Faith No More Turn the Sandy Beaches of the Black Sea Into Paradise (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Spirit Of Burgas (festival) / Burgas / Bulgaria
Concert date: 14.08.2009
Attendance: 20
Ticket price: 50 LV (one day) / 120 LV (three days)

Some things in life are just meant to be. It’s summer, August rolls around! Time to celebrate and party, no school, no work. It’s high time to launch ourselves out of the gray of everyday life into an adventure of our choosing, where we can recharge and sharpen our battle-chipped teeth. From innocent hints, dreamy ideas and quiet wishes, to making it happen! That meant leaving Ljubljana for Burgas on the Black Sea in Bulgaria, home of the three-day music festival Spirit Of Burgas. It wasn’t just the exotic location that pulled us there, but also the summer European tour of the newly reactivated extravagant, experimental rockers and musical innovators Faith No More. Naturally, you have to wonder: “What the hell is wrong with these nutcases, rushing to Burgas, almost 1,400 km away?” Two Faith No More shows in a row. First in Burgas and a day later in  Bucharest (Romania). Would that be a good enough alibi? Or maybe the juicy realization that the great Faith No More are being supported by Slovenians Elvis Jackson?

We got to Burgas from Ljubljana the day before. It was a spicy trip, with the brave foursome keeping a watchful eye out so that their wish, their goal, would come true! After a detour to Belgrade’s Kalamegdan (Serbia), stuffing ourselves with grilled food (Belgrade, Serbia), a drive through the picturesque Nišava canyon toward the Bulgarian border, past Trajan’s Gate (Bulgaria), through the Bulgarian metropolis of Sofia, a final overnight stay and a whole day of swimming in Burgas, we arrived on 14.08.2009, around seven in the evening, at the festival entrance. After some horrifying adventures, which ended with us not being able to enter the campsite even though we’d paid for camping tickets, we reached the concert area on the sandy beach by the Black Sea with our heads spinning anyway. Just as ordered. We spent two and a half hours fighting and burning through precious stores of energy because of the confusion in the heads of the festival staff.

The Spirit Of Burgas festival boasted as many as eight stages, but you really had to hunt for music generated by flesh, bones and vocal cords and driven by alternating electric current. The lineup was flooded with Bulgarian acts who mean absolutely nothing in the world of music, and it was also swarming with DJ kitsch, whose real musical knowledge is wrapped up in a fistful of juicy crap anyway. At exactly 21.30 we made it to the stage called “Jack Daniel’s Stage”. Sadly, we missed the excellent Macedonian rockers Bernay’s Propaganda, but we gladly welcomed our brave countrymen, whom we’d met and shaken hands with the day before the festival at one of the rest stops on the highway just outside Niš (Serbia) –  Elvis Jackson!

Elvis Jackson are guys who have matured with the album Against The Gravity to the point where they can taste worldwide recognition. For now, things are looking very good for the boys. Tours keep coming, and they’ve played a whole pile of shows abroad. Elvis Jackson are known for their high-energy performances, bursting with positive vibes and the liveliness that only this band can conjure up.

The ambience in Burgas (the sea, the sandy beach) fit the cover art of the album “Against The Gravity” perfectly, and the band presented it with the songs Against The Gravity, Wake Me Up!, Dry Your Tears and Not Here To Pray. The guys left bassist Erik Makuc – Slavc at home in Slovenia, since the poor guy had to go under the surgeon’s knife right away because of a burst appendix, so they called on Corkscrew bassist Andraž Stockson for help, who saved the band from having to cancel both shows. The curious Bulgarian crowd was initially a bit wary, wondering what was in store for them on stage, but it didn’t take much to get them fired up by the hot sermon dictated by a razor-sharp mix of ska, skate-punk and reggae impulses, with plenty of metal-flavored riff snippets thrown in (oh boy, I feel like a specialist in medical rhetoric).

