Radar Rock Festival 2007

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik, Sandi Sadar Šoba
Photos: Sandi Sadar Šoba

Location: Zagreb / Jarun / Croatia
Concert date: 28.06.2007
Attendance: 2006
Ticket price: 6.000

June’s invasion of tempting open-air shows swept up not just central Europe but Slovenia and its neighbors too. The Croats have been having quite a run of gigs lately, the kind we on our side of the border could only drool over, but those of us who were a bit more determined, and lured in by an offer per excellence, crossed the Schengen border… All to grab our own slice of concert euphoria. One of the biggest reasons crowds were gravitating toward the heart of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, was the collab project of the summer: Radar Festival, put together by Austrian organizers teamed up with local promoters..

Originally planned as a two-day marathon, this year it ended up as a somewhat scaled-down one-day affair. Even so, the haul of bands thrown into the pot was more than tempting. Besides our own Slovenian youngsters Anavrin, the crowd was warmed up by Croatian punkers Overflow and Australia’s Howling Bells, while the headliners that kept eyes glued to the posters were Britain’s Kaiser Chiefs, Placebo, and the main attraction, a band we’ve already hosted once in Križanke, who this time came to show off their stoner jewels at our neighbors’ place: Queens Of The Stone Age. No doubt about it – heading south was a must!

After a couple of hours on the road, the two-man RockLine crew finally found the way to the green in Zagreb’s Siget. The landmark of the Hrvatski dragovoljac stadium was pretty misleading, since we soon figured out that the stadium’s very pitch, ringed by plastic grandstand seats, was the arena where we’d get a multicultural musical polyphony of rhythms and styles, while the more visually inclined could hope to run into more or less big stars of the music world. Three o’clock was approaching, the hour when we were finally supposed to be let out of the vestibule, purgatory if you will, into Paradise. After a few minutes of camping out in front of the miniature ticket booth we finally made it to the entrance, where hulking masses of steroid-pumped security guys finally waved us through onto the plain of pleasure.

The steel stage structure stood up to the heat blasts of the merciless sun. A look at the crowd. A very rough estimate: a hundred or two hundred impatient lads and lasses were milling around in front of the stage. In the tents behind the stage it was clear right away that the offering of shirts and CDs would satisfy the crowd’s appetite just fine. The beer was chilled to a suitable temperature, but apart from Žuja (Ožujsko beer) in half-liter plastic cups, don’t expect anything that much resembles beer.

intro text: Sandi Sadar

ANAVRIN: 15.30 – 16.00
Right on schedule, the guys dressed in black-and-white combos appear on stage and start getting everything ready for the opening set of this year’s Radar. Ljubljana’s young hopefuls Anavrin, a band with the album Juice already under its belt, came to announce the release of a second album, due sometime by autumn. Seven members, seven characters, who have been tuning up together musically since 1999. And what can you expect from them? Actually quite a lot: Anavrin are trying to satisfy the hunger of nu-rockers, grungers, and ska-funk-poppers alike, and to please the masses we can expect the palette of sounds to widen even further.

