Location: Vidia Rock Club / San Vittore (Cesena) / Italy
Date: Saturday, October 24, 2009
Barely a year and a half had gone by, and Swiss hard rockers Gotthard were already serving up a new record, “Need To Believe” (2009). New year, new record, new tour! That’s how it goes when everything in the band is clicking 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 north through Europe, wrapping up with the final shows in February 2010 in Scandinavia. The second date was marked down 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 feel like the whole thing is in a big residential house whose owner got the urge to throw a great party in the living room. And yet. There’s a tour bus parked outside, even an extra trailer for hauling gear. The show is definitely happening. It was crazy lively in front of the club the whole time. By the time we got there, around half past six in the afternoon, rock fans were already gathering and killing time in front of the closed doors in thick debates, in true Italian manner. The already good-humored crowd was put in an especially good mood while waiting by the gesture of the Gotthard members, who stepped out of the tour bus and handed out a few autographs to impatient fans.
MARKONEE: 8:30-9:10 PM
At eight the club doors open, and by half past eight the Italians Markonee are already on stage. Let me start with the first surprise: the venue itself. It delivered excellent acoustics and it’s a decent size, taking about 500 heads in total. If you don’t want to squeeze in on the floor, you can find a spot along 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 are pushed way back, and wide enough that a band that can even be a sextet can really spread out between songs. The club’s acoustics are great too. Wherever you stand above the floor, the sound is thrilling. Down on the floor too, though the clear mix there isn’t guaranteed. Markonee are old acquaintances. Ever since RockLine started going to shows organized by the Bologna Rock City agency, which will soon be a solid three years, Bologna’s own Markonee have usually been the openers for mid-sized hard rock bands. So we saw them a week earlier in Bologna before Over The Rainbow, and so they also kicked off the evening with Gotthard.
Markonee keep getting better. In every respect. They’re a superbly tight crew. And when the place is packed, the band really heats up on stage too. The guys signed with Escape Music this year, just put out a fresh album, “See The Thunder”, their second, and really pushed it at the show. These guys basically write songs that are tailor-made for Gotthard fans, so they were a great choice this time. Besides the great sound they conjured up, they impressed with an excellent performance and an immersive stage show, and the crown on it all was the great form of the singer on the night, who goes by the name Gabrielle Gozzi! In the set, it’s worth singling out Women & Whiskey, written with flirty touches of melodic hard rock, in which an interesting harmonized guitar riff takes the lead and makes you feel like you’re listening to something different, not necessarily “worn out”. The up-and-coming guys warmed up the club, about two-thirds full, also with the 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 features a chorus chant with the word “Markonee” instead of “Motori”. A neat trick, and I hope Zele Lipovača and company have been informed. 40 minutes of great playing, the best Markonee show I’ve witnessed so far.
GOTTHARD: 9:30-11:15 PM
At 9:30 Gotthard step on stage. The band belongs to the ranks of those in Europe today whose careers went a bit differently than, say, Winger, House Of Lords, Firehouse, Giant, Hardline,… Gotthard arrived on the scene with their self-titled album in 1992, in times that were no longer friendly to the message of melodic hard rock. Even if they’d written an evergreen hit back then, the kind that put those bands 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 showed up, despite commercial success and two or three albums out, Gotthard, true grafters that they are, stubbornly hung in through the nineties and got tempered. So they matured from album to album. The last three are on an equal level of quality, they’re different from each other, but still separated by nuances. With them Gotthard won themselves a commercially satisfying position, widened their fan base, and so, finally, the time came for them too to reap what they’d sown.
So today, what sets Gotthard apart from a heap of other bands is also their lack of airs and their exceptional accessibility to fans. The band is also used to playing small club spaces and is totally unburdened, since in the past they’ve been through much worse as far as offers go. And they always knew how to take it in stride. This time the club was packed to the last corner, 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 mixed 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 burst out 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 was shaking hands with the frenzied crowd the whole time. On top of the music, Gotthard won the Italians over with the simple fact that half the band speaks fluent Italian. That includes 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 quite “caught on” yet, since barely a month had passed between the official release and the tour, the crowd sang some choruses of older songs at the top of their lungs, like Gone To Far, Top Of The World, Sister Moon, the folk-anthem-by-now Hush (which Gotthard will absolutely have to cross off the set list at their French dates this year 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, and as a sixth member, keyboardist Nicolo Fragile helps them out on stage and in the studio. Most of the attention on stage goes to the excellent Steve Lee, who delivers first-class classic hard rock vocals, the kind Jon Bon Jovi lost long ago, and a charge of inspiration for Bon Jovi themselves, while Gotthard, at least in Europe, are filling the void left by Bon Jovi’s burnt-out, forced new albums. Steve Lee is also an excellent stage performer, a phenomenal connector. A man of flirty glances and sinful moves, he held all the strings firmly in his hands, and the crowd was literally eating out of his palm all show. A few sky-high, killer “screams” and there we are. Goosebumps guaranteed. Especially when Gotthard tackle the fantastic title track of the album, which put the hall under a spell with its perfect chorus.
In the middle of the set, only Leo Leoni with an acoustic guitar and Steve Lee appear on stage. The acoustic set was put together totally spontaneously and the two took requests from the crowd. So, four songs on demand 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 then tugged at the soul one last time, for the ladies, with the song Angel (“Gotthard”, 1992). Then comes the wake-up call and a “wrecking” atmospheric eruption with the phenomenal new song Shangri-La, where the club was again bursting at the seams with excitement. The band wrapped up the regular part of the show in top gear! First they raised the atmosphere with the highly melodic, hard-hitting Now (“Domino Effect”, 2007), then closed this part of the show with the strictly demanded and much-wanted all-encompassing anthem Lift U Up from “Lipservice” (2005), which, with its venomously tight rhythmic march, must have made the hair stand up on end even on the coldest, most numb visitor who happened to find himself in Cesena that night hanging out with Gotthard.
Flawless, highly professional, highly tight. And on top of all that, Gotthard are known for not leaving a speck of arrogance, pushiness, or the feeling that they just showed up to routinely collect a paycheck. A full-on show with no dodging around and, most importantly, no special calculations about saving energy. This is the start of the tour and the band already has the new material down cold, which only confirms that with all their heavy, constant 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, taking several thousand people. So the gap between the band and the audience will be wider at those shows, and it’ll be hard to get an intimacy like the one the Vidia club offered anytime soon. The guys wrapped up the hour-and-three-quarters-long show with one more thrilling anthem from the new album, I Know You Know, and rounded off another fantastic live 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 let up one bit from the first second of the show to the last. Hanging out with Gotthard at that intensity was over in a flash!
On that note, I’d like to add a personal angle. 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 shows on Italy’s club scene, which has its own specific character, I can say straight up, no holding back, that the experience with Gotthard at the Vidia club takes first place among all my club-scene show visits in Italy so far. A very important factor this time, besides the excellent club space, which was just the right size and had great acoustics, was the crowd. It packed in and filled every single corner of the club and contributed a fanatical response and tremendous support for the band. The band took an extra run-up and, with that kind of momentum, totally relaxed, literally flew on the wings of the concert magic created that way!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
MARKONEE:
1. Way
2. Go
3. Back On Me
4. Brand New Day
5. See The Thunder
6. Dirty White Boy
7. Women & Whiskey
8. Loved Land
9. Markonee
10. The Big K
11. 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
