Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Hala Tivoli / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Concert date: June 23, 2010
Attendance: 5,000
Ticket price: €49.00 (advance) / €60.00 (at the box office, day of show)
You could say that Slovenia has finally, at long last, got itself a real rock spectacle. The kind that usually passes us by, where you have to trek several hundred kilometers from, say, the Slovenian capital just to get a taste of real rock n’ roll! This time we’re talking about the show by 54-year-old rock icon Billy Idol, who stopped at Ljubljana’s Hala Tivoli with his gang of top-pedigree musicians. A despairing, true-believer Slovenian fan of Western European rock n’ roll would tell you without hesitation that the only acts who can fill Tivoli are Plavi Orkestar, Tony Cetinski and similar oddballs of non-English rock vocabulary, who have been raking in fat stacks of cash across the planetary zone between the Vardar and Triglav for far too long. That shakes up Slovenia’s outward image with a general veil of sick ideas about what a healthy take on rock music looks like. Not that Slovenes will get sick of the Balkan-Mediterranean occupation melos anytime soon, that will probably never happen, but on this day Slovenes finally showed that somewhere deep down they haven’t lost their feel for the authentic spirit of rock n’ roll. They came to pack Hala Tivoli to the last corner. Something like that, with no Ceca on stage, in the middle of Tivoli these days really wasn’t something you could expect.
Billy Idol took the stage with his band at 8:45 p.m. The spiky blond hair, the washboard abs, the signature sneering grimaces with that curled lip that always catches the eye, the fist-pumping! The man hasn’t dropped a single one of them. The fatal charm is still with him! With guitar wizard Steve Stevens on his right, the beastly drummer Jeremy Colson (Steve Vai Band) behind his back, and newcomer and rhythm guitarist Billy Morisson (Camp Freddy, The Cult) and bassist Stephen McGrath on his left, Billy, with his trademark inexhaustible showman energy, delivered a first-class rock n’ roll spectacle to Ljubljana.
Did I forget anyone? While the band plows new ground with the Generation X classic Ready Steady Go, it gets roughly 6,500 feet (times two) in the hall moving, and Idol follows up with Dancing With Myself! Here Stevens shows off his first guitar solo played behind his back (which he repeats several more times in his parade of acrobatics later on), and we also get the first outro jam. Then the brand-new Love is Strange, with former Dream Theater keyboardist Derek Sherinian, an official member of Billy Idol’s touring lineup, still not on stage. Even the programmed sample in Love is Strange could have scared someone into thinking something was wrong with Derek, but the statuesque keyboardist of Armenian descent joins in on stage for the mega hit and one of the most polished songs of Billy’s career in the golden eighties. Flesh For Fantasy. A real art treat. Everywhere you looked, the standing crowd was taking in the spectacle. When the charismatic master of the stage Billy powers through to the chorus with his fist raised, the hall all but drowns him out. The magic of the atmosphere was one of a kind this time! The sex-soaked song flows phenomenally into the no less scandalous Sream, which proves that Idol remains successfully “Idolized” in his own songwriting for the new millennium too.
A short break follows, a costume change, and Billy appears on stage with an acoustic guitar. With Stevens backing him up, they kick off “Whiplash Smile” hit Sweet Sixteen, where Billy selflessly opens by laying out the inspiration behind its creation. The lyrics, which Billy pieced together at Coral Castle in Florida, peel back the backstory of a love drama between two Latvian emigrants in the USA, Edward Leedskalnin (who carved out the coral castle for his “sweet sixteen”) and his runaway fiancée Agnes Scuffs. She ran out on Edward just one day before the wedding.
An almost flamenco interlude from Steve Stevens lulls the hall into Idol’s new mega hit, where the whole hall again waves their arms in the air and gives in to the grabby melody of the classic Eyes Without Face. Stevens puts his guitar soloing front and center, which on the studio version is deliberately tucked away in the background, adding to the overall stage dynamics and building up the intensity of the song. Next comes the brand-new and highly melodic Kings And Queens of the Underground, which keeps the lazy yet relaxed vibe of a mellow song backed by the natural sound of the acoustic guitar. Billy has always been a huge fan of The Doors. So in Hala Tivoli he dedicated his version of L.A. Woman to them, which the crew stretched into a new extended outro jam. After it come two Generation X classics, which were a surprise on the setlist, considering the heap of Idol’s own trump cards that the singer (still) hadn’t pulled out of his sleeve.
We had to wait quite a while for a new hit. The phenomenal Blue Highway (“Rebel Yell”, 1983) wakes the hall up, and then Idol says: “Here’s a song you all know!” The stretched-out Rebel Yell brought one of the concert’s decisive peaks, and after a full hour and fifteen minutes the hall is left starving for Idol’s music! Steve and Billy come back on stage. In a stripped-down version Stevens starts strumming the acoustic guitar, and the hall soon recognizes the lead melody of Idol’s classic White Wedding. Around the halfway point the whole band is on stage. A full electric assault finishes it off, commanded by a rock-solid demonstration of Billy Idol’s charismatic presence. It wasn’t hard to predict that the band would completely set the crowd on fire at the end when they tackled Tommy James’s cover Mony Mony. An hour and a half. The people want more. But that’s all for tonight!
The backing crew shows an exceptional brilliance of tightness where a mistake can hardly sneak in. They all picked up a touch of Billy’s mockery, mischief and sexism! Unified on stage like this, they further reinforced Idol’s figure, and by magnifying his recognizable trademarks they got even deeper under the audience’s skin! Even the sound, always treacherous at Hala Tivoli, came out of it successfully this time!
What to say in closing? Billy Idol has remained what you have to remain in the mature years of a rock career. An exceptional stage character who, with a fleeting glance like a fatal earthquake tremor, bewitches the crowd so that it starts eating out of his hand without hesitation. Behind him a heap of hits, ahead of him a preserved hunger for creative restlessness that keeps driving him forward. Idol is working on a new album and there’s no end to the story in sight. Vocally he’s held up, not to mention his vitality, which plenty of guys 30 years younger who came to see him in Hala Tivoli that night could envy without reservation.
Let’s be honest, Billy could perform his music with a lot less glamorous names in the lineup. But without the natural pairing of Stevens and Idol, it just doesn’t work. And God forbid Stevens should ever happen to be missing from Billy’s side! Billy Idol, though, stays smart enough about this fact. With such exceptional names in his backing band, he knows it’s a guarantee of packed halls at his shows. Sure, the fees go up and, as a result, so do ticket prices. But the people will pay. Big names are a guarantee of stability and quality. That’s why people with less intrigue reach deeper into their pockets when they need to get a ticket. The golden eighties were brought back to life in a one-of-a-kind way, with Idol keeping all the important recognizable trademarks of his unique charisma as a performer and rock n’ roll entertainer. With his generosity and explosive energy he didn’t waste time on relaxed antics that only his show theater knows! No. That night there wasn’t a hero who would dare claim he regretted coming to see a rock icon! And once again, no! This tour isn’t written off as best-of classics. In his setlist Billy Idol touched on his Generation X career as well as two brand-new songs that will most likely be included on his new studio album.
photos: Mojca Perdih
Setlist
1. Ready Steady Go
2. Dancing With Myself
3. Love Is Strange
4. Flesh For Fantasy
5. Scream
6. Sweet Sixteen
7. Eyes Without a Face
8. Kings & Queens of the Underground
9. L.A. Woman
10. King Rocker
11. Running With the Boss Sound
12. Blue Highway
13. Rebel Yell
—encore—
14. White Wedding
15. Mony Mony
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