Mary Rose
Friday, 12 July 2024, at 9:00 PM
Postojna / Titov trg / Slovenia
Those Fridays do come around. Eventually. July ones. Locked into scorching dog days that know how to fray the nerves. Days when you stare at a restless sky, glance away for a moment, and the very next instant a poisonous storm shower of ‘questionable origin’ buries you ‘out of nowhere’. So here we have another daily madhouse — a day when the writer of these lines needed to escape from Ljubljana! That hellish stench of Ljubljana’s streets, the unbearable heat of a radiating concrete jungle, gridlock delirium on every main road, plus the endless doses of sadomasochism courtesy of hordes of manic tourists and transport vehicles — something that long ago blew past every limit of (carefully banished) common sense, sliding deep over the edge of chaos. All of which we have gratefully ‘gilded’ and accepted as the new normal of everyday life. And so on… But things do, from time to time, in the evening hours of such days, somehow settle down and remind you of the old ‘still lifes’ that Fridays used to bring.
Even the ‘switched-off’ Postojna, which functions as little more than a dormitory town on weekends, can occasionally wake itself up. When the city draws together, on a Friday evening like this, a choice crowd from the good old generation of ‘survivor’ metalheads and rockers — people who once swarmed every corner of this town and the surrounding area — and when their joints, after years of ‘rusting’, are sufficiently oiled to get them out to a gig. What drove them to Titov trg this time was a concert by Slovenian glam metal legends — hometown Postojna hard rockers Mary Rose. Time flies. Come this autumn, two years will have passed since the anniversary celebration when the band played two sold-out shows at the Postojna cultural centre to mark the 30th anniversary of their cult debut “Rocks Off”.
Nine o’clock in the evening, and the square in front of the big stage is nicely packed. The opening of an hour-long party gets underway. Short but sweet — with a particular emphasis on striking those nostalgic notes, among other things. The band was on a tight clock. They centred their set on material from “Resničen svet” (2019, RockLine review), adding moments from its predecessor “Feniks” (2006, RockLine review), with the emotional crescendo saved for the closing stretch — two “Rocks Off” (1990, RockLine review) classics, Hold On Baby and She’s Run Away, topping off the final minutes with a Queen classics medley.
No need to reinvent the wheel. Even though Mary Rose play relatively rarely these days, they remain synonymous with outstanding performances and rock’n’roll parties. The quintet, in which the spotlight falls on the timeless, ‘fearsome’ vocal acrobat Žak — who once again delivered a top-tier performance — and on one of the icons of Slovenian hard rock when it comes to commanding the postulates of the six-string ‘Bible’, namely Eki, without whom Mary Rose simply isn’t Mary Rose, functions with an almost unholy tightness and precision. In the opening stretch the guitars scratched a little through the monitors, but they dialled the sound in quickly to a pleasing level. Sandi’s keyboards drew the short straw at moments, but otherwise — an hour-long bomb and a cracking concert tornado, exactly what you expect and demand from a band like this. Adding their stamp to the superb stage execution: a rejuvenated rhythm section, with the ferocious drumming juggler — the explosive David — and the throughout ‘tightly strung’ bassist Anže. In a word: “Cannonade”. The crowd turned out in great numbers, but once again took up positions there, in a radius of roughly 7 metres from the edge of the stage outward (looking away from the stage), which at concerts like this in Postojna has become an established habit over the years. This reserve — the apparently internalised, characteristic shyness of the local crowd — was honestly the only minor blemish on the evening; without it, the concert would almost certainly have ignited to an even higher level of energy!
Mary Rose are a living relic of the Slovenian rock scene of the eighties. “Rocks Off” guarantees them enduring status as a band with one of the foundational achievements of Slovenian heavy metal and hard rock of the eighties in their back pocket. Mary Rose are legends of the Slovenian rock scene, and no one can take that status away from them. Eki and crew haven’t said their last word either — quite a few unrealised plans still remain on the table for the near future. The Postojna concert was short, but packed with quality. It confirmed once again the sheer pleasure of seeing them perform live! And so it will remain going forward.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik (no. 1 – 22 & 25) & Edita Klemen (no. 23 and 24)
Mary Rose – setlist:
1. Intro
2. Preteklost
3. Vizija
4. Kralj za eno noč
5. Nagon
6. Paranoja
7. Kje si zdaj
8. Sam
9. Stampedo
10. Planet
11. Krivda
12. Ko tako objame
13. Ples
14. Hold On Baby
15. She’s Run Away
16. Queen medley