A few bars in and Anavrin serve up something familiar for openers – the song ‘Slep’ from the first record, which after a sampled intro turns into a rather dry-sounding bouncer. Guitarists Anže Hvale and Marko Lavrič sound more mono than stereo, and apart from some pretty two-dimensional, dry playing, nothing comes off the stage that would get you moving. Singer Damir Lisica still tries to convince with the look of total immersion in the grandeur of playing the big stages, but the crowd’s response is too lukewarm for anything more intense. The opening sounded like a car climbing a hill in fifth gear: tired, a bit clumsy, and laborious. Right after the opening “hit” Anavrin switched to presenting material meant for foreign markets. The guys went from Slovenian to Anglicizing their stories. The song ‘Names In Sand’, second of the set, continues the thematic thread of the first one, but because I was a bit too close to the speakers I couldn’t make out a single complete line, so all I can say is that they poured in a bit more distortion, which sounds like formalism without the much-needed fit with the content. Anavrin are too static and artificial on stage. That’s just my subjective take. Sadly, they still remind me too much of a clone of their bigger and more successful Slovenian “brothers” – Siddharta. The copius siddhartis syndrome has already infected a few Slovenian bands, who now automatically reach for artificial constructs and the stereotypical clichés of insincere blabbering. Not that Anavrin are to blame. The guys do their job with craftsmanlike skill and nearly with verve. As a whole they sound tight and determined to win, so expect nothing other than that they’ll serve the Slovenian crowd digestible music that fits our standards perfectly. But they lack the charisma and magnetism to draw hordes of fans abroad – English and interesting haircuts notwithstanding. After ‘Reborn’ and ‘Emptyman’ comes the first single from the upcoming album – ‘Better U’. With its softness and pretty vocals, the song promises far more joy for pop followers than for rock extremists. I liked it, though the two-dimensional dryness of the guitar strumming could be upgraded and the song filled with a more energetic pulse. Damir’s vocals kept up with the instrumental whole pretty well, but the overall impression was fairly bland. After the first single, the first cover. Every band draws on the wisdom and message of musical history. Anavrin picked as their oracle from the past the wild lady, the diva of erotica and provocation – Madonna. ‘Like A Prayer’ sounded fun and just edgy enough that listeners in the first three rows of the by-then terribly empty arena responded in the last gasps of the set. Damir tries to stir up a bigger reaction with an attempt at dialogue in Croatian, but our neighbors are quite sensitive to the Slovenian undertone in the way they speak; the phrasebooks for Slovenian tourists all but recommend using English. Fitting for that was the fun ‘Foolish Games’, into which they poured more passion and energy than into the entire rest of the gig combined. Probably it’s the logic: the best comes last. After a few minutes of massaging the crowd, they leave the stage in about the same way they came on: pretty much overlooked and unnoticed.

ANAVRIN set list:
1. Slep
2. Names In Sand
3. Reborn
4. Emptyman
5. Better U
6. Like A Prayer
7. Foolish Games

