Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Velden am Wörthersee, Carinthia / Bluesiana Rock Cafe / Austria
Concert date: 15.05.2014
Attendance: 150
Ticket price: €35.00
In a career spanning more than thirty years, Danish heavy rock veterans Pretty Maids had never played this close to our doorstep, until their current European club tour brought them to Velden in Carinthia, specifically to the Bluesiana Rock cafe, a club that has been spoiling us for years with shows by big names in music. Rockline last ran into Pretty Maids three weeks ago at the Frontiers Rock festival in Milan (report here), and right after their bombastic festival set we decided to catch them one more time on this tour.
The scene of the crime was a familiar one: Bluesiana’s intimate club atmosphere. Pretty Maids are used to big stages, so the coziness of Bluesiana was probably a bit of a shock for them too. Around nine in the evening some 150 heads were drummed up at the club. That’s a small number, of course, hardly befitting the band’s reputation, but the setting promised a genuine connection with the band. It was precisely the search for a more intimate concert experience that drew a good number of Slovenian gig fans to Lake Wörthersee, which made wandering around Bluesiana on a Thursday evening feel even more like home.
Pretty Maids treated Thursday’s show like a public rehearsal, so there was no shortage of joking stage antics and other good-natured devil-horn extras among the band members, but the intensity of the performance wasn’t at the level we’re used to from Pretty Maids on bigger stages. The two main men, Ronnie Atkins on vocals and Ken Hammer on guitar, are seasoned musicians, but despite all their mileage they didn’t muster a professional enough approach to sweat out the same number of drops as they would in front of an endless sea of fans. The main proof is the shortened setlist, which was cut by two to three songs, or ten minutes of playing time, compared to the earlier German leg of the tour. That’s something the crowd, having paid €35 for their tickets, certainly didn’t deserve.
That doesn’t mean the trip to Austrian Carinthia was in vain, of course! Pretty Maids served up a mix of their classic material and the output of recent years, when they started pushing their musical ideas more actively from the album »Pandemonium« (2010) onward. What’s interesting about the Danes is that, unlike the vast majority of similar heavy metal and hard rock institutions from the eighties, they aren’t ashamed of the commercially unsuccessful nineties, so they once again filled the repertoire with two songs from albums that will forever stay in the shadow of their first three. Psycho-Time-Bomb-Planet-Earth (»Scream, 1995) and the Sykes cover Please Don’t Leave Me (»Sin-Decade«, 1992) spoke eloquently enough about how their compass kept pointing the right way even during the heyday of alternative rock.
The stage action rested on the shoulders of blond frontman Ronnie Atkins and guitarist Ken Hammer. The years haven’t spared them. If the first one’s hairline has thinned out quite a bit, the second one’s mileage shows in ever wider rings of extra weight around the belly. Proof positive that beer really does fatten you up! Atkins took good care of his role as chief motivator throughout the show, leaving the other musicians on stage only crumbs in the form of the obligatory flirting with the crowd. Pretty Maids usually explode during a set, but this time the miniature stage clipped their wings, which shortchanged mainly the younger trio of musicians, led by the bouncy bassist Rene Shades. The Danes put complete trust in their newer, more modernly arranged material, which quickly lodged itself in the ears of their loyal followers, so feeding the words into Atkins’s ears on the choruses of Little Drops Of Heaven or Mother Of All Lies was just as intense as on older classics like Red, Hot & Heavy or Yellow Rain. For the intro to I.N.V.U., Pretty Maids spiced things up with a nod to the Pink Floyd classic Another Brick In The Wall, and the newly bearded drummer Allan Tschicaja got his moment in the spotlight with a short solo in the middle of the set. The atmosphere kept building, flames engulfed the club from every angle, before the get-together came to an end (too soon) with the theatrical, bombastic classic Future World.
The Pretty Maids machine didn’t roar with every available octane this time, but that didn’t hold the crowd back one bit from reaching concert ecstasy. The Danes’ reserved start melted into a proper rock party with a one-of-a-kind flavor as the night went on, since watching them from a meter or two away was without a doubt an exclusive experience.
Setlist
1. Nuclear Boomerang
2. Psycho-Time-Bomb-Planet-Earth
3. Final Day Of Innocence
4. Red, Hot & Heavy
5. My Soul To Take
6. Pandemonium
7. I.N.V.U.
8. Drum solo
9. I See You Ghosts
10. Sad To See You Suffer
11. Yellow Rain
12. Rodeo
13. Little Drops Of Heaven
14. Back To Back
—dodaek—
15. Mother Of All Lies
16. Please Don’t Leave Me
17. Future World
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