Heavy Metal Night 2007

Hell yeah, another year has rolled around, and it was time to give that sleepy little village in the embrace of Nanos, Veliko Ubeljsko pri Postojni, a proper shake-up! Our seismologists hadn’t picked up any major tectonic movement in a while. The third Heavy Metal Night in a row was the perfect chance to spice up their workweek too. Veliko Ubeljsko was shaking!

At six in the afternoon the football pitch looked downright idyllic – bathed in sun, with a gorgeous view of the Nanos plateau. It didn’t take long for the headbangers to take it over, though, and after all, 150 liters of free brew was a tempting bonus for the colorful foursome on the bill – this year the guys from Forgotten Eden and everyone else involved in the organization pulled off a huge coup, inviting a pretty big name of melodic rock and metal to Veliko Ubeljsko, the German pink cream puff Pink Cream 69. And of course there were old friends of Heavy Metal Night, Divlje Jagode, plus Fosgen, who I’d never heard of before HMN, and Forgotten Eden themselves. As some German band would say, let the Heavy Metal Breakdown begin!!!

FOSGEN: 21.10 – 21.50
Around nine the grounds filled with the smell of freshly mown hay, and Fosgen were already on stage (fun fact: phosgene is a chemical warfare agent that smells like hay), hitting us without compromise with a toxic assault of thrash/speed/heavy metal! The band, around since 2003, has grown in just three short years into a great live act that stops at nothing. In a good 40 minutes they took us through classics – Motorhead’s Iron Fist, Anthrax’s Antisocial, Diamond Head’s Am I Evil (admittedly better known in Metallica’s cover version) – and bombarded us with the Sodom classic Ausgebombt. They also presented two original tracks that promise a lot, and even more than that, since there isn’t much thrash with Slovenian lyrics out there! Hats off to the whole crew, and a big thank-you goes especially to the excellent guitarist Edi Žorž, who played even the trickiest parts brilliantly (Am I Evil!). Fosgen ’till Death!

DIVLJE JAGODE: 22.30 – 23.55
After a quick tune-up, a bigger crowd had gathered in front of the stage, because up next were the darlings of the Heavy Metal Night crowd, the Croatian-Bosnian alliance and legends of the ex-Yugo scene, Divlje Jagode. The band is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year, but three decades of roaming stages all over Europe don’t show on them one bit, because they still come across as fresh and energetic as a bunch of twenty-year-old kids. Right from the start, guitar virtuoso, maestro Zele, and his gang hit us with the eternal classic of all bikers, Motori, and the crowd lost it. They were eating out of the hand of the lively, communicative frontman Pero Galić and sang every single chorus with him, or even instead of him. Sadly, Aleš and I missed the rest of the Jagode set, because the friendly organizers, despite some unpleasant hiccups (PC69 were a good three hours late thanks to an accident in the Karawanks), set us up with a press conference and an interview with the Germans. But you could hear through the windows that Jagode were tearing it up, and I caught just their return to the stage and the reprise of Motori, the song Jagode said their goodbyes to us with, a little before midnight. Proof of why Jagode love coming back so much, and why the crowd always welcomes them with open arms, was an hour and a half of red-hot set!

Divlje Jagode setlist:
1. Motori
2. Dobrodošla ljubavi
3. Mrak za dvoje
4. Konji
5. Autostop
6. Piši mi
7. Rospija (sve iz inata)
8. Šejla
9. Turski marš
10. Stvari lagane
11. Divlje jagode
12. Želim da te imam
13. Kap po kap
14. Let na drugi svijet
15. Ciganka
—encore—
16. Motori

PINK CREAM 69: 1.00 – 2.40
Then came a painful, endless wait while the roadies got everything ready for the Germans to take the stage. For a grueling hour we had to listen to the mangled German the techs were using to talk to each other on the stage–mixing desk line, and the racket of the drum tuning was slowly becoming unbearable… Finally, at one in the morning, Pink Cream 69, probably best known to the metal crowd as the former band of Andi Deris (Helloween), marched onto the stage.

