Location: Stonehenge club / Arcole (Verona) / Italy
Gig date: 01.05.2008
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: 0.00€
The ways of the Lord are mysterious, and the ways of our RockLine even more so. This time the road led me to a little town called Arcole, about halfway between Vicenza and Verona in Italy, known for one of Napoleon’s battles in 1796, which he most definitely walked away from as the winner. To give you some bearings, this teeny-tiny town is only 330 km from Ljubljana. And since we’re a hardened bunch, in the unbridled RockLine conquest of Europe any gig less than 400 km from Ljubljana counts as pure driver’s heaven.
May Day holidays and a dead town. No need to mention that I got lost, of course. That goes without saying. Still, I got a educational stroll around Arcole, where friendly locals explained to me exactly where the Stonehenge club is. In short: take the Soavia/San Bonifacio exit, drive through the center of San Bonifacio heading south, and when you hit the roundabout with the turnoff for the center of Arcole, take that. Only about 400 m further on, the Stonehenge club is on your left. Since the Stonehenge sign is almost completely overgrown with vines, it’s worth just parking on instinct at the first parking lot you reach on the right side of the road you enter Arcole on, then looking at the opposite side of the street, where the first thing you’ll spot is a big Las Vegas sign on one of the buildings. Stonehenge club is right below it. Of course it’s no druid temple, and there’s not a single giant boulder arranged in a circle to be found either. So the place is right at the start of town. Once I found myself at the scene of the crime, I first said hello to Emiliano, the boss of Bologna Rock City. How fast time has flown since November 2006, when we met in Padua at the gig of Swedish AOR/hard rockers House Of Shakira (you can read the report HERE).
Soon after, I was already jumping on the tour manager’s neck. The guys were just heading off to a spaghetteria to refuel, but there’d be no problem with an interview once we got back from dinner, the friendly German said. The start, originally announced for 21:30, was of course stretched to the max in classic Italian manner. The wait flew by anyway, chatting with Emiliano, who was selling Jaded Heart merch from a nicely dressed table. The draft beer was surprisingly excellent this time (Tuborg), but expensive as hell itself (5.00€ – my advice is to bring cans from the corner store if you ever happen to find yourself at the Stonehenge club by some strange twist of fate). And finally I got my interview with the band. The clock had already struck 23:00 and the first support band hadn’t even started their show yet. How the interview went will of course be covered in another article, so let’s jump ahead three quarters of an hour. Which puts us at roughly the last 15 minutes of the great day of the Lord, 02.05.2008!
The locals Venoma were right in the middle of their big orgasmic performance when I crept back through the club doors from the interview. The trio, a girl (vocals/guitar) and two guys on rhythm duty, had barely reached sexual maturity and were already handling dangerous weapons. How does it go again? Emo kids and maximum impregnation, protecting against the (potentially) fatal invasion of bacteria. Instant and empty. Sloppy playing and thick, smeared noise are encouraged, because that way you can’t hear the melodies in it at all. You scream over that smear and the job is done. Whoaaa, deep stuff!!! Time to slit our wrists already! Venoma tortured my spoiled ears for another 20 minutes or so, while the crowd, which this time really looked like a kindergarten, followed their countrymen with great interest and hopefully didn’t mistake it for the dawn of a new rock universe. By this point the club was nicely filled. You could count about 70 people with your eyeballs.
Dissoluto followed. The second local support act, who got a much more boisterous response from the audience. This time a quartet with a female guitarist, a singer, a bassist and a drummer. They actually served up quite a lot more sugar in their alternative rock character, especially thanks to lyrics in melodic Italian. The sound was lighter too, compared to Venoma. You sometimes wonder what the hell goes on in the heads of the young. They dress up in the clothes of the punk rock revolution, but they’re full of crap. So there’s no deeper essence to look for here, just adolescence growing out of itself. Good luck, you little brats, you’ve piled enough misery on my hearing organs for one night.
The organizer knew he had to book locals as supports, since that’s the only way the club would be full enough. How sad, right? Even Emiliano couldn’t exactly boast about the turnout at his hard rock shows in Italy. But the man’s got guts. One time it’s a loss, another time a profit, and he does it all completely voluntarily! Worthy of respect.
