropolis, which carries them to yet another classic. Over The Top! Phil Campbell urges the crowd to make more noise than they’ve ever made in their lives, and Lemmy tops it off by dedicating the song to everyone in the audience who woke their throats up tonight!
The band just can’t and won’t peel itself off the promo cycle of the latest studio album “Motorizer” (2008), which, let’s be honest, is one of the less interesting Motorhead albums. The slot that Sacrifice and Orgasmatron used to fill in the set list now goes to the newer In The Name Of Tragedy (“Kiss Of Death”, 2006), which meshes nicely with the classic repertoire. That song still features the phenomenal drum solo from the blond Greek with a Swedish passport, Mikkey Dee. Flawless and perfect!
Welcome blooms from the album “Another Perfect Day” (1983) are finally no longer a target of criticism, since it’s one of the band’s unfairly overlooked records, with guitar work of the highest IQ, in Motorhead terms of course. Once again the boys successfully “caressed” our ears with I Got Mine and Just ‘Cos You Got The Power. The set list surprise this time was Cradle to the Grave, which came out as the B-side of the Eat The Rich single from the album “Rock N’ Roll” (1987). You’d wish for more lovely surprises like that, because the show quickly slid toward the finale, announced by the short rock n’ roll firestarter Going To Brasil and confirmed (by Motorhead standards) by the almost mini-EP that is Killed By Death. These days the boys usually close every show with that one. But this time Born To Raise Hell, a “Bastards” mischief, sneaked in after Killed By Death to wrap up the regular set. After Killed By Death it only proved that, given how demanding both choruses are, Lemmy’s voice keeps an unbelievable edge of vocal detonation and a whiff of rebellion, like a lone rock n’ roll wolf who, through the beastly workout he gives his vocal cords, never skimps on the amount of alcohol fumes he exhales. All of which, in the end, puts Motorhead among the giants of rock music.
The boys shamelessly cranked the sound up during the show. That’s a constant: the more roaring, droning and general torture of the sound gear, the better they feel. As if they wanted to literally kill the crowd with noise. For the closer, Ace Of Spades, during which many in the crowd went through an unforgettable delirium, like losing their virginity for the first time, and the band nailed the devil’s horns one last time with Overkill, which, as expected, they stretched out at the end. Through unbearable stage feedback, the band said goodbye to its fans.
Motorhead don’t miss. They’re winners, though they like to remind us that the little guy lives under the mistaken belief that he can win, even though he’s doomed to ultimate defeat from the day he’s born. As long as Lemmy stays healthy and the nails driven into his vocal cords, of poisonously unique origin, don’t rust, we’ll get to see many more fantastic nights with the band. It was no different this time in Codroipo. The chrome lining of Lemmy’s vocal cords is serving him perfectly well in 2010 too!
But let’s be honest. Motorhead shows are for catching in the UK and Germany. That’s where the band squeezes out more, and their gigs don’t smell purely of routine. In Italy you feel the routine way too much. Either the crowd tears down the barrier, or it “retires” in front of the stage. And that just doesn’t move Motorhead. On the other hand, the band urgently needs to change up the set list and shuffle the running order a bit, because it has started to bore us terribly with its predictability. The first alarming sign this time was the relatively low turnout in Codroipo. Above all, stop forcing “Motorizer” songs on the crowd. They’ll never reach the shine of the eighties classics, which, after three years of the same worn-out live repertoire, we miss like crazy. Let’s hope our wishes come true by the band’s December tour of Germany. The band was incredibly stingy and the show wrapped up in under an hour and a half. Anyone seeing Motorhead in Codroipo for the first time definitely got their money’s worth. Motorhead remain tried-and-true riders of the fatherland of rock n’ roll, who can’t and won’t deny what they are.
photos: Mojca Perdih
Setlist
MOTORHEAD:
1.Iron Fist
2.Stay Clean
3.Be My Baby
4.Rock Out
5.Metropolis
6.Over The Top
7.One Night Stand
8.The Thousand Names Of God
9.I Got Mine
10.Cradle to the Grave
11.In The Name Of Tragedy
12.Just ‘Cos You Got The Power
13.Going To Brazil
14.Killed By Death
15. Born To Raise Hell
—encore—
16.Ace Of Spades
17.Overkill
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