Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Urban Bolta
Location: Seebronn / Baden-Württemberg / Germany
Concert date: 27.07.2012
Attendance: 10,000
Ticket price: 75€ (two-day ticket)
End of July rolled around, and with it came a new edition of the Rock of Ages festival, which has been bringing together mostly fans of classic-flavored rock (and, to a modest extent, heavy metal too) since 2006. The two-day event takes place on the edge of the little town of Seebronn in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, about 50 kilometers south of Stuttgart or, to give you a better picture, roughly 700 kilometers of driving from Ljubljana. Seebronn is surrounded by endless fields of wheat and corn, so the feeling of being a guest in a typical southern German landscape is incredibly strong.
The seventh edition of the event brought some sour weather with it (just like last year), but the relatively strong lineup still made sure the festival was sold out, according to the organizer. Thanks to the good organization and friendly staff, the festival has every chance of expanding in the future into a three-day event – if not in terms of space, then at least in terms of time. The laid-back program on a single stage is probably the main reason potential visitors from farther away skip it. The sister festival Bang Your Head!!!, run by the same crew, offers not just a second stage but a warm-up day too, so the tally of bands you get to see ends up being incomparably more fruitful. Among Rock of Ages visitors it’s almost impossible to hear a foreign language, as the festival is attended almost exclusively by rock fans from the near and middle-distance surroundings.
Despite the early start, Rockline’s trip, somewhere near Augsburg and Stuttgart in the middle of Friday, once again ran into endless traffic jams, probably typical for any weekend. The reason for the standstill is the widening of the motorway between those two cities from two lanes to three, and all we can do is hope the workers will have finished it by the next edition of the festival.
We set up in the camping area just as the festival was being opened by THE SAILER BROS. BAND, winners of yet another contest that drew over 100 young bands. After them, FISCHER-Z took the stage, a British band from the late seventies and one of the most exclusive names on the festival bill, since they’re extremely hard to catch live on Central European stages. Despite constantly putting out new albums, John Watts and company haven’t managed to break through in the media for a long time, so their work is doomed to play out away from the spotlight of the big headlines. Their new wave-flavored, school-hour-long set was seasoned with a hefty dose of punk arrogance, yet still within a sound that’s acceptable for rock. Despite a rather passive performance, Fischer-Z were a pleasant refreshment among the acts, thanks to the organizers’ lush imagination.
Next, at seven in the evening, FISH stepped onto the stage, the former member of neo-prog rockers Marillion, and since leaving the band in 1988 a successful solo musician with an eventful solo career that lives up to his reputation as an excellent musician. This year is a quieter one for Fish when it comes to concerts, so his appearance at the festival was obviously the fruit of the organizers’ great desire to finally get the British musician to play in their midst. First the band of Fish’s backing musicians spread out across the stage, and then Fish himself emerged from behind the backstage curtain to the crowd’s delight, and from the very start reminded everyone with his playful sign language why he’s considered an excellent stage performer. During the Marillion classic She Chameleon he walked all the way to the end of the extended stage reaching out into the crowd, stretched his hands toward the audience and, while singing the line »I saw the lizard, touch«, made physical contact with the front rows by touching them. His fittingly theatrical stage show successfully tamed the size of a stage on which many performers simply get lost. Fish, who is well past 50 now, no longer hits the higher notes vocally, but he cleverly hid that with a technique of interpreting the songs with a slight departure from the originals, and his backing musicians helped him out with excellent backing vocals. The hour-long set, mostly tinted with shades of his solo career, was closed by the Scot, a giant of a man physically, with yet another Marillion masterpiece, Fugazi, the title track of the album of the same name from 1984.
At half past eight the stage went to BOB GELDOF, a man whose life path and musical career are completely one of a kind compared to those who came before him on stage. Mention Geldof’s name and most people think of 1985 and his organizing of the high-profile charity project Live Aid, in which the biggest music stars raised money for Africa through simultaneous concerts in London and New York. But Bob Geldof is something more than just an Irishman with a good heart: he’s a musician who started his career as part of the new wave movement with The Boomtown Rats, and in the mid-eighties went solo, the latest fruit of which is last year’s album »How To Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell«.
