Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Olympiahalle / Munich / Germany
Concert date: November 15, 2008
Attendance: 12,000
Ticket price: €52.00
Rock titans Deep Purple on their 2008 autumn tour, with hot-blooded Swiss hard rockers Gotthard as the opening act. Like father and son. Three hours of full-blooded rock revelry in the land of sausages and beer, Bavaria! Can’t complain!
The Deep Purple show in Stuttgart a week ago left a hell of an impression, so there was no reason not to look forward to another date with the legends. This time, though, picking up the accreditation didn’t go nearly as smoothly as in Stuttgart, where the organizers were eating out of your hand. This time they forgot the photo pass for RockLine. I had to do battle with five people before one of them finally plucked up the courage and brought a sticker for RockLine too. In this particular case, the excessive devotion to German order and discipline is a sign of total self-destruction and a textbook example of how a system can start crumbling from the inside all by itself. There’s just too much control. And the organizer, so self-confidently convinced of being infallible in all this self-monitoring, feels so safe and carefree that anything that deviates even slightly from the staked-out rules is downright unacceptable, incomprehensible, impossible. Admitting a mistake is impossible because of the overblown striving for perfection and mathematical purity. The control of logic. Anyway, amid all this tug-of-war over who’s right and who’s wrong, I unfortunately missed shooting Gotthard. Not even printed confirmations from three different sources saying we were on the guest list helped. Not from Nuclear Blast, not from Gotthard’s management, not even from the agency KB-K, co-organizer of the show. Nope. Because my name wasn’t on the photographers’ list. On top of that, they hand you a free press ticket, and one that sends you to row 33, the very top row of the stand, right under the canvas of the Olympiahalle roof in sector D, so you can study the density of the hair on the crown of Ian Gillan’s head, and his bandmates’ too, through binoculars. That’s a view of the stage from practically a blind spot and from somewhere up in the heavens, not to mention it’s the part of the hall with the worst sound. Nice start, right?
GOTTHARD: 20.00-21.00
I did manage to sneak my way through the rest of the Gotthard set and sail over to a spot in the stands where I finally got a normal view of the stage and the sound was full. Clean, phenomenal sound across the whole length of the Olympiahalle. Gotthard were greeted by a packed hall, though not a sold-out one. The crowd was about the same size as a week ago in Stuttgart (12,000). Gotthard came across even hotter this time than in Stuttgart. Singer Steve Lee in particular was even more animated and inspired, in a special kind of flying mode where no register was out of reach for his vocal cords. Once again Gotthard killed it to the point of unconsciousness. They played flawlessly. After the ballad Falling, the only point in the band’s performance that gets a minus from me, since the studio version is far more convincing than the version on this tour, where the song is performed only with keyboards and Steve Lee’s vocals, Gotthard cranked the rock vibe up to boiling point, and with Let It Be the show really got its wings. With full wingbeats they carried the fanatical drive of a band in top form through Said And Done, The Oscar Goes To…, Lift U Up and Anytime Anywhere, all the way to a brilliant finish, where the entire hall applauded them. From the floor to the whole of the stands. The hour flew by in the blink of an eye and people demanded an encore, which Gotthard simply couldn’t play. Gotthard are the real deal in every respect. A true school of hard rock for the new millennium, and their high quality could serve as an example to all their peers and the younger bands trying to break through to greater recognition in this genre. Put simply, a Gotthard show leaves you pumped up after the gig.
DEEP PURPLE: 21.30-23.30
If nothing else, pumped up at least for Deep Purple. If they were peers rather than, on average, 20 years older, I’d say Gotthard gave the headliner a proper spanking this time. Deep Purple once again showed up on a huge stage, in front of a huge audience, under gigantic lighting, and the whole show was recorded by a video camera too (the official camera below the stage, as in Stuttgart). There were probably more of them, but that’s the only one I spotted. What’s true and what isn’t, we’ll find out if the band releases a DVD from this tour.