text for Anavrin prepared by: Sandi Sadar

OVERFLOW: 16.15 – 16.45
After the Slovenes’ exit, it was time for something more authentically Croatian. We have to admit: a lot of what Croatian musicians have put together has become far more listenable even on our side of the border. Here’s a name that, alongside the legendary punkers Hladno Pivo, has infected at least the extreme devotees of beer, leather jackets, studs, tousled hair, and a direct kick in the groin with a straight, sincere, sparkling performance. That’s more or less how you could sum up a show by the Koprivnica quartet Overflow. Guitarist Nikica Jovanović – Nike, drummer Dalibor Martinčević – Dado, bassist Zoran Piberčnik – Zoki, and the mischievous eternal teenager, singer Goran Živković – Žika, started the occupation with the pompous punk number ‘Star’ (from the very provocatively titled album Extremely Perverted Fantasies Of Mad Milkman’s Disordered Mind …), and the thirty-somethings, who look like they’re 17, filled the stage as if it were an endurance marathon of life and death. Žika, in a green shirt, is back! After a few years off, during which he was, among other things, the owner of a mainstream disco, his body demanded an adrenaline dose and a punk rock energy boost again. Žika commands the entire stage as if more than fifteen years hadn’t passed since Overflow’s first gig together. The somewhat rounder guitarist Nike more than satisfies the need for wild string-bashing, and drummer Dado and the youngest member of the lineup, Zoki, are also far above the punk minimum. Next up is ‘Get Away’, which you can hear on the latest record Live…At Parties. A mix between hardcore of the D.O.A. or Poison Ivy variety and new-school skate punks like Good Riddance and what have you. Žika growls: “Run away before we get in front / There’s no way you can win …” and the crowd gives itself over more and more to some concert-style neck-vertebrae loosening. The song ‘Doraaa’ takes a somewhat softer stance, a very faithful punk take on the age-old theme of unhappy love, seduction, and things left unsaid, and into the sentimental mood the guys very nicely weave a stolen chorus from The Police and their almost entirely dusty but never completely forgotten hit ‘So Lonely’. A much faster but no less melodic punk discourse comes with the pop, Green Day-style ‘You’re Angry’, which flows into the accelerated ‘Face’, a melodic cross between Hladno Pivo and their song ‘Sitni Narcisoidnici’ and something less burdened with meaning. It’s a classic three chord wonder, polka, party, and Overflow are artists at it. Dynamics and action in one spot, along with a stock of classic experience, charisma, and mileage. Overflow were shifting up through the gears. The retrospective of four full-length albums turned into a trip back to the Precambrian era of their existence. Žika announces a track from the album that came out in the year Yugoslavia fell apart, Through Department Store – ‘Family (Remember Brundo Beer)’, which had many of the older members of the Radar Fest crowd reminiscing about the golden age of socialist repression and the tunes of your youth and ours. A punk haiku of rock’n’roll energy and cultivated punk diction, ‘Swallow’ delivers a kick in the face, and after just a minute and a half the guys decide to sprinkle on some more spice. The world revolves around fucking, so fucking is perfectly fitting subject matter for poetry. And Overflow are, among other things, poets of hedonism, fucking, and gorgeous female bodies, so ‘Pussy Eater’ is a lovely link between the band’s old and new image. The brand-new-sounding ‘Wasted’ strolls through pop melodics confidently and nonchalantly. It’s precisely because of this that Overflow are aptly labeled old-school pop punk entertainers who automatically build into their very idea of making music a healthy measure of humor, irony, sarcasm, and looseness. Newer bands are learning this and still sound contrived. The old lineups often simply had it – innate, built into the spiral of their DNA. ‘Doctor’s Tune’ and after it the only hit from the record Unbreastfed 69, ‘Ebony’, and Overflow gallantly switch off their hyperventilating live machine and, sweaty and wrung out from the intense set, head off for their thoroughly deserved beer, two, or a dozen – in every respect they reaped well-deserved applause and sympathy, at least from me …

OVERFLOW set list:
1. Star
2. Get Away
3. Doraaa
4. You’re Angry
5. Face
6. Family (Remember Brundo Beer)
7. Swallow
8. Pussy Eater (Pička)
9. Wasted
10. Doctor’s Tune
11. Ebony

text for Overflow prepared by: Sandi Sadar

HOWLING BELLS: 17.15 – 17.45
Howling Bells were a surprise at the festival, since their name was nowhere to be found on the flyers advertising the event. On the other hand, their presence was totally natural, as they’re currently on a short European tour as Placebo’s support act. Incidentally, Howling Bells already supported Placebo through November and December 2006, as well as The Futureheads.

Howling Bells are an Australian band based in England. Their self-titled debut came out last spring on Bella Union. They’re representatives of indie rock, blending pop, rock, and country influences. The lineup is a four-piece made up of the lovely Juanita Stein (vocals, guitar), Joel Stein (guitar, samples), Brendan Picchio (bass), and Glenn Moule (drums), who wore a proper Australian Crocodile Dundee hat during the show, expressing the band’s roots.