The band was in great spirits, and even without Slavc, “hastily recruited” Andraž proved to be the best possible choice for Elvis Jackson to pull off their show with confidence.  The mandatory inflatable mattress was of course part of the show, and the Elvises sent out the first volunteer – a non-swimmer from the crowd – who set off floating across the sea of hands below the stage. The other stage props, like rolls of toilet paper and inflatable toys (a ball, etc…), were somewhat limited in doing their job, since the wind kept blowing from the sea toward the stage. So instead of flying into the crowd, the toilet paper rolls flew onto the stage structure, where they fluttered from the stage, which looked tremendously cool during the Elvis Jackson show.

Elvis Jackson crowned their solid, compact, tight and polished performance with a heap of positive vibes that easily sucked the crowd into partying along with them. At first people were just watching the band, but in the second half of the show, under Elvis Jackson’s baton, they were already in full party gallop with them. Charismatic singer Buda, who of course served up the usual acrobatics like headstands, somersaults and so on, dressed in a checkered nightgown, talked to the audience a bit less this time. The reason was the limited time and of course the fact that the crowd in front of the stage wasn’t Slovenian but Bulgarian. “Are you good?!?”, he repeated a few times, and the people also appreciated the message of the closing Smoke The Herb very much, which Elvis Jackson used to wrap up their very successful show in Burgas with a sense of humor. Like the RockLine crew, the guys had a trip to Romania ahead of them, where they played the next day as support for the mighty Faith No More. So we moved over to the main stage, which was by now heavily occupied by Faith No More fanatics.

Before Faith No More, Bulgarians Panican Whyasker warmed up the crowd. They “grooved” in tough riffs, partly layered with funked-up rhythms, but miles away from anything like Red Hot Chilli Peppers, with a rather annoying vocal and English-language verses that literally begged them to wrap up the show. The band is very popular in Bulgaria, as proven by the crowd of fired-up heads they got going in front of the stage.

Faith No More, this immensely important band whose presence shaped the later sound of the bands that followed, leaning on some of the winning discoveries of Faith No More’s bold and singular investigative streak, stepped onto the main stage a little past eleven in the evening. The stage was rather small,  by main festival stage standards, but on the flip side that was very welcome, since it brought the band closer to the listeners, who poured in front of the stage in massive numbers, creeping dangerously past 15,000 bodies.

Into a dynamic and thrilling setlist, marked by some of the strongest moments of their career, they worked in quite a few twisted covers of well-known artists. They opened the show with a thoroughly “FaithNoMoreish” Reunited, originally by the duo Peaches&Herb. A completely mellow, ear-friendly melody with a fitting song title summed up the big news in a nutshell: on 25.02.2009, Faith No More officially announced the band was back in the exact same lineup that last officially played 11 years before the reunion. That’s Mike Patton (vocals), Billy Gould (bass), Mike Bordin (drums), Roddy Bottum (keyboards) and Jon Hudson (guitar)!

Mike Patton joined the rest of the crew on stage a bit later, as a crippled old man with a cane in his hand. But when the spotlight caught him, Patton no longer looked like an old man, more like a limping mafia godfather. The whole quintet was dressed in off-the-rack black suits. After a short warm-up, the place heats up to proper working temperature in an instant when the band erupts into From Out of Nowhere (“The Real Thing”, 1989). Patton goes wild on stage, and the crowd in front of him literally loses it. More people, bigger mosh pit circles. This time too, a few studs about 15 meters from the stage were practically provoking and could hardly wait to start slamming into others with their beer-soaked bodies. Of course, they were in “topless” attire for the occasion.

The energy is fascinating, the mass of people follows Faith No More word for word, blindly following Patton’s gestures. Patton hasn’t lost a bit of charm, vocal power or his signature stage extroversion! The man is truly an extraordinary power generator, driving the machinery of Faith No More on stage. With looks of demonic charm he put the crowd under his spell, and they were happily eating out of his hand throughout the show. The initial dust hadn’t even settled yet when the band carries on with an excellent Land Of Sunshine, which brings the character of Faith No More’s music even more directly home. The thick, voluminous, funky stance of the Gould – Bordin rhythmic gallop, with a simple but penetrating riff “sawing” guitar on one side and equally elevated keyboards on the other, give Faith No More’s sound a special, I wouldn’t say mildly post-apocalyptic, look. Especially when you throw the extravagant Patton into the mix! Brilliant! The guys don’t back down even with Caffeine, when Patton leaps off the stage and gets right up to the front row, and only then do they calm the boiling heads of the mass-euphoric frying beach, with the song Evidence.

