Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Linz / Tips Arena / Austria
Concert date: May 5, 2012
Attendance: 3,000
Ticket price: €60.00
When the British smiths of the metal bible Judas Priest announced a farewell tour at the end of 2010, after forty years in the game, plenty of heavy music fans felt their hearts skip a beat. The final world tour, »Epitaph«, a monster in terms of dates, kicked off in the Netherlands at the start of last summer and has been rolling practically nonstop ever since. In the meantime the Priests have played both Americas and Asia, and in April they came back to the Old Continent. Great live form, a satisfactory Halford voice and a relatively credible successor to K.K. on guitar, a guy by the name of Richie Faulkner, were the takeaways from our meeting with the Priests last year and reason enough to make the pilgrimage one more time. For Slovenian fans of the band, the most convenient spots for another date with the legends were Mantua in Italy and Linz in Austria – and to the latter, a city better known for its delicious pastries than for big-name concerts, Rockline headed in the company of the Koncerti.net agency.
In the first leg of the European »Epitaph« tour, Judas Priest played alongside hard rock veterans Whitesnake and occasionally Thin Lizzy – and the latter crossed our path this time too.
Thin Lizzy, once the untamable Irish riders of classic rock, now with a more international lineup, are reviving on stage the days when the great Phil Lynott and company cranked out songs about working-class life and won themselves cult status among rockers back in the seventies. The success story ended with Lynott’s premature departure from this world in the mid-eighties, and his comrades Brian Downey (drums), Scott Gorham (guitar) and Darren Wharton (keyboards) have spent the last few years carrying on under the name of a brand that, in my opinion, died back in 1986. But let’s take it from the top!
The Irish kicked off their hour-on-the-dot stroll through the band’s biggest hits with Are You Ready. One look at the stage quickly revealed that the band had gone through a lineup change since last summer’s tour: Fortus (Guns N’ Roses) had been replaced on guitar by Damon Johnson, for the last few years Alice Cooper’s touring guitarist and a man of rich musical knowledge. The central figure of the stage action was, of course, Ricky Warwick, frontman of the Scottish outfit The Almighty and for the last two years also the lead throat of Lizzy. Warwick followed Lynott’s original lines with a deep, booming voice, which came easily to him thanks to the similarity of their timbres, but this very slavish following of the Lynott school is just one more proof that all the band has left today is playing the notes and trading on old recognition. In his usual manner, the temperamental bassist Marco Mendoza was having a great time on the left side of the stage, while the reins were watched over, with glances from under wrinkled brows, by the two gray-haired bosses, Gorham on guitar and Downey on drums. To the evergreen wreath made up of Jailbreak, Rosalie and Whiskey in the Jar, the Irish surprisingly added Still in Love With You (»Nightlife«, 1974), paying tribute to the fallen hero Gary Moore, who first joined Thin Lizzy for a short time while that album was being made. Near the end of the set, Gorham rewarded the band’s ‘greenhorn’ with a venomous look when Warwick came in too early on the intro of The Boys Are Back in Town, but that didn’t spoil the generally good impression Thin Lizzy left in the Tips Arena thanks to their polished form. All well and good, but even after meeting the band again, the fact remains the same – even the best stage performance can’t restore, without the mastermind, the credibility and greatness that the name Thin Lizzy holds for classic rock fans, no matter how much effort goes into it.
The stage crew took a serious chunk of time, and quite a bit of water flowed under the bridge, before the stage was ready for the arrival of the heavy metal gods. When the long wait was cut short by the rolling riff of the Black Sabbath classic War Pigs, it was clear that the curtain would soon drop and the spectacle could begin.
The opening with Rapid Fire was ferocious, just as ferocious as Travis’s double-kick pounding on the bass drum, which carried us through yet another »British Steel« classic, Metal Gods, to a leap onto the highway called Heading Out to the Highway! The heavy metal crowd, known for its unshakable loyalty, was eating out of the Priests’ hands from the first moment and carried them onward on the wings of fanatical cheering from the front rows. It has to be said here that the Tips Arena, the biggest indoor concert venue in Linz, was only half full this time, but that didn’t stop a few thousand newcomers from giving body and soul to the immortal Judas Priest classics!