They really surprised me, caught me while I was walking a tightrope. When the band appeared on stage, all the attention was focused (at least as far as I’m concerned) on the sweet little Juanita. I single myself out because the people (as many as were hanging around below the stage at that point) mostly ignored the band. Simply put, Howling Bells were a total unknown and complete exotic in Zagreb that day. The band didn’t bother in the least with the little things I’m mentioning and started their set a bit past six in the afternoon. On the wings of solid self-confidence and Juanita’s extraordinary charisma, Howling Bells signaled that they’re a hugely interesting fresh musical foldout on the scene. The guitars of Juanita and her brother Joel carried a totally natural-sounding semi-acoustic tone, the bulk of the melody built on laying down classic grips without much PhD-level fuss, very simple, alternative! At moments flirting with pop, but also with rocker amateurism. Juanita’s presence brings a special kind of mood to Howling Bells’ image, which can at times be perfectly innocently playful, while right around the corner a freezing-dark atmospheric turn can be lurking. The blame goes mostly to the deliberate dissonance created by Juanita’s choice of singing style: there are her emotional outbursts of punk anger, while on the other hand the girl can at times be intoxicatingly sweet in twisting her tone of voice. Who knows, huh, if The Beatles had been alternative, they might have been called Howling Bells. The song Broken Bones stood out a bit in this bundle of alternative rock tunes with its country touch, and the band included in their half-hour set two brand-new songs, Cities and a yet-unnamed one. All four released singles were there too, and with one of them Howling Bells opened their show very energetically. With Wishing Stone, with its pronounced rattling bass and melodic catchiness that the ears pick up contagiously in an instant.

Judging by the poise of their stage show, their compositional talent, and the demonically attractive charm of the provocative little Juanita, the central figure of Howling Bells, who stresses in the band’s expression what is most recognizably their own, Howling Bells are definitely a hot item emerging on the indie scene. As far as the festival goes, including them was a very welcome genre variation for the event.

Howling Bells set list:
1. Wishing Stone
2. Cities
3. Setting Sun
4. New Song
5. Blessed Night
6. Broken Bones
7. Low Happening

text for Howling Bells: Aleš Podbrežnik

KAISER CHIEFS: 18.00 – 19.15
The British post punk / brit pop sugar candies Kaiser Chiefs, whom MTV is currently full of, sharply split Radar festival into two atmospherically completely different halves the moment they hit the stage. Even during Howling Bells, people spent most of their time at the stands with sausages, beer, and official band merch. There were a measly 400 people in front of the stage, more likely fewer than more, who during Howling Bells grumbled, sighed, or gave in to everyday chatter, completely ignoring an otherwise very interesting indie rock band. Well, the announcement of Kaiser Chiefs turned the picture below the stage upside down. The area in front of the stage filled up the way it should at a festival. The number during the Kasier Chiefs show grew to 3000 and only kept climbing from there. Of course it’s wise to take into account that many people came to the festival with “deliberate lateness”, that is, with the intention of starting to follow the event from Kaiser Chiefs onward.

The front rows thus filled up in support of Kaiser Chiefs with a bunch of unplucked daisies aged 16 to 22. Mixed in among them were little boys with modern emo haircuts and the moves and glances of shy fawns, who these days spend more time in front of bathroom mirrors than any of the previously described “modern MTV” girls.

When their heroes took their positions, it of course went off instantly and the festival finally grew wings. The Kaiser Chiefs lads, who masterfully won their popularity through a carefully planned economic propaganda policy, by creating songs of infectious catchiness dressed in just the right dose of the revolt that rock music sparks, and with a look into which they mixed some Beatles-style haircuts and just the right amount of rowdiness reviving the stage devastation of the years when the punk movement was at its peak, that is, combining the naughty and the good into a bold and effective jigsaw for a broader receptive crowd, didn’t beat around the bush on stage in all this guise. Incidentally, the formula is a winning one and the boys deserve all the congratulations for achieving popularity in the first decade of the new millennium.

They filled the whole stage, mostly thanks to singer Ricky! The guy climbed on monitors, jumped off them doing splits, twice even climbed a few meters up the stage structure by the left and right monitors, rammed into monitors, kissed mic stands,… While Ricky floated in the clouds, running around the stage further whipped up the people: the two-meter spider on bass, Simon, and the man with a green sock on his head and glam specs, guitarist Whitey!

