Gotthard March Triumphantly into Cesena (2009)

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Venue: Vidia Rock Club / San Vittore (Cesena) / Italy
Concert date: October 24, 2009
Attendance: 500
Ticket price: €20.00

Not even a year and a half had gone by and Swiss hard rockers Gotthard were already serving up a new record, “Need To Believe” (2009) – RockLine review HERE. New year, new album, new tour! That’s what happens when everything in a band works the way it should. The finances are sorted, the crew sticks together, the inspiration is flowing. The band’s overall form is at its peak. The guys decided to kick off the first leg of the “Need To Believe” tour down south – in Italy – and slowly work their way up to northern Europe, wrapping up with final shows in Scandinavia in February 2010. The second date landed near the city of Cesena, south of Ravenna, in the godforsaken little village of San Vittore. That’s where the Vidia club is. When you park next to it, you get the feeling the whole place is a big residential house whose owner suddenly felt like throwing a great party in the living room. And yet. A tour bus is parked outside, even an extra van for hauling gear. The show is definitely happening. It was lively in front of the club the whole time. Already when we arrived, around half past six in the evening, rock fans were gathering and killing time in front of the closed doors in heated debate, in true Italian fashion. The already good-natured crowd was put in an especially good mood while waiting by the Gotthard guys themselves, who popped out of the tour bus and handed out a few autographs to impatient fans.

At eight the club doors open, and by half past eight Italians Markonee are already on stage. Let me start with the first surprise: the venue itself. It delivered excellent acoustics and is solidly sized, taking about 500 heads in total. If you don’t feel like squeezing in on the floor, you can find a spot on the “stepped” edges, which even have seats and work as a kind of grandstand. But the main things are the acoustics and the stage. The stage is deep enough and wide enough. Deep enough that the drums sit way in the back, and wide enough that a band, even a sextet, can really spread its wings. The club’s acoustics are great too. Wherever you stand above the floor, the sound is thrilling. Down on the floor as well, though its clear separation isn’t a given. Markonee are old acquaintances. Ever since RockLine started going to shows organized by the Bologna Rock City agency, which will be three solid years soon, it’s usually Bologna’s Markonee opening for mid-sized hard rock bands. That’s how we saw them a week earlier in Bologna before Over The Rainbow, and that’s how they opened the night with Gotthard too.

Markonee keep getting better. In every respect. A superbly tight outfit. And with the place packed, the band really heats up on stage too. This year the guys signed a deal with Escape Music, just put out a fresh album, “See The Thunder”, their second, and played a good chunk of it at the show. These guys write songs that are basically tailor-made for Gotthard fans, so they were an excellent choice this time. Besides the great sound they conjured up, they won us over with a great performance and heartfelt stage presence, and the cherry on top was the superb form of the singer on the night, a guy by the name of Gabrielle Gozzi! In the repertoire, it’s worth singling out the song Women & Whiskey, with flirtatious touches of melodic hard rock, where an interesting harmonized guitar riff takes the lead and gives the listener the feeling of hearing something different, not necessarily “worn out”. The up-and-coming guys warmed up the club, which was about two-thirds full, also with a Foreigner cover, Dirty White Boy, and of course added fuel to the fire with a borrowed classic by Divlje Jagode, Motori, which in their version gets a chorus chant of “Markonee” instead of “Motori”. A neat trick, and I hope Zele Lipovača and company have been informed, of course. 40 minutes of great playing, the best Markonee show I’ve witnessed so far.

 At 21.30 Gotthard step on stage. The band belongs to that group of acts in Europe today whose careers played out a bit differently than, say, Winger, House Of Lords, Firehouse, Giant, Hardline,… Gotthard arrived on the scene with their self-titled album in 1992, at a time when the world was no longer friendly to the message of melodic hard rock. Even if they’d written an evergreen hit back then, the kind that put the bands I just named on the map, they wouldn’t have gotten far. Unlike the phalanx of hard rock bands that threw in the towel when the grunge virus hit, despite commercial success and two or three albums under their belts, Gotthard stubbornly kept at it through the nineties like true workhorses and got tempered in the process. They matured from album to album. The last three are on an equal level of quality, each different from the others, though only in nuances. With them Gotthard earned a commercially satisfying position, expanded their fan base, and so, finally, their time came to reap what they’d sown.

Today, then, Gotthard are set apart from a bunch of other bands by their lack of airs and their extreme accessibility to fans. The band is also used to playing smaller club venues and is totally unfazed, since in the past they’ve been through much worse when it came to conditions. And they always took it like good sports. This time the club was packed to the last corner, and it was literally boiling wherever you looked.

