Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Sebastijan Videc
Venue: Hala Tivoli / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Date: 24.06.2014
Attendance: 6000
Ticket price: 39€ (stands) / 44€ (floor)
While Slovenian media were busy with news from the country’s biggest prison and from football-crazy Brazil, rock fans had completely different things on their minds. Almost to the day, four years after his first visit, British rock star Billy Idol came back to Ljubljana. The 58-year-old music icon has managed to hold on to the popularity of the early eighties right up to today. What’s more, staying true to the faith and sticking to a path laid out ages ago still guarantees him packed venues, so the hall beneath Rožnik greeted him with a full house of six thousand.
So what’s changed in Billy Idol’s camp since his last visit here? Not much, really. The man is working on a new studio album due this fall, set to drop alongside an autobiography that will, no doubt, serve up some juicy tidbits from Idol’s career, now almost four decades long.
The show, with no opening act, kicked off a few minutes before 8:30 p.m. Starting with a new track, Postcards from the Past, which will land on the upcoming album, Idol soon spiced up the evening with some of the most recognizable tunes of his career: Cradle of Love, Dancing With Myself and Flesh for Fantasy had a good chunk of both stands on their feet right from the opening, and the near-ecstatic support from every corner of the hall didn’t let up until the very end. Billy’s backing crew was made up of old familiar faces Steve Stevens and Billy Morrison on guitars and bassist Stephen McGrath, plus two newcomers to the lineup, drummer Erik Eldenius and keyboardist Paul Trudeau.
Despite those sixty years creeping up on him, Billy Idol stays true to the image that made him famous. The eternal mix of charm and machismo, backed by the look of a bad boy that long ago won him heavy rotation on MTV, is alive and well and still hypnotizes crowds, especially when Billy pulls one of his signature facial grimaces out of his sleeve. The many costume changes (and strip-downs) revealed that dust hasn’t exactly gathered on his home gym equipment; judging by his sculpted body and nonstop energetic stance, you could easily knock a decade off Billy’s age.
Love and Glory and One Breath Away, as the newcomers in the live repertoire at the start of the main part of the show, served to demonstrate what waters Billy swims in these days. The ragged guitar rhetoric of Steve Stevens and Billy Morrison testified to a continued pursuit of the uncompromising sound Idol staked out with his previous record, »Devil’s Playground«, perhaps the hardest album of his entire solo career. So no going soft, then! After the new Generation X track Ready Steady Go, Billy picked up an acoustic guitar and tossed out another sex-drenched little hit, Sweet Sixteen. Though his fingers are nowhere near as smooth on the fretboard as those of his longtime guitarist Stevens, Billy’s instrumental showing predictably drew waves of enthusiasm. The biggest stars have the whole philosophy of show biz in their pinky finger, so they know exactly when and with which bones to throw the crowd to get the reaction they want. Similarly populist platitudes ran through Billy’s between-song banter too, though with that kind of enormous mileage, you can hardly blame him for being bored of the same stock concert phrases he always uses.
In the second half of the night, fans of guitar virtuoso Steve Stevens, recognizable from a mile away by his lush hairdo that hasn’t changed much in shape over the last three decades, got more and more of what they came for. Flirting with a light flamenco pattern in the intro to yet another well-known hit, Eyes Without a Face, was just a warm-up for a longer solo spot, by now traditionally woven into the motifs of the The Doors cover LA Woman. Over the course of the show Stevens displayed a varied palette of skills, and playing behind the back was of course not missing either, but the dose of guitar tricks was just right, so the spotlights didn’t lose sight of his boss’s shoulders for too long.
Billy’s live power was on full display as the regular set wrapped up with Rebell Yell, during which the loud singing of the anthemic chorus at times drowned out the otherwise sturdy PA of the Tivoli hall. Back on stage, at first only Billy and his right-hand man Steve Stevens appeared and unrolled the acoustic motif of the more than thirty-year-old hit White Weding, to which the rest of the band gave its familiar roaring face at the close. To say goodbye to a show an hour and three quarters long, Idol served up a cover of Tommy James’s Mony Mony. An ending identical to last time, despite a fun delivery, raised the question of why the hell Billy sticks to a routine set years ago instead of swapping it for more artistic freedom. Anyway, in the end it has to be said that the new rock spectacle satisfied the appetite of a packed Tivoli hall, even if, compared with the show four years ago, the Slovenian audience deserved a fresher take on those eighties hits.
Setlist
1. Postcards from the Past
2. Cradle of Love
3. Dancing with Myself (Generation X song)
4. Flesh for Fantasy
5. Love and Glory
6. One Breath Away
7. Ready Steady Go (Generation X song)
8. Sweet Sixteen
9. Whiskey And Pills
10. Eyes Without a Face
11. L.A. Woman (The Doors cover) Guitar Solo
12. King Rocker (Generation X song)
13. Love Like Fire (Generation X song)
14. Blue Highway
15. Rebel Yell
———–
16. White Wedding
17. Mony Mony
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