The five-piece are so tight they could play blindfolded. Not a single missed note. The only vulnerable factor is, of course, the voice of “skinny as a lollipop stick” Ian Gillan, who sounded a bit more worn this time than a week ago in Stuttgart. You could especially tell in the choruses of Perfect Strangers, where you couldn’t hear the verses in full anymore, Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming, or Knockin’ At Your Backdoor. Gillan also sang a lot more “sloppily” this time. Not because he couldn’t be bothered to try. You could feel that he still runs out of breath in places (e.g. Lazy). But Gillan is a rock icon, an indispensable part of Deep Purple Mk II. (minus Morse), and it’s almost enough for him just to show up on stage, which of course is no excuse. But the guy knows how to redeem himself with his entertaining stage banter. He’s one of a kind in all his charisma and likability.
Wring That Neck, Lazy, Perfect Strangers are the moments where you especially miss the refined, strictly controlled, velvety-soft tone of Blackmore’s eternally melancholic and yearning Stratocaster, with its famously long, moaning “licks”. These are moments where Morse’s overblown muscles simply don’t belong, and yet Morse wouldn’t be Morse if he tried to chase the famous sound of his predecessor.
The peak of the show was the closing stretch built on the “Machine Head” repertoire, opened by Space Truckin’ with a witty On Broadway (orig. Nancy Sinatra) motif woven in, which formed the bridge into Highway Star. The trio was of course capped off by the noblest elemental guitar phrase of them all, Smoke On The Water, and it was fascinating to watch from the stands how the crowd on the floor literally lost its mind the moment Purple broke into that evergreen riff! In the finale of this great song, just before the end of the regular set, Leo Leoni, guitarist of Gotthard, also appeared on stage at Deep Purple’s invitation, probably thinking: “Dreams! Come true!”
The whole experience was very much like the excellent Stuttgart show a week earlier. Deep Purple are simply so seasoned that it’s hard for them to show a bad day on stage. Still, you can pull my leg on this one, because we’re in Germany again. And German tours are special for Deep Purple. This is their home turf, since they enjoy extraordinary standing among music lovers. So it’s hard to throw them off, and in such a “home” environment the guys can, no doubt, keep their concert spirits high far more easily throughout the tour and its run of days.
The German crowd once again lifted the whole event to a special concert level. Everything is gigantic, and for someone used to Slovenian indoor venues, it’s unimaginable. The roar of the crowd, the energy flowing from audience to band and back, the sound, the light effects, everything gets amplified, adds up, magnifies into an extraordinary magic that only sold-out stadium shows with 40,000 people and up can top. Simply put, the money is here, the tradition of rock culture is here. Now I’m repeating myself, since I wrote this in my Stuttgart report too. So you go to Germany to see Deep Purple live. With the kind of support they still enjoy in Central Europe, where the guys are in demand and highly respected for their contribution to rock music, we don’t have to worry that there won’t be plenty more Deep Purple shows on the calendar. As long as the band’s health holds up as it seems to, they can easily drag their existence all the way to the fiftieth anniversary.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
text: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
GOTTHARD — set list:
1. Master Of Illusion
2. Gone To Far
3. Top Of The World
4. The Call
5. Mountain Mama
6. All We Are
7. Sister Moon
8. Falling
9. Let It Be
10. Said & Done
11. The Oscar Goes To You
12. Lift U Up
13. Anytime Anywhere
DEEP PURPLE — set list:
1. Pictures Of Home
2. Things I Never Said
3. Into The Fire
4. Strange Kind Of Woman
5. Rapture Of The Deep
6. Wrong Man
7. Contact Lost
8. Well Dressed Guitar
9. Knockin’ At Your Back Door
10. Sometimes I Feel Like Screaming
11. Wring That Neck
12. Battle Rages On
13. Solo Airey
14. Perfect Strangers
15. Space Truckin’
16. Highway Star
17. Smoke On The Water
—encore—
18. Lazy
19. Hush
20. Black Night
Photo Gallery