The boys have only two studio albums out! And from them they put together a bombastic set list as if it were a joke, devoted to an equal presentation of both and, as far as confidence goes, with an authoritative and fully polished approach to live performing by Kaiser Chiefs, it was the basic framework for creating the compact high mood of their feverish show. If you open the gig with a big hit (Everyday I Love You Less And Less) and close it with another one (Oh My God), and in between keep the crowd on its feet with MTV flowers like the most current Ruby and Everything Is Average Nowdays, then Modern Way and toward the end I Predict A Riot, the whole thing simply can’t go wrong. Sound and delivery at the required, high-quality level of great persuasiveness. The loudness of notorious rowdiness and the excellent communication of the five on stage, with which they visibly delighted the audience below the stage, says that everything in the band is running at the required operating temperature. Kaiser Chiefs proved they’re a young, hot band that, judging by what I saw at Radar festival, lived up to its current commercial success in grand style. The boys know how to play, know how to perform, and know how to establish an exceptionally firm field of mutual communication on the band – audience axis. An hour and 15 minutes spun by in a blink and the first peak of Radar festival was behind us before I, caught up in the waves of the crowd’s loud singing, had properly come to and put myself back together into a state of normal perception of stimuli!

KASIER CHIEFS set list:
1. Everyday I Love You Less And Less
2. Heat Dies Down
3. Everything Is Average Nowdays
4. Na Na Na Na Naa
5. Ruby
6. I Can Do It Without You
7. Born To Be A Dancer
8. Modern Way
9. Thank You Very Much
10. The Angry Mob
11. Highroyds
12. I Predict A Riot
13. Learnt My Lesson Well
14. Take My Temperature
15. Oh My God

text for Kaiser Chiefs: Aleš Podbrežnik

PLACEBO: 19.45 – 21.00
People had been piling up against the barrier like a real little sea already during Kaiser Chiefs. The festival really came alive with Kaiser Chiefs. In the roughly 30m of space between the mixing desk and the stage, it was boiling. Youth in abundance everywhere. Feverishly awaiting their darlings Placebo, just three lads. The stage was a surprise with its abundance of guitars, more than even the most hardcore guitar nerds, from Steve Howe to Joe Satriani, probably have in their private collections.

Placebo came to stir up trouble just as dusk was slowly falling. Strobes suddenly started cutting venomously, the crowd woke up, and the band was on stage with Infra-Red. Strange that the boys didn’t kick off with the song “Še kikl’co prodala bom…” (“I’ll still sell my skirt…”), since Brian Molko greeted the audience in a skirt – the guy turned up at Radar festival in a brand new stage outfit, and so did the “eel-like” bassist Stefan Olsdal. Shirtless and unbridled, so “topless”, he raises the bass high in the air to greet the audience, and the band is already continuing with Because I Want You. Brian apparently arrived on stage with calm nerves this time, he seemed in good spirits, even addressing the audience in gratitude to the crowd and Zagreb. On top of that the singer had thick-framed dark glasses pulled on, so he looked like a young transsexual Roy Orbison. Placebo just raged this time without any mental barriers. Their stage spontaneity was downright infectious. Brian’s vocal of a neotenic larva (a naughty unmutated boy) held up at the required operating temperature throughout the band’s set. It just doesn’t work without him, and good thing he performed flawlessly!

The guys are truly oddballs. Two techs are on stage the whole time. Each of them stands by a chain of guitars, one on the left, the other on the right. Both tune guitars while the guys play. All the time. The whole show. When a song ends, Molko and Olsdal swap guitars, each with their own tech; for every single track a different guitar lands in their hands. So logical deduction leads to the conclusion that the guys have their guitars tuned lower. Since they build on avalanches of big “groove” from the most elementary two-finger grips in fifths, the sound of course oscillates during the gig between tuned and untuned. The latter only benefits a band like Placebo. The more out of tune they sound, the spectrally fuller and even more dangerously avalanche-like their sound gets.