At twenty past one at night, the German wizards of melodic glam hard rock Jaded Heart finally took the stage. Quite a few things conspired to make this evening not exactly made for a Jaded Heart show. First, the stage itself, which looked more like a catwalk, and then the impossible conditions for setting up a decent PA. The guitar was way too loud during the gig and there was tons of squealing feedback. The next problem the band was fighting off this evening was the cold of singer Johan Fahlberg. The likable black spider, a true two-meter giant, of course tried to squeeze everything out of himself during the show, but the cold claimed its victims. Johan simply couldn’t work in the registers that matter most live, the ones that carry the red thread of the songs. His mid-range had completely given up on him. So he mostly bailed himself out by skipping over them, leaving out the tricky verses and, via improvisation, finishing lines with extremely high “screams” that tore at the ears. It was all the harder for Johan because he couldn’t hear himself properly on stage, since Peter Oestros’s guitar was cranked up beyond all measure. Fahlberg was pulled out of the mess by Peter Oestros, Michael Mueller and Dimitri Keiski, who handled the multi-part vocal harmonies. There was quite a bit of sloppiness during the show, but in concert conditions like these, that’s the price the band has to pay, plain and simple. On top of that, the club is a big mystery to many a sound engineer who dares to venture behind the mixing desk there. This time the sound really was an unsolvable riddle.
Oh, and one more thing! Dimitri Keiski is a buddy of Peter Oestros and the two play together in the Swedish power metal band Insania. Keiski only jumped in for Jaded Heart for this tour, since it so happened that the band had lent their original member and keyboardist Henning Wanner to White Lion, who are roaming around South America at the same time. Keiski learned the entire Jaded Heart repertoire in just one week.
The band shortened their set and limited it to just over an hour. They cut 5 songs and the encore from the repertoire. So at least 40 minutes, counting the two-song encore as well, which is almost half the repertoire we were deprived of. Interestingly, Jaded Heart cut every song from the set list that comes from the records with Michael Bormann on vocals. There are two reasons for that. The first carries more weight. The band is thrilled with the albums “Helluva Time” (2005) and “Sinister Mind” (2007), which were heavily represented in the set at the Stonehenge club too. The other reason, which was more than welcome given the insistence on those two records, is the band adapting to Fahlberg’s cold-ravaged throat. Fahlberg started his Jaded Heart career with “Helluva Time”, so it’s logical that the material from the last two records suits him best and that his throat would suffer at least a tiny bit less performing it.
Both records are more than excellent, and the fact that we only heard songs from those two was far from a reason to cry and moan. That came from deliberately trimming the set list down to barely an hour. The band made that call quite logically. Without real fans in the front rows, playing just isn’t interesting for them. They’d already had one soundcheck in the afternoon, they surely don’t need another, and it was pointless to them. So since there were about 30 people during the gig, and even those were sitting far away at the tables, the band lost a big chunk of the joy of performing live. And mind you. There was no admission at all. Of course Jaded Heart still gave it their all that hour. Real proof of that is the three completely destroyed pairs of drumsticks that Axel Kruse tossed into the crowd.
JADED HEART setlist:
1. Hero
2. Justice Is Deserved
3. Somewhere
4. Live And Let Live*
5. Inside Out*
6. Tommorow Comes
7. Shores Of Paradise
8. Sinister Mind
9. Paid My Dues
10. Going Under
11. Journey Will Never End*
12. Dreams You’ll Never See
13. Hellucinate
14. Anymore*
15. Feels Like Love*
*…songs Jaded Heart didn’t play
Experiencing a gig in conditions like these is not exactly an everyday thing, but with all the constant roaming around stages across Europe, even such experiences become a matter of course. They’re part of the life of bands and the rock scene. That’s how it goes. I just hope a new chance comes along soon to see Jaded Heart in different conditions. With a proper stage, a proper crowd, proper stage lighting. Still, I was filled with energy like I hadn’t been in a long time. Anyway, when you’re with a band that plays music for your soul, in your head you just naturally skip over all the rough conditions the band found itself in that night. Jaded Heart skipped over them too. Surely not for the first time, and not for the last either.
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