 

Already with the first track, Children of the Dawn, off PC 69’s fresh new studio album “In10sity” released this year (RockLine review HERE), it was clear that the wait had been totally worth it, because the sound was top-notch from the very first beat. It didn’t even matter where you stood. Front, back, right, left,… Everywhere you could hear every single note played and sung perfectly, throughout the whole hour and forty minutes our hangout with the band lasted. Pink Cream 69 walked through their entire discography and dug deep into their “Deris era” too. There was the acoustic version of One Step To Paradise and the fired-up Welcome The Night (both from the debut “Pink Cream 69”, 1989), while the album “One Size Fits All” (1991) was represented more heavily, with a whopping four songs: Do You Like It Like This, Hell’s Gone Crazy (both placed at the start to stoke the atmosphere), Talk to the Moon, and toward the end Livin’ My Life For You, a song with a chorus full of predatory melody. With Keep Your Eye On The Twisted they didn’t skip the album “Games People Play” (1993) either, and they closed the regular set furiously with it. But of course the guys put the most emphasis on the current album and played four tracks from it. David Readman proved himself a frontman in the truest sense of the word, because he built a genuine connection with us. The whole band, despite trouble crossing the border (they drove an extra loop from the Karawanks tunnel to Šentilj and rolled into Veliko Ubeljsko from the direction of Styria), was in great spirits and smiling the whole time. By constantly calling people from the back, “come up to the front we’re having fucking great fun”, David was at first very successful. But since the booze and the late hour did their thing, the crowd was trickling away from the stage minute by minute. Toward the end there were maybe only a measly 200 left. Between songs, the charismatic English singer didn’t forget to give a shout-out even to Forgotten Eden vocalist Jure, who after the press conference had sung the main parts of the opera The Barber of Seville for his entertainment. Both guitarists shone, with Reitenauer, as expected, playing most of the most complex parts, since it’s known that Koffler has been suffering from neuropathy for some time. The rhythm section was unstoppable too, with the raging Greek Kosta and the wound-up, bouncy American bassist Dennis Ward, who carefully fired up the crowd. The guys also nailed all the multi-part backing vocal harmonies with flying colors. After Keep Your Eye on the Twisted the guys said goodbye, but they came back for the obligatory encore, which they finished with a witty cover of The Police hit So Lonely, into which they wove Marley’s No Woman No Cry. Did the guys forget about the song from the first album called White Men Do No Reggae, heh heh?

 

Right at the end Jure invited David on stage once more and offered him some homemade schnapps, which, despite David’s persistent denials, surely fired him up good. The PC69 premiere on Slovenian soil will definitely stay in the memory, thanks to the outstanding stage perfection and professionalism (let’s forget the solid three-hour delay). The contact with the crowd was exceptional, and the band also surprised everyone with flawless sound. They kicked off the show straight out of the “soundcheck”!

Pink Cream 69 setlist:
1. Children Of The Dawn
2. Do You Like It Like That
3. Hell’s Gone Crazy
4. Lost In Illusions
5. I’m Not Afraid
6. Talk To The Moon
7. Carnaby Road
8. A New Religion
9. The Spirit
10. One Step Into Paradise (acoustic)
11. Welcome the Night
12. Wanna Hear You Rock
13. The Hour Of Freedom
14. Livin’ My Life For You
15. Seas Of Madness
16. Keep Your Eye On The Twisted
—-encore—
17. No Way Out
18. Shame
19. So Lonely

Last on stage were Forgotten Eden. Sadly, the sheer number of gigs and the exhaustion took their toll on the RockLine crew too, so this time we skipped Forgotten Eden. Next time we’ll “headbang” in the front row!

 

Special thanks go to the courage of the organizer, who dared to bring over the phenomenal melodic hard rock outfit Pink Cream 69, who in 2007 aren’t exactly hot news on Slovenian soil. That makes Heavy Metal Night another year bigger in terms of name recognition! The organization was excellent! See you at Heavy Metal Night 2008!!!

 

words:  Rok Klemše

photos: Aleš Podbrežnik