From the audience, as per standard practice, the guys coaxed out delirious female screaming with minimal effort, which a person not used to going to “mainstream” bands’ shows these days watches (and admires) in sheer amazement. Placebo had a fourth member on stage – a helper. One of their techs took care of electronic sampling the whole time, which built up the concert atmosphere, or “doubled” Brian with a second guitar. On top of that, Olsden likewise alternates between bass and guitar during shows, so the tech was a real little doctor of multi-instrumentalism, since he occasionally had to play bass too.

The Placebo show in Zagreb was extremely successful in every respect. The guys dumped a mass of ultra-heavyweight riffing on the crowd, exactly the kind their fans came for. It’s incredible how much more this massive wall of sound comes through live compared to the sound of their records. The sound was excellent, and the crowd itself contributed at least two-thirds of the share to making the intense atmosphere and chemistry during the Placebo show devilishly magnified. The band felt great in the bosom of the hot-blooded audience and squeezed that much more out of themselves accordingly. A great little party!

PLACEBO set list:
1. Infra-Red
2. Because I Want You
3. Meds
4. Drag
5. Sleeping With Ghosts
6. Song To Say Goodbye
7. Every You Every Me
8. Special Needs
9. One Of A Kind
10. Bionic
11. Special K
12. The Bitter End
13. Running Up That Hill
14. Taste In Men
15. Twenty Years

text for Placebo: Aleš Podbrežnik

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE: 21.30 – 22.45
By the time Placebo played, the all-day concert marathon had already hit a level of psychotic fawning over music idols, so the peak of the day, devoted to old acquaintances from Slovenian stages and at the same time one of the main pillars of modern stoner (though they themselves can neither identify nor want to fully identify with it), was a continuation of the guidelines laid out before. They come from a place called Palm Desert. They come from California. Queens Of The Stone Age are a conglomerate of stoner-stoned energy, expert lyric writing, almost radio-friendly melodies, and an ego that outgrew anonymity. QOTSA were the peak of expectations and the condensing of those into a meditative disconnect from the Here and Now. On stage the techs had unrolled a fresh ton of new stage props without which the show couldn’t have been pulled off. Especially standing out were the disco balls on kilometer-long stands, hanging from some steel and at the same time leather sado-masochistic framework. The prospect of a one-hour set, given that the guys had recently released their sixth album, meant a complete cutting of the less interesting stuff. Every fan had a list of songs in their pocket that they’d like to hear at the show (or at least quietly hoped for some tune closer to their heart than the others …).

At half past nine, a little after, the stage spotlights turn on the stage and leave the crowd in semi-darkness. The show had begun. With the first chords, guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, drummer and ex-Danzig man Joey Castillo, bassist Michael Shuman, keyboardist / guitarist Dean Fertita, and the center of the action – mastermind Josh Homme weave threads of perfect experiment and unrepeatable spontaneity in a way that follows form and frameworks only to satisfy the minimum of recognizability. I’d by no means want to say ‘Good Hit Of Summer’ was unrecognizable and beneath criticism. Not at all! It was about the chemistry of psychedelia and handing the audience the concert bill with an explicit “less is more” attitude. QOTSA are musical experimenters, bohemians, and masters of rhythm and guitar coloring. They’re not exactly Pink Floyd-style complicated, but their purpose for the evening was just dance and fun. “Everybody knows how to dance like … Before I do …Croatia it’s time to dance!” and the rhythm of weaving the evening’s story is far from stoned and devoid of intellect. The song list is carefully thought out. ‘No One Knows’ sounds warped and almost like some freak who, born into chaos, struggles for bare survival and death. Truth be told: the rhythmic slowness and alternative tuning of the track give the feeling that the stars of the evening can allow themselves almost anything and nobody will be able to hold it against them. QOTSA are like the scene itself – a cabaret of hedonism, sado-maso aesthetics, and an eternal experiment with their own endurance and the schizophrenic reconceptualization of already altered concepts. ‘Do It Again’ sounds somewhat closer to album science, but the clusters of sound waves are quite massive and ragged, so it’s not entirely trouble-free to follow the red thread of the already familiar string of words from the super-successful album Songs For The Deaf. Josh Homme absently leads the dance on, and the rest of us are part of the web of a moment in which past and present are interwoven and in which dwells the yearning for an endless future. Soon we get to a moment that Homme marks as the first turning point simply by addressing the audience (some 5000 fans, who were nevertheless filling the gaps on the lawns in front of the stage that had been much emptier before): “This song’s about screwing. You know the thing don’t ya…” and ‘Lost art Of Keeping Secrets’ booms out fully from a pair of side speakers as filler for the void between the right and left hemispheres of the vacuum space of the infinity of the universe.

