Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Location: Ušće, Belgrade, Serbia
Concert date: 28.06.2012
Attendance: 10.000
Slovenia has Metalcamp, Metal Mania, Rock Otočec and plenty of other festivals. Croatia has InMusic and the freshly born Metal Fest Croatia (which will run under the name Burning Sea next year). Only Serbia has been lagging behind on the festival front (with the exception of the gargantuan Exit, of course). That has now changed too, because at the end of June the first Belgrade Calling festival went down at Belgrade’s Ušće. Over three days it hosted some of the hottest bands of this summer and, above all, served up a colorful (maybe even a bit too varied) lineup. The first day (musically uninteresting) saw Ušće taken over by electronic beats and the dumb pop of Britain’s Đesi Đej, while the second day of the festival was the real kickoff, with an actual concert lineup.
The festival took place at Ušće, a part of New Belgrade located right at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, which offers a wonderful view of the Kalemegdan fortress from some spots, as well as the tallest skyscraper in the Balkans, Ušće Tower, the former Central Committee building. The park right below the skyscraper has been a place for mass political rallies and even more massive concerts for decades, and its enormous expanse can of course only be filled by names like Ceca and Zdravko Čolić, who played in front of crowds of over a hundred thousand heads. In past years Ušće has also hosted world-famous acts like The Rolling Stones (2007), The Police (2008) and Metallica (this May), and this time it was the stage for the first Belgrade Calling, which opened its gates on Thursday a good hour late. The patchy organization and some pretty serious birth pains were also to blame for Satyricon, the first act on, taking the stage while most people were still jostling at the entrance.
Still, black metal veterans Satyricon, led by the legendary duo of Satyr and Frost, brought a bit of Norwegian winter to sweltering Belgrade. The two men who were there at the birth of the beast known as Norwegian black metal are now the target of fairly frequent criticism that Satyricon are heading in the wrong direction and forgetting their roots. But whether Satyricon are black metal, post-black metal or whatever genre junk you want to call it, in the worst of the summer heat they managed to present their vision of black metal in the best possible light – even though black metal generally only works live in the dark. The sun was to blame only for the dance of death with Satyricon not coming off as transcendental and ritualistic as usual, but Satyr knows how to keep a crowd in his fist even in blazing sunshine, holding on to the posture of a black metal frontman without falling into the trap of any Spinal Tap moments. This time the Norwegians focused only on their last three records – Now, Diabolical, The Age of Nero and Vulcano – and so, with the exception of the classic Mother North, presented the second phase of the band, which, whatever the elitist fans think, is no worse than the first. The excellent sound, which only gained in power and massiveness when Satyr picked up a guitar as a third guitarist, created the perfect impression of a monumental band, further lifted by Frost’s crushing drumming (he is now sporting ultra-kvlt mustache). With Satyricon, Belgrade Calling got off to a seriously promising start.
And it went on that way with the arrival of the fathers of doom and gothic metal, Paradise Lost! The Brits used their Belgrade show to promote their brand-new record Tragic Idol. They played only two songs from that album, while going back into their past with one track each from earlier records and even pulling off some very pleasant surprises. The first was that they walked on to the sounds of Desolate, the »outro« of the cult album Gothic, which blended perfectly into the newer Honesty in Death. That one, along with the title track of the new record, was living proof that Paradise Lost age like fine wine, that with their last three releases they’ve hit their creative peak again, and that with Tragic Idol they’re right below it. On top of all that (in my opinion mostly thanks to the phenomenal Mackintosh, who is probably also under the influence of his new band Vallenfyre, the biggest driving force behind the much more guitar-driven and aggressive new material), Paradise Lost haven’t sounded this good and this old-school in quite a while. Nick Holmes did struggle vocally through the first three songs, but his form kept visibly improving from track to track, and he pleasantly surprised again with a somewhat beefier delivery of Tragic Idol. He also dropped some charming remarks, which he backed up, entirely in his own style, with gentlemanly British humor. Via Forever Failure, with the controversial Charles Manson speech once again present, and the mighty The Enemy, Paradise Lost wrapped up their set far too soon (probably mostly because of the hour-long delay at the start of the festival day) with the ultra-hit Say Just Words.
