Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Boogaloo / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: 10/28/2009
Attendance: 250
Ticket price: 160.00HRK
Doro Pesch is one of the few women whose name is known to every metalhead worth their salt. In other words, she’s pulled off the big leap, successfully switching from Warlock to a solo career that today is defined by her as Doro with her band. A deeply rooted, well-respected name in metal circles.
New album “Fear No Evil” and a new tour. Second time in Zagreb. Awesome. The impression she left at Wacken Rocks South was more than a promising warm-up for the new trip and another live fix of her music. Our usual stop on Zagreb visits was Boogaloo club again this time. But with a nasty surprise: a tiny crowd! Which is shocking, considering the Croatian audience is normally a very loyal, dependable supporter of the metal scene. Maybe the market, with its wide variety of shows, has gotten a bit oversaturated, though I doubt it. If you’re a “metalhead”, you’re a “metalhead”. As a rule, there’s no backing out of the metal philosophy. If you’re a “metalhead”, I repeat. In that case, chasing trends is out of the question. Exactly five years after Saxon played Zagreb’s Tvornica, here comes Doro. A nice chance to mark a sort of “five-year plan”. If the Saxon ticket back then was a laughable 90.00HRK, this time Doro cost (still pretty laughable) 160.00HRK. Times change. Price gaps get ever deeper, honest folks’ pockets ever shallower.
But let’s get to the gig. A good two hundred people were scattered around the club and its surroundings, so when the seriously intriguing We Come On from Požega, Croatia took the stage, the hall still had a gaping emptiness. But that doesn’t mean a thing. A ten-piece crew, five of whom (two guitars, bass, drums and keyboards) are lined up the “metal” way, while the other five basically take over the vocal duties. Wind players. Two trombones, two trumpets and a French horn. Why not? If violinists no longer count as “oddballs” in metal lineups, there’s no reason wind players should either. Covers of foreign rock and metal bands, with the lead melodies lifted onto the brass. A seriously interesting thing. Different, non-stereotypical, even witty. So we got a tribute to Chinese food in Chop Suey (originally by System of a Down), and the handful of curious souls down front really came alive when the band launched into the worn-out Fear Of The Dark by Iron Maiden. Gers’ solo on keyboards, Murray’s on guitar. Though even without that, because all the attention in We Come One goes to the horns and the witty recoding of the arrangements themselves, which makes the band special, with a key dose of provocation. A hugely well-chosen support act for a colorful half hour of fun at Boogaloo.
A meter and a “razor blade” (shaving blade) tall, the big little Dorotka bounded onto the stage with her band around 10:15 p.m. and opened with the Warlock classic Burning The Witches, which quickly got a good 200 heads going. She built up the opening stretch with the slightly more anthemic, singalong I Rule The Ruins, then finally won the crowd over with a longer greeting, a proper “Dobro veče!” and You’re My Family.
The band was up against a badly prepared sound mix. The guitars were seriously muffled, the solos pretty muddy, or hard to make out. The singer’s vocals, despite heavy help from the “echo” effect, kind of got lost in the walls of the hall and failed to spark any real energy flow, even though Doro, as a hugely charismatic and agile stage figure, once again fully lived up to both labels and tried her damnedest to give her all. Especially interesting were some of the faces in the male part of the crowd right up front, to whom I could add only streams of drool, so shamelessly were they undressing the 45-year-old “kitten” onstage with their eyes.
Through Night Of The Warlock (“Fear No Evil”, 2009), then Metal Racer, True As Steel, Above The Ashes, On The Run, a drum solo as filler, and a return to the stage with Earthshaker, Celebrate (also a new song), We Are The Metalheads, Unholy Love, the obligatory All We Are, an excellent version of the Judas Priest classic Breaking The Law, and Fight For Rock, the hour and 20 minutes flew by in the blink of an eye. We didn’t get any more than that. Not even the obligatory encore. During the show it wasn’t hard to spot some diva moments from drummer Johnny Dee, who strolled out from behind the kit mid-set for a drink and gestured at the singer that the show should “calm down”. After All We Are, a longer, unexpected pause also fell over the hall, which pros like Doro shouldn’t allow themselves. The band stayed onstage in the dim lighting, and it looked like the members were negotiating how and in what way to wrap up the show as soon as possible.
The supporting cast came across as purely routine. Bassist Nick Douglas got especially tacky between songs with his artificially “manufactured” smiles, while guitarists Bas Maas (ex-After Forever) and Luca Panciotta (ex-Blaze) showed, besides the legendary singer, the most stage confidence, spraying out excellent solos and riffing. The rhythm section in particular was what somehow undermined Doro’s own authority this time. In her place, a person might consider swapping out members, regardless of their quality. The singer, meanwhile, proved her voice still serves her excellently.
So the performance owed a lot. Above all a sense of lived-in spontaneity, which failed to mask the negative vibe that this time suggested Doro came to Zagreb only in a flash to pick up their paycheck. What’s the cause? Maybe they arrived in Zagreb for less pay, maybe they were thrown by a club hall that was more than two-thirds empty, or something else? In short, just given the seriously sad sound conditions, this gig won’t go down in the annals as a moment engraved in golden letters in the generally rich history of rock and metal concerts in our southern neighbor. Especially when you remember how Boogaloo was bursting at the seams back in February 2009, at the Saxon and Iced Earth show.
Maybe the management and the label are at fault too. Given today’s situation, with power metal and classic heavy metal not exactly the focus of the metal masses, who would rather explore the “extremes” again, it wouldn’t be silly for Doro to call her AFM Records labelmate Udo Dirkschneider so that U.D.O. and Doro could join forces on a joint European tour. There would definitely be more people showing up. That would matter especially at shows of such a tour outside Germany. As it is, the financial result of this Zagreb show probably sank pretty deep into the red.
photos: Robi Lipej
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