The intensity of the feeling is somewhat paler than at the show a couple of years ago, when they were defending the red colors and when we saw part of the joint tour of the Homme – Olivieri duo on our stages for the last time. Personally I feel that Songs For The Deaf was followed by a period of constant decline and loss of their own identity, which QOTSA had to face already while recording Lullabies To Paralyze. Despite that, one of the record’s more visible pearls is the song ‘Burn The Witch’, which the Californian stoners serve us very soon after the opening feeling-out of the crowd’s pulse. Homme says in broken Croatian “Volim vas!” and the crowd’s eating out of his hand. To balance out any possible shock to the crowd from listening to new material – ‘Turning On Screw’ – they immediately add a pinch of rustic from the second-to-last record. In fact they reserve the middle of the show for a duel between the latest and second-latest records, as after ‘Little Sister’ they announce a stampede of distorted destructiveness of everything we’ve associated with the term QOTSA in the past. ‘Battery Acid’ sounds like a reorganization of perfect chaos into a melody that you can conditionally even dance to. The unyielding hard grip of the new stuff is undoubtedly also ‘Misfit Love’, ‘3’s & 7’s’ or ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’, which combine Van Leeuwen’s coloring, Homme’s psychosis and musical genius, and the hard cohesive whole of the rhythm section that convinces you with three chords and massive drum cementing that repetitiveness can be perfectly logical. Pretty soon it becomes clear that the era of old catchiness and playing for the easy favor of the crowd is, at first glance, definitively over. QOTSA claim the right to artistry. Still, it’s clear they can’t live entirely and only off the new fruits of studio rambling, so for the big finale they allow themselves a trip to their version of Metallica’s black album: to Songs For The Deaf. They stretch out ‘A Song for the Deaf’ and allow themselves some rhythmic play with segments, which earns approval and simultaneous clapping from the crowd. Goal achieved! The crowd gave itself over to dancing and forgot all the unnecessary junk of the hellish day, which was slowly behind us. QOTSA were pleased with the success and Homme kept repeating his affection for our parts again and again, but the time to say goodbye had to slowly come. “This song is a little love letter to you guys! We love you!” was the overture, followed by ‘Go With The Flow’, after which the Queens slowly but finally left the stage.

The kitschy galaxies of multicolored lights were replaced by white floodlights, and the saga of one of this summer’s gigs could begin to be written. The fields in front of the stage were strewn with a blanket of festival devastation, cups, a slightly smaller pile of trash than usual, and with visitors who, in a more or less absent state, contentedly and delightedly sought their way to the exits to freedom. As for me, after the phenomenal show the comparison of the two QOTSA gigs kept presenting itself, between which we can draw parallels, but any weighing is completely impossible. These were two separate segments in the coordinates of quadrants of space and time. Two separate entities and two separate group organisms. Limbs were changing and with them the functionality, purpose, and overall image. Still, I doubt there were many who’d say the show wasn’t worth the money paid, since for the asked sum we got far more than we could or should have expected. In this respect Radar Festival was a complete success, and a smaller turnout could spell tragedy for everyone hoping for a repeat next year. But no worries: it’s whispered they intend to expand the festival next year and offer you, instead of a one-day picnic, a full two-day camp-out …

Setlist

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE PLACEBO KAISER CHIEFS HOWLING BELLS OVERFLOW ANAVRIN

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