With the next act, the festival atmosphere could really be felt in the air for the first time, even though the crowd was nowhere near as big as I expected. The stage was taken by Ozzy Osbourne’s former comrade Zakk Wylde, and an hour of guitar masturbation began. In his home band, Wylde combines elements of heavy metal, which he has heavily painted in the black of stoner, and drenches it in liters of Jack Daniel’s-soaked, American-South-inspired rock. Since there was no whiskey at the festival, Black Label Society this time had to be washed down with Jelen beer, which flowed from the taps nonstop, the cold beer arriving from the hands of Serbian-friendly waiters dressed in specially made festival T-shirts with a picture of Bambi and the slogan »Kad porastem biću jelen.« Meanwhile Wylde led his dirty crew through the band’s rich discography in a good hour, grating a little with monotonous, nasal singing that even recalled the vocals of his former boss (while at moments sounding melancholic and spleeny like Layne Staley, and at others completely Southern like Phil Anselmo). The endless solo spot was harder to digest: you had time to order a beer and a Banja Luka-style pleskavica, drink the beer, eat the pleskavica and digest the whole thing in peace, and then there were the repetitive guitar tricks (Zakk’s wanking with constant pinch harmonics seemed to have no end) from Wylde, adorned with a Native American feather headdress. Despite the overly posey guitar performance, Wylde’s almost total lack of communication with the crowd and the somewhat unclear, muddy sound, Black Label Society went down easy, and on top of that, instead of a pleskavica from the grill, all that was missing was some ribs with Zakk’s »Berserker« hot sauce.
Before the giants of rock, British icons The Cult, took the stage, the »fan pit« in front of the stage filled up properly for the first time, and the evening dusk that fell over Ušće was tailor-made for a concert by big rock stars. Serbs obviously love guitar rock (which is a pretty interesting fact if you just glance at the music programming on Serbian TV, but that’s a topic ripe for a serious sociological study, heh), as they already proved at the Judas Priest and Whitesnake concert at the Belgrade Arena, where the latter got far better and louder support. Led by the star-studded Ian Astbury (naturally hiding behind black sunglasses, wearing white cowboy boots and, despite the evening swelter, a jacket with some kind of furry thing around the neck), The Cult strutted into Belgrade like little devils, with Lil’ Devil from the cult album Electric. The very first song showed that The Cult were in excellent form (which, according to those who know the band better, was still the exception rather than the rule a few years ago), and in terms of quality and overall impression they probably played the best show of the night. Astbury was in a good mood that evening, talking to the crowd several times, and the dance moves typical of him were not missing either, the kind he laid down in the cult video for She Sells Sanctuary. Even nicer was hearing Billy Duffy’s truly phenomenal guitar sound. It was just loud enough to pleasantly carve up your eardrums, and it was completely distinct and crystal clear. Thrash metal fans’ hearts beat fastest for the legendary drummer John Tempesta, who wrote himself into the annals of thrash as a member of Exodus and Testament, and has been earning his bread (probably far more profitably than in thrash, heh) with The Cult since 2006. In top-notch, polished style, as befits a band of their caliber, they brought their brilliant set to a close, with the loud support of a satisfied crowd, with the mega rock hits She Sells Sanctuary and Love Removal Machine.
