Location: Hala Tivoli / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: 25.11.2006
Attendance: 8200
Ticket price: 9500 SIT
Bryan Adams in Slovenia for the third time, and for the third time in a jam-packed venue – in the company of a crowd of more than 8,000 heads. Wow. Hats off. Getting that many Slovenes together in one place. Hassles picking up the accreditation, the same old story for the part of Europe that falls under Slovenia’s official territory. Well, after I’d been made to feel like a drenched puppy, thanks to the organizer’s attitude toward the press, the negative vibe fed by my wounded ego was discharged by good old Vene – a guy who’s always in a cheerful mood, and who cooked up a fresh, juicy repertoire of jokes for the evening, naturally in his own signature style, with which he entertained us nicely.
The concert kicked off at 8:14 PM and the temperature in the big hockey arena was 23°C at the time. Adams stepped onto the stage with his Room Service and the partying began. The man ran through hit after hit across a tight, full two hours with his tried-and-true crew, which includes two regulars, loyal companions of Bryan’s who’ve been tested over the years and are masters of their craft: drummer Mickey Curry and guitarist Keith Scott.
During When You’re Gone he called a chosen girl from the audience up on stage, as expected. This time it was Veronika from Ljubljana, whose relaxed manner surprised even Bryan himself. Together they sang the song, and the girl was shocking with how well she knew the lyrics and sang the song, with her dance moves,… heh. Slovenian women know how to market themselves well, at just the right moment, that is! Veronika is talented and shameless, no doubt about it. Congrats. She had no distance at all from Bryan Adams, and during the performance the guy even covered his head with a dark towel to make himself invisible, because the girl simply wasn’t reining in her passions on stage and would have eaten him alive. An extremely endearing moment that spiced up the hangout with the Canadian rocker. Bryan swapped between a wide range of Gretsch 6120-type guitars during the show.
The sound? Way too quiet! During the show we could chat with no trouble at all, and our ears were left totally unbothered the whole time. What’s more, the sound faded diffusely the farther you got from the stage, and apparently the upper rows of the stands took the biggest losses there. Otherwise, down on the floor the sound picture was balanced. Push the faders up just a touch more and it would have been bang on. Still, Bryan has a repertoire that easily coaxes sighs out of women’s hearts. This time too, the women led the way in making noise, and several times they unleashed loud volleys together that bordered on hysteria. Bryan maybe overdid it a little with his lullabies in the setlist. Chances are the girls didn’t mind much. There were maybe just a tad too many of these ballads, and the back-to-back pairing of Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman and Everything I Do was particularly jarring. What followed was crying out for something heavier, rockier and wound up, but that feeling never quite got to come fully alive.
An absolute plus for the show was the stage setup itself, which was “stretched” practically across the entire width of the arena, and the choice of stage lighting added to the atmosphere too, emphasizing a 3D effect that made the stage look even bigger than it really was.
Like I said! Hit after hit! The crowd was brilliant at delivering Bryan’s material, and this evening there wasn’t a shred of fear that could have raised any doubt that anything might go wrong. The audience breathed with Adams the whole way through and gave him tremendous support. When you looked across the arena, at moments literally every hand in the place was raised high in the air, from the floor through all the rows of the stands, no matter how far from the stage. All together!
After the regular set ended, everyone came back out for the first encore. The first encore was loud, and then Bryan “chased” his legion offstage for a shower, while he grabbed a Martin acoustic folk guitar and told the audience that every one of his concert nights is always different. You can never predict what’s going to happen, after all. And this time he sincerely stressed that he simply feels phenomenal with an audience like the one that greeted him tonight in Ljubljana. He warmly thanked Slovenia for its support and played 4 acoustic songs solo in front of a jam-packed arena, with the crowd along for the ride. He wrapped up the event with the musketeer-style All For Love. The time was 10:14 PM, and the temperature in the arena had reached 25°C. The end.
Bryan jumped off the stage and shook hands with every single fan who’d followed him through the show in the front row. Quite a few girls among them had an emotional outburst, let’s call it something that can border on hysterical delirium, and they just couldn’t hold back their tears (you could see it on the projection of the two enormous screens). This time it was a classic rock concert, without Bryan’s excursions into lukewarm Latin-acoustic experimental waters, which added yet another plus to the whole picture. After a full two hours of energy exchanged between the crowd and Bryan, and close communication between them, the concert, if we set aside the stinginess with decibels in the overall concert sound, earned a university-style “ten”. Nine, that is.
Setlist
01.Room Service
02.Somebody
03.Open Road
04.18 ’til I Die
05.A Night To Remember
06.Can’t Stop This Thing We Started
07.Back To You
08.Think Of You
09.Summer Of 69
10.Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman
11.Everything I Do
12.Cuts Like A Knife
13.When You’re Gone
14.It’s Only Love
15.This Time
16.Heaven
17.The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You
—encore 1—
18.Cloud Number 9
19.Run To You
20.Here I Am
—encore 2—
21.Please Forgive Me
22.When You Love Someone
23.Straight From The Heart
24.All For Love