The likable musician with a noble title (which Queen Elizabeth II bestowed on him way back in 1986) won approval with his positive presence and message from the very first second of the set, and it only grew as the show went on. Geldof’s music is mostly acoustic in nature, with the sound filled out by a colorful palette of instruments from his backing musicians: violin, keyboards, harmonica, piano. Although Geldof was never known as an extraordinary vocalist, in Seebronn he rescued his average voice with remarkable control and a lively delivery, laying his words over a »Dire Straits-style« acoustic instrumental backdrop. And not only that! His words clung to the listeners like bees to honey, so with his charismatic personality it wasn’t hard for him to win over a crowd that was pretty much eating out of his hand. The setlist was still heavily weighted toward songs from Geldof’s current album, though he also dipped into »The Vegetarians of Love« (1990) and »Sex, Age, Death« (2001), and the cherry on top of the cake was, as expected, provided by The Boomtown Rats covers Rap Trap and I Don’t Like Mondays. The man who has dedicated his life to charity managed to touch the essence of musical expression, and his positive message of likable manners (and hippie thinking) echoed across the wheat fields long after the set was over.
The first day’s headliners were EUROPE, one of the most successful European hard rock outfits of the eighties, who won worldwide fame with extraordinary radio hits, mostly of the gentler variety. In the spring the Swedes released the album »Bag of Bones« (review here), presenting themselves in a completely new light of retro sound, for which producer Kevin Shirley is primarily to thank, having managed to squeeze even a hint of blues out of their sound, which would have been almost blasphemous for their melodic albums of the second half of the eighties! And that’s where the problem arises. Europe are trying to shake off the “eighties band” label at every step, something frontman Joey Tempest stresses at length in interviews, and in doing so they’ve managed to split their fans into two contradictory camps. It was along that thin line between the two poles, “old” and “new”, that this show in Germany played out.
Europe opened by pulling new tracks out of their sleeve one after another. Riches To Rags, Not Supposed to Sing the Blues and Firebox came across in a heavy metal light, as Norum’s guitar was cranked to the point of exhaustion and showed no sign of the compromise AOR collaboration with keyboards, the recipe that made Europe famous long ago. Tempest’s first address to the crowd followed, in which he called the gathered folks children of the corn (Children of the corn), after the Stephen King story, and after the address came a jump to 1988 and the hit Superstitious, before Europe returned to the tunes of the newer batch.
The impossible is possible! Throughout the entire middle part of the show, Europe played songs from their last two albums, with the focus on »Last Look At Eden« (2009) just as strong as on »Bag of Bones«, which shows the Swedes’ hundred percent faith in their own artistic credibility these days, even though judging by the fans’ reaction, their confidence rests on shaky foundations. Europe have their stage show polished to the last detail, and the bulk of the performance naturally rested on the shoulders of the excellent Joey Tempest! The frontman doesn’t hide his love for David Coverdale’s moves, because in the style of the original Whitesnake voice he played with the mic stand the whole time, turning what most frontmen find an annoying prop to the advantage of his sex appeal. Despite his adrenaline-fueled stage stunts, he handled his vocal duties decently, and during the instrumental parts he left the spotlight to the fingers of guitarist John Norum, who also lived up to the band’s name in the shoes of Kee Marcello in the song Let The Good Times Rock. Europe closed the show in the encore with the most anticipated song of the evening, The Final Countdown, and the countdown to the start of tomorrow’s concerts could begin… Europe proved that their existence is independent of nostalgic flirting with the eighties, though on the other hand it was precisely that factor, combined with an overly harsh sound from the mixing desk, that caused mixed reactions among the crowd. How the beloved Swedes will respond to this in the medium or long term, the future will show.
Although each of them comes from a completely different philosophy of rock, every one of the evening’s main acts managed to carry the audience into a trance that only regulars at music events know and that is impossible to describe in simple words, so by the end of the first day I knew that the decision to head to faraway Seebronn had paid off the moment I heard the first notes from the speakers of the Rock of Ages festival.
Setlist
EUROPE:
1. Riches to Rags
2. Not Supposed to Sing the Blues
3. Firebox
4. Superstitious
5. Scream of Anger
6. No Stone Unturned
7. Demon Head
8. New Love in Town
9. Seventh Sign
10. Love is Not the Enemy
11. Girl From Lebanon
12. Carrie
13. Let the Good Times Rock
14. The Beast
15. Rock the Night
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16. Last Look at Eden
17. The Final Countdown
Photo gallery
