Author: Urban Bolta
Location: MC Pekarna / Maribor
Concert date: March 18, 2012
Attendance: 90
Ticket price: €10 (with reservation) / €12 (without reservation)
Blaze Bayley! That’s the guy Steve Harris picked to step into Bruce Dickinson’s shoes and save the Iron Maiden ship, whose popularity had been sinking steadily in the mid-nineties. The Wolfsbane frontman saw his dreams come true, and even though plenty of fans turned their backs on Maiden in the second half of the nineties, Blaze Bayley wrote himself into heavy metal history for good by being part of the giants. After an amicable exit from the band, Blaze Bayley set out on a thorny solo career, and in the good decade since its launch he’s proven himself a successful musician, devoted to heavy metal body and soul.
But that’s not all! Unlike a whole bunch of musicians who ended up out the back door of one rock giant or another, Bayley cranks out good albums like it’s nothing and doesn’t lean blindly on his former glory like a drunk on a fence. Just a few days ago he put out his sixth studio album, »The King of Metal«, which he also presented at two shows in Slovenia (the day after Maribor, Blaze played Ljubljana too). Craving a fresh live experience, I went back to the scene of the crime, Maribor’s Pekarna, where a then still long-haired Blaze played in December 2010.
Because of those two shows “on the sunny side of the Alps,” the Maribor crowd was visibly thinner this time – just under a hundred people showed up. Blaze kicked off the set around half past nine in the evening with Will To Win, before tossing the sleepy crowd a bone in the form of the Maiden-style onslaught Lord of the Flies. Next came the first taste of the new album, the song Dimebag, which was also a good opportunity to size up the two new guitarists, the young Thomas Zwijsen and the somewhat older rhythm guitarist Andy Neri.
The new creative blood in Blaze’s backing band was hungry to prove itself, but unfortunately the lack of stage experience and of knowing each other turned out to be too tough a nut to crack for this crew to measure up to the lineup Blaze made his last two albums with. On the right side of the stage, Zwijsen showed a decent dose of technical command of the six-string, his fingers gliding along the neck of his guitar with textbook precision, but the kid just doesn’t have enough charisma for your eyes to land on him more than once while scanning the stage. Blaze devoted the middle of the show to presenting the new album »The King of Metal«, lining up its songs one after another, which shows total confidence in his latest creation, even though the fans are unanimous that the album doesn’t reach the greatness of its predecessors. Still, it’s the best proof that Blaze lives and creates for the present, and nostalgic glances at the past are foreign to him. Let me just point to the countless acts who release an album and then give its live presentation a negligible amount of stage time.
Blaze’s voice remains intact in the mid-range, so the 48-year-old musician kept falling back on long »oooo«-ing and, as a result, more and more dialogue with the audience, using these tried-and-true mannerisms to stretch out the songs and keep the tension up the whole time. This time too, Blaze treated Pekarna to a mountain of monologues, going after the moved souls in attendance and trying to convince them how hard his life is. As if he were the only one in the world… A malfunctioning microphone put the star of the evening in a bit of a bad mood, but luckily the technical glitch hit right in the middle of The Clansman, so the crowd was able to fill the silence left by Bayley’s throat with their own singing.
With the arrival of the new crew, Blaze also brought back some older material that he’d played less often in recent years. The songs Stare At The Sun and The Brave (»Silicon Messiah«, 2000) were an interesting shot in the arm for a varied setlist, which, surprisingly, also featured the Maiden single Virus near the end. There’s probably no need to stress that it was precisely the galloping Maiden rhythms that got the warmest response from the crowd. Judging by the visible reaction, they were happy with how the evening went.
A good hour and a half of cruising through the career of a charismatic frontman warmed Pekarna up to working temperature and loaded those present with the energy they needed before the start of the work week. Despite some shortcomings, the trip to Maribor (still) paid off, but it’s worrying that the creative curve started bending downward in 2012. Time will tell how Blaze Bayley responds to that.
Setlist
1. Will to Win
2. Lord of the Flies
3. The Launch
4. Dimebag
5. Ghost in the Machine
6. The King of Metal
7. Silicon Messiah
8. The Rainbow Fades to Black
9. Fate
10. The Brave
11. The Black Country
12. Leap of Faith
13. Stare at the Sun
14. The Clansman
15. Man on the Edge
16. Futureal
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17. Virus
18. Faceless
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