In the autumn of their career, Judas Priest still sound undiminished and venomous, and the biggest headache for them remains Halford’s aging voice. After being a pale shadow of his golden years on the »Nostradamus« tour, Rob Halford clearly took good care of his vocal cords during the two-year break and has partly regained his form, and with it his battered confidence. Make no mistake, the heart-rending screams from songs like Starbreaker or Victim of Changes are no longer within reach, but the Priest throat handled the mid-difficulty songs quite decently and so knocked down the last obstacle to takeoff for heavy metal paradise! In Linz, Halford once again pulled off the impossible – he shut up all the doubters who had written his name off in the past. A lot of ink was also spilled over the past year about the newcomer, the barely 32-year-old guitarist Richie Faulkner. The blond youngster successfully stood up to the thankless role of successor to the legendary K.K. Downing, and the trademark joint headbanging and shoulder-to-shoulder playing show that Faulkner has already picked up the recognizable Judas Priest stage language and clicked with his older bandmates. But the real challenge for him and the band is still to come – only the recording of a new album will show what kind of stuff the Tipton / Faulkner guitar tandem is made of, though on stage they looked confident and split the solo spots down the middle like brothers.
Judas Priest built the setlist for the farewell tour in an interesting way – they took at least one song from every album of the Halford era, making a mix that spans a huge stretch of time, all the way from »Rocka Rolla« (1974) to »Nostradamus« (2008). It’s a thankless job to single out all the classics the Priests served up in Linz, but at the very least Beyond the Realms of Death (»Stained Class«, 1978), The Sentinel (»Defenders Of The Faith«, 1984) and the surprise of the tour, Blood Red Skies (»Ram It Down«, 1988), deserve a mention. Sadly, the second leg of the European Epitaph tour brought not a single change to the setlist, which turned out to be the one big minus of the Linz trip.
The final stretch of the show was the product of the band’s established habits – the deadly Painkiller with Travis’s drum solo intro, the smell of Harley Davidson gasoline fumes before Hell Bent for Leather, and, as a farewell, the good-natured anthem Living After Midnight. Even after a solid two hours on stage, the whole band ran like a well-oiled machine, and the sight of 61-year-old bassist Ian Hill, who after a long battle with the loss of every last atom of strength still held his trademark pose with youthful stubbornness, was especially unbelievable.
Another meeting with the band that long ago crowned itself the most influential heavy metal outfit in this solar system, another unforgettable experience – only Judas Priest can deliver that!
Once again, the ride into the bosom of ever safe and pleasant atmosphere was taken care of by the travel agency Koncerti.net, led by its fearless boss and hardcore rock enthusiast, Concert Freak!
Setlist
JUDAS PRIEST:
1. Battle Hymn (intro)
2. Rapid Fire
3. Metal Gods
4. Heading Out To The Highway
5. Judas Rising
6. Starbreaker
7. Victim Of Changes
8. Never Satisfied
9. Diamonds & Rust
10. Dawn Of Creation (intro)
11. Prophecy
12. Night Crawler
13. Turbo Lover
14. Beyond The Realms Of Death
15. The Sentinel
16. Blood Red Skies
17. The Green Manalishi (With The Two-Pronged Crown)
18. Breaking The Law
19. Painkiller
—encore I—
20. The Hellion
21. Electric Eye
—encore II—
22. Hell Bent For Leather
23. You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’
—encore III—
24. Living After Midnight
THIN LIZZY:
1. Are You Ready
2. Jailbreak
3. Killer On The Loose
4. Don’t Believe a Word
5. Whiskey in the Jar
6. Suicide
7. Rosalie
8. Black Rose
9. Cowboy Song
10. The Boys Are Back In Town
Photo Gallery