The guys built the set with a third of it devoted to songs from the new record “Need To Believe”, which is the only right move, since it’s one of the best albums of their career. In between they slipped in songs from older albums that are still huge favorites with the fans. Interesting that they saved Shangri-La, which opens the new album, for the second half of the show and came out swinging with Unspoken Words, the second track on “Need To Believe”. I can say the sound in the club was excellent and well balanced from the very first moment. An intimate atmosphere where you could get right up close to the band in the front rows, and singer Steve Lee shook hands with the crazed crowd the whole time. Besides the music, Gotthard won the Italians over with the simple fact that half the band speaks fluent Italian. Including the singer, and this time Gotthard talked between songs entirely in Italian. The crowd surprised me with its fanaticism for the band. While the songs from the new album hadn’t fully “stuck” yet, since barely a month had passed between the official release and the tour, the crowd belted out the choruses of older songs like Gone To Far, Top Of The World, Sister Moon, the folk-anthem-by-now Hush – which Gotthard will absolutely have to cut from the setlist on this year’s French dates with Deep Purple – Now, and especially the closing mega-bomb Lift U Up, which blew the roof off the club.

Gotthard are officially a quintet, with keyboardist Nicolo Fragile helping out as the sixth member at gigs and in the studio. On stage most of the attention goes to the excellent Steve Lee, who delivers first-class classic hard rock vocals of the kind Jon Bon Jovi lost long ago, like a jolt of inspiration for Bon Jovi themselves, and Gotthard, at least in Europe today, fill the void left by the spent, forced albums of the new Bon Jovi. Steve Lee is also a great stage performer, a phenomenal frontman who ties the whole thing together. A man of flirty glances and cheeky moves, he held all the strings firmly in his hands and the crowd was literally eating out of them all night. A few skyward-piercing screams and there we are. Goosebumps guaranteed. Especially when Gotthard dig into the album’s fantastic title track, which had the hall spellbound with a perfect chorus.

In the middle of the show, only Leo Leoni with an acoustic guitar and Steve Lee appear on stage. The acoustic set was put together completely spontaneously and the two took requests from the crowd. So four songs on request in acoustic dress. They kicked off this part of the show with One Life One Soul (“G”, 1996), disarmed the crowd especially with Heaven, which spontaneously flowed into the surprise Lonely People  (both from “Homerun”, 2001), and finally melted the hearts of the gentler sex with Angel (“Gotthard”, 1992). Then came the wake-up call and a “crushing” atmospheric eruption with the phenomenal new song Shangri-La, where the club was once again bursting at the seams with excitement. The band closed the regular part of the set in top gear! They first lifted the atmosphere with the highly melodic, punchy Now (“Domino Effect”, 2007) and finished this part of the show with the strictly demanded and much-wanted anthem for everyone, Lift U Up (“Lipservice”, 2005), which, with its venomously well-honed rhythmic march, had to make the hair stand up on the neck of even the coldest, most numb visitor who happened to end up hanging out with Gotthard in Cesena that night.

Flawless, highly professional, tightly rehearsed. And through all of it, Gotthard are known for not leaving even a trace of arrogance, pushiness, or the feeling that they just came to collect their paycheck on autopilot. A full-on performance with no dodging and, most importantly, no calculations about saving energy. It’s the start of the tour and the band already has especially the new material down cold, which only confirms that, after plenty of nonstop touring, Gotthard are a venomously well-trained live attraction that’s worth experiencing in the flesh!

Gotthard are heading to Germany in the company of Europe. A tour of France with Deep Purple follows, and so on. The venues will be bigger, holding several thousand people. That means the gap between band and audience will be larger at those shows, and it’ll be hard to find the kind of intimacy that Vidia offered any time soon. The guys closed their hour-and-three-quarters-long show with one more rousing anthem from the new album, I Know You Know, and rounded off another fantastic performance with yet another hugely popular song, Anytime Anywhere. They didn’t leave the crowd starving, but still in a trance and hungry for more! With form and voltage that didn’t slip one bit from the first second of the show to the last. Hanging out with Gotthard at that intensity was over in a flash!

I’d also like to add a personal take. Ever since I started going to shows in Italy, and let’s be honest, in four years there’ve been quite a few, if I focus only on comparing the Italian club scene, which has its own very specific character, I can say flat out that the Gotthard experience at Vidia takes first place among all my visits to Italian club shows so far. A very important factor this time, besides the excellent club space that was just the right size and had great acoustics, was the crowd. It packed into every single corner of the club and brought a fanatical response and tremendous support for the band. The band took an extra run-up and, with that kind of momentum, in total ease literally flew on the wings of the concert magic created that way!

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Setlist

MARKONEE: 1. Way 2 Go 2. Back On Me 3. Brand New Day 4. See The Thunder 5. Dirty White Boy 6. Women & Whiskey 7. Loved Land 8. Markonee 9. The Big K 10. The Cross Between The Lines GOTTHARD: 1. Unspoken Words 2. Gone To Far 3. Top Of The World 4. Need To Believe 5. Sister Moon 6. Hush 7. Right From Wrong 8. Delay From Hell 9. Unconditional Faith 10. One Life One Soul* 11. Heaven* 12. Lonely People* 13. Angel* 14. Shangri-La 15. The Oscar Goes To… 16. I Don’t Mind 17. Now 18. Lift U Up —encore— 19. I Know You Know 20. Anytime Anywhere * … acoustic set

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