The peak of the second festival day was without a doubt the show by Ozzy Osbourne’s crazy runaway train and friends. Ozzy provided that kind of plaster over the burning wound once it turned out that the long, long-awaited reunion of the classic Black Sabbath lineup wasn’t going to happen. The father of the metal riff, Tony Iommi, had the bad luck of falling ill with leukemia (from which, luckily, he is reportedly recovering well), and after a dispute with Bill Ward the band split into two camps. The lucky ones caught Black Sabbath (minus Ward, who was replaced behind the drums by Tommy Clufetos, otherwise the drummer of Ozzy’s solo band) at two exclusive shows in Birmingham and at Donington, while the rest of us just had to lump it. But if you managed to forget all the fuss and dirty backstory around Black Sabbath, Ozzy & Friends was pure heavy metal enjoyment from the moment the Prince of Darkness personally shuffled onto the stage and screamed »Let the Madness Begin!« Ozzy kicked off the madness with a medley of his biggest solo hits, and the current lineup of his solo band spent the first half hour firing off one ultimate hit after another – Bark at the Moon, Mr. Crowley, Suicide Solution, I Don’t Know and a nice surprise in Shot in the Dark. It was played superbly, of course, even though Clufetos is an at-best average drummer and Gus G is still a guitarist who, in my opinion, doesn’t fit Ozzy at all. The bigger question mark was Ozzy’s form, which vocally kept getting worse over the first five songs and bent the legend over quite a few times, but you have to remember that Ozzy is 64, and in the eighties and nineties he ate, drank, snorted and did whatever else could be done, and with everything he consumed he could probably have circled the Earth a few times. But there’s nothing nicer than seeing a sprightly Ozzy who still acts like a kid on stage, a kid with a bit of Damien hidden inside, who with special glee, a childish smile and wickedly mischievous glowing eyes drenches the crowd in liters of white foam. After the five-hit run came a generous break for Ozzy, as it was time for the first Black Sabbath classic, the instrumental Rat Salad, which Gus G and Clufetos stretched out with not-so-convincing solo excursions. The best part of the show was the trio of Black Sabbath anthems, the eternal steel classics of heavy metal, Iron Man, War Pigs and N.I.B., and even nicer was seeing the lively, rowdy legend Geezer Butler on stage, who in his sixty-plus years still plays bass lines like a twenty-year-old brat, headbanging like crazy as if he’d bet on it. Iommi’s immortal riffs were handled this time by Ozzy’s star guest, none other than Slash, who somewhat surprisingly played every guitar part with great respect and very close to the original sound of the master Iommi, without overdoing the improvising. For Fairies Wear Boots, Slash was replaced by Ozzy’s former employee Zakk Wylde, and Ozzy’s constant cries of »Louder!« were heeded most by the somewhat lukewarm crowd at the peak of the show with the hit Crazy Train and the closing mega anthem Paranoid, during which everyone took the stage: all of Ozzy’s guests, Ozzy’s band and the godfather of heavy metal himself. We kind of missed I Don’t Want to Change the World and Mama I’m Coming Home, which Ozzy played everywhere on the tour, and I don’t know exactly why they weren’t played. So the show also passed a bit too fast, but it was great to see a legend live before he heads off into a well-deserved retirement. »Ozzy Osbourne is Our God!«
On Thursday morning, the small crowd was seen off by Macedonian thrashers Sanatorium, but one a.m. was the perfect time for a tour of Belgrade by night and for gathering strength for the next day.
Setlists
SATYRICON:
1. Now, Diabolical
2. Black Crow On a Tombstone
3. Possessed
4. The Wolfpack
5. That Darkness Shall Be Eternal
6. Commando
7. Mother North
8. K.I.N.G.
9. Fuel For Hatred
PARADISE LOST:
1. Desolate/Widow
2. Honesty in Death
3. Erased
4. As I Die
5. Tragic Idol
6. Forever Failure
7. The Enemy
8. Say Just Words
THE CULT:
1. Lil’ Devil
2. Honey From a Knife
3. Rain
4. Lucifer
5. Phoenix
6. Fire Woman
7. The Wolf
8. Wild Flower
9. Rise
10. For the Animals
11. She Sells Sanctuary
12. Love Removal Machine
OZZY OSBOURNE & FRIENDS
1. Bark At the Moon
2. Mr. Crowley
3. Suicide Solution
4. I Don’t Know
5. Shot in the Dark
6. Rat Salad
7. Iron Man
8. War Pigs
9. N.I.B.
10. Fairies Wear Boots
11. Crazy Train
12. Paranoid
Photo Gallery