With the focus on a repertoire spanning all four albums of the Mike Patton  era, the band led the show through waves that included calm moments, where Patton’s innate gift for interpretation and delivering verses came through all the more. Those were moments like the song Easy, which the whole beach sang! Faith No More painted a similar picture, but with a different vibe, after Easy when they lit up the crowd head-on with probably their best-known hit, Epic.

Faith No More easily proved that in eleven years they haven’t forgotten how to create the unique stage magic of their signature musical expression, as shown especially by the songs Midlife Crisis, Last Cup Of Sorrow, Ashes To Ashes and King For A Day. The band finished the show in a very interesting way, choosing the mellow Just a Man, in which they masterfully built up the atmosphere. Patton is incredible! A chameleon. From the feeling “soul” subtlety of Easy, Evidence or Just a Man, he transforms into a true stage devil when Faith No More tackle Cuckoo for Caca, and Patton pulls out downright impossible vocal tricks. You could dare to say that Patton has only grown and matured over the years, as far as interpretation and stage acting go. He’s a one-of-a-kind stage figure who offers a unique approach.

For the encore the band started with Vangelis’ Chariots Of Fire, which unnoticeably slid into a fantastic Stripsearch, and of course Faith No More couldn’t skip their big hit We Care A Lot from the early Mosley era, with which they closed their spectacular show.

The band’s sound during the show was excellent, although the wind from the sea occasionally carried it off a bit. An hour and a half is maybe less than we expected, but you have to keep in mind that this is Faith No More’s first European tour since the reunion, on which the band is still “feeling out” the ground beneath its feet, testing how much popularity it has managed to keep among audiences after all these years of silence, and a tour that’s focused mostly on festival appearances, where this kind of set length is completely normal.

And so ended the show of a band whose reunion this year counts as one of the most important on the entire rock planet! With it, Faith No More proved that they age like wine. The older they get, the better they are. Let’s just hope Faith No More stay together and maybe get around to recording new studio material and doing new concert tours in the future. From the unforgettable experience in Burgas, our road with the band led us on to Bucharest, Romania, but that’s already a new RockLine story, so stay with us for the rest of the adventure!

photos: Mia Milharyčič

Us accredited photographers were forced to shoot all the bands from the crowd, even though we had photo passes around our necks.  Luckily, Sandi Maver (Elvis Jackson’s manager, also in the photo) managed to talk the security guys into finally letting me down in front of the stage. I shot Faith No More from the crowd, at the edge of the mosh pit, and I didn’t manage to catch the other band members, because the madness was too intense. – Mia

Setlist

ELVIS JACKSON:
1. Against The Gravity
2. Wake Me Up
3. My Beer
4. Dry Your Tears
5. Dreams
6. Morning
7. Get Up!
8. Not Here To Pray
9. Hawaiian Club
10. Rangeros
11. Go Elvis
12. Raining Blood (Slayer, intro)
13. Smoke The Herb

FAITH NO MORE:
1. Reunited (Peaches & Herb cover)
2. From Out of Nowhere
3. Land of Sunshine
4. Caffeine
5. Evidence
6. Surprise! You’re Dead!
7. Last Cup of Sorrow
8. Cuckoo for Caca
9. Easy (Commodores cover)
10. Epic
11. Midlife Crisis
12. I Started a Joke (Bee Gees cover)
13. Let’s Lynch the Landlord (Dead Kennedys cover)
14. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
15. King for a Day
16. Be Aggressive
17. Ashes to Ashes
18. Just a Man
—encore—
19. Chariots Of Fire (Vangelis, intro)
20. Stripsearch
21. We Care a Lot

Photo gallery