Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Zenith Halle / Munich / Germany
Concert date: December 10, 2010
Attendance: 5
Ticket price: €40.00
December in Germany has traditionally meant a Motörhead tour. Year after year. Every other summer the elder statesmen of English heavy metal also play the festival stages, so for every true rocker in Germany, a Motörhead outing is just part of daily life. And they never get sick of it. The Germans proved once again how devoted they are to the more traditional forms of rock music, packing Munich’s Zenith hall to the last corner. It’s a fairly big venue, tucked away in an industrial zone in the north of the Bavarian capital.
It’s a long road from Slovenia to the Zenith hall. Especially if you ignore all those hugely popular navigation gadgets and rely only on your own instinct and memories of past visits to the place. It gets even trickier when you find out that the Munich North exit, which drops you practically right in front of the Zenith, is closed, and the cherry on top is that a home match for Bayern in the German league has just ended right near your destination, so tens of thousands of people are blocking the very roads you’re driving on while you hunt for the place. But events can’t keep going against you forever, so Aleš and I beat all of these obstacles and, a little before eight in the evening, in Siberian conditions and dressed in T-shirts, walked into the long-sought hall, where things had already heated up nicely.
Heavy metal queen Doro Pesch was already prowling the stage, which meant we’d missed the Swedish stoner metallers Grand Magus. No big deal though, there’s a resit coming in April, when the Swedes play Metelkova in Ljubljana with Grave Digger. In the barely half an hour of her set that Aleš and I caught, the seasoned Doro showed she knows every stage trick in the book and has enough experience to give the people what they want. The repertoire was heavily marked by Warlock numbers, and as the cherry on top she added the Judas Priest classic Breaking The Law. The most sentimental moment came with the song Für Immer, during which guitarist Luca Princiotta sat down at the keyboards and, after the preceding heavy metal crushers, provided some gentler melodies. Doro kept urging the crowd on with rehearsed moves, though she couldn’t shake my feeling that her stage show is dragged in by the hair and is really just a mix of Dio’s moves and Manowar-style showmanship. With the classic All We Are, the heavy metal queen finally wrapped up her standard, no-surprises set on autopilot and did a solid job as the warm-up act for the mighty Motörhead.
After an agonizing wait (which of course can’t compare to the two hours of suffering at Motörhead in Padua last year), Lemmy Kilmister (vocals, bass) took his place on stage, with Phil Campbell (guitar) to his left and Mikkey Dee on drums at the back. Lemmy steps up to the mic and utters the famous words: “We are Motörhead. We play rock’n’roll,” which have opened their shows for years. Could it get any more traditional? In an age of bands pouring enormous effort, even mountains of money, into their intros, the iron chancellor Lemmy sticks to a simple, instantly recognizable line, followed by a shot straight to the forehead. This time the only thing missing from the perfect delivery was a cigarette between his lips.
The show was opened by the decade-old romp We Are Motörhead, which hadn’t happened since the “Hammered” tour in 2002. Then came the two-minute shot of the ancient Stay Clean, a proper cure for those gourmets who only acknowledge Motörhead’s creativity up to the mid-eighties. Get Back In Line from the brand-new album “The Wörld is Yours” was a welcome change in their slowly shifting repertoire, and it has all the typical ingredients of the British trio, from Lemmy’s cranked-up bass and recognizable vocal lines, through Campbell’s punky guitar, to Dee’s monstrous drum pounding.
As the set went on, the temperature in the hall was creeping toward boiling point. Lemmy and Phil understandably did their part, with countless glances toward the sound techs and thumbs-ups dictating that the volume from the monitors and speakers keep climbing steeply, which can be quite a test for every concertgoer’s eardrums. Motörhead simply don’t know an upper limit. Watching the show from up close, in the front rows, you notice plenty of interesting details about how the band communicates, things the eye in the middle of the hall surely can’t see. Several times, just catching each other’s eyes was enough for the trio to agree how many bars to stretch a song or how many more hits on the snare it would take to finish it. Even the extension of the closing song Overkill was completely spontaneous: Lemmy’s glance toward Phil and that famous bass line kicking in were enough for the song to grow into its third stage.
Alongside the regularly played classics Metropolis, I Got Mine, the pure-blooded rock’n’roll crusher Going To Brazil, Ace Of Spades and the newer staples One Night Stand and Rock Out, the more interesting part of the setlist came from The Chase Is Better Than The Catch (“Ace Of Spades”, 1980), the newest, already mentioned Get Back in Line, and I Know How To Die. Compared to previous tours, Whorehouse Blues and Iron Fist got short shrift this time. The faithful Motörhead crowd breathed with the band and followed them every step of the way, even singing along to the still officially unreleased tracks.
Lemmy proved once again that he’s a charismatic icon without equal. It doesn’t get more authentic than him. Racing along at breakneck pace, hat pulled down over his head and that unmistakable vocal rumble still serving him well, a good hour and a half flew by in a flash. In Lemmy’s shadow, which surprised me personally, the crowd overlooked guitarist Phil Campbell, whose two or three bits of banter between songs fell on deaf ears and didn’t get the “feedback” he wanted. Mikkey Dee laid all his virtues on a platter once again: hidden behind the mighty drum kit, he dictated the tempo with animal speed, and only showed himself to the audience for the bow at the end of the show. Until then all we saw was his galloping mop of hair above the cymbals. This new trip to Bavaria was a journey worth making, because the hard-earned drops of sweat on that stage proved that shows in Germany are more than mere routine. The faithful German crowd got another lesson in raw, cranked-up rock’n’roll, and we’ll be hiccuping about it for years to come. That’s exactly why every new encounter with Motörhead feels like the first!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
GRAND MAGUS: 1.Kingslay 2.Like The Oar Strikes The Water 3.Hammer Of The North 4.Ravens Guide Our Way 5.I, The Jury 6.Iron Will DORO: 1.Earthshaker 2.I Rule the Ruins 3.Running From the Devil 4.Burning the Witches 5.Metal Racer 6.Wacken Hymne (We are the Metalheads) 7.Für immer 8.Breaking the Law 9.All We Are MOTORHEAD: 1.We Are Motörhead 2.Stay Clean 3.Get Back In Line 4.Metropolis 5.Over the Top 6.One Night Stand 7.Rock Out 8.Guitar solo 9.The Thousand Names Of God 10.I Got Mine 11.I Know How To Die 12.The Chase Is Better Than the Catch 13.In the Name of Tragedy (plus drum solo) 14.Just ‘Cos You Got the Power 15.Going To Brazil 16.Killed By Death 17.Ace Of Spades —encore— 18.Born To Raise Hell 19.Overkill
Photo Gallery
