Location: Seebronn (Rottenburg am Neckar) / Festplatz / Germany
Date: Sunday, July 31, 2016
The last day had arrived, day three of the 11th Rock of Ages festival. It was Sunday, and it kicked off in truly miserable fashion. The heavens opened in the morning hours. And it poured. And poured. All around Seebronn too, in the villages of Hailfingen, Ergenzingen, Wolfenhausen, Bondorf, and the larger town of Rottenburg Am Neckar. Proper downpours, right up until one in the afternoon. Then the weather settled down, the clouds slowly but steadily burned off, and sunbeams started cutting through the scattered remains. Unbelievable luck with the weather, three days in a row now. In other words, not too hot and not too cold.
The last day also got going in the afternoon, at half past three. Five acts were on the bill. Yet only four actually played. The show by the day’s headliner, eighties pop icon Kim Wilde, was scrapped. Right after Fargo’s set, festival boss Horst walked onto the stage and announced that, because of an accident at Stuttgart airport, the airport had been shut down. They tried to rebook the flight for the plane that was supposed to bring Kim Wilde and her backing band to Rock Of Ages, but luck wasn’t on their side, so the show had to be canceled. After UFO, that’s the second cancellation at this year’s Rock Of Ages festival!
Cue a lot of grumbling, griping and even some whistling. That left Fargo, Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung (a sort of “Austrian version of, roughly speaking, Slovenia’s Agropop”), the legendary British rock heavyweights Slade, and after them the considerably more sophisticated Barclay James Harvest (the version of the band led by bassist Les Holroyd).
Before the unhappy announcement about Kim Wilde, the third day was opened by hard rock veterans from Hanover, Germany’s Fargo, led by the no less legendary bassist Peter Knorn, also known for his work with the heavy metallers Victory. Fargo’s set was a real exclusive at this year’s festival, since it was in fact the band’s only show in ages. Knorn is now joined in the lineup by guitarist and singer Peter Ladwig, lead guitarist Arndt Shultz and drummer Nikolas Fritz. The band, which in its golden age opened shows for AC/DC, Mother’s Finest and The Small Faces among others, ran through its classic material, covering the albums released between 1979 and 1982. Just four albums in all. But that’s not the yardstick. The songs are. Brilliantly cooked-up compositions with just the right balance of rock punch and melodic catchiness, crowned with incredibly singable, listenable choruses. Energy kneaded from true old-school hard rock dough that grabs you in a heartbeat. Lucifer’s Friend had already brought a similarly phenomenal opening dose of rock’n’roll to the festival grounds the day before. An excellent set from a legendary lineup that even had Matthias Jabs on guitar for a short while before he joined The Scorpions. Considering how rarely the band plays live, it was an extremely tight, polished and well-tuned show!
Next up were Austria’s Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung, or EAV for short. Jesters of rock’n’roll, a blend of wildly intelligent satire and parody of modern life. Founded way back in 1977, the band is a sextet powered by the driving force and creator of boundless ideas, bubbling over with rich imagination, singer and actor Klaus Eberhartinger, along with guitarists Thomas Spitzer and Kurt Keinrath, keyboardist Franz Kreimer, dark-skinned bassist Alvis Reid and drummer Aaron Thier. All eyes were on Klaus Eberhartinger’s theater, as he kept changing costumes throughout the show into the central figures that particular songs in the repertoire were dedicated to. Not just the razor-sharp lyrics but the construction of the songs themselves, where EAV fold pop, funk, cabaret music and tango into the rock tradition, and add Latin rhythms or alpine polka where needed. And when they “make fun” of the Italians (Heissse Nacht in Palermo), a relaxed breeze of Mediterranean melos gets thrown in too. In short: comedy without brakes. Even between songs Klaus didn’t let the crowd catch its breath, rattling off tongue-twisting humoresques like a fast-talking doctor of language and firing them out unbridled, with no end in sight. No other act at the whole festival got this much hearty laughter out of the crowd. Laughing until the tears came and the cramps hit. Until it hurt. The lyrics, of course, were entirely in German. The band delivered the obligatory humoresques from its repertoire, including Ba-Ba-Banküberfall, Märchenprinz, Heiße Nächte (in Palermo), Fata Morgana, Küss die Hand, schöne Frau, An der Copacabana, Samurai, Was ist Loss, Geld Oder Leben, Burli,… To enjoy an EAV show you have to know German, otherwise you can get bored in a heartbeat.
Slade are one of the few legendary rock bands still active whose pioneering work inspired the likes of The Ramones, Kiss, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister and so on, and the RockLine crew had never managed to catch them on a European stage in the portal’s ten years of existence. So the interest in their set was all the greater. Of the original members, the quartet today still features the famously “pint-sized” guitarist Dave Hill and the (now) toothless drummer Don Powell, while the bass (and violin) and additional vocals spot is filled by John Berry, and the lead vocals and rhythm guitar by Mal McNulty. The band has played in this lineup since 2005. There hasn’t been any original material since the second half of the eighties, since the main idea men are long gone from the band: retired original members Noddy Holder and Jim Lea. Whatever. The band hit the nostalgia notes with an excellent show, cleverly making use of the giant, spacious stage (catwalk included). The stage was especially full of Dave Hill, who ran wildly from one end to the other all night, spent loads of time at the front of the catwalk, where he locked the crowd in tight, and the crowd responded by joining in with the band throughout the show. Why wouldn’t they, with songs like (opener) Gudbuy T’Jane in your pocket, then Lock Up Your Daughters, Look Wot You Dun, Everyday, Cuz I Love You, My Baby Left Me, Far Far Away, Run Runaway, Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Get Down And Get With It, and in the very finale the eagerly awaited My Oh My followed by Cum On Feel the Noize. A mad concert roulette of Slade classics and hits. And the band plays great. Dave Hill, probably one of the smallest guitarists on the planet, if not in the galaxy, makes use of the little platform he climbs onto. On it he shifts from his left foot to his right, his stage trademark. There are platforms in the middle and on the far left too. Seeing Slade on stage today, it immediately becomes clear why they’re counted among the bands that drastically shaped the later development of glam rock and glam metal. They still squeeze out heavy quanta of unexpected rock’n’roll energy and playing power, adorned with brilliantly tight chemistry. Rock of Ages turned flint-hard and electrified, and the voltage of Slade’s eruptive, debauched rock’n’roll fury never let up. The show flipped in an instant. Hill and the crew don’t show their age one bit, or their longevity. You can still feel that youthful fire and the authentic charm of unbridled rock magic in Slade today!
With Kim Wilde’s show canceled, the headliner role quietly passed to Barclay James Harvest feat. Les Holroyd. The band was asked to extend its set, but we got no more than an extra five minutes of playing. The crew preferred to drag their feet and stretch out the breaks between acts, which made the waiting really painful. Right when he walked onto the stage, Les Holroyd also expressed the band’s sympathy to the crowd over Kim Wilde’s cancellation. The Barclay James Harvest feat. Les Holroyd set brought an act to the stage that differs by a mile in style from everything we’d enjoyed at the festival up to that evening. BJH have an artistic sophistication. They carry elements of symphonic as well as progressive rock. So they’re closer to fans of prog rock, bands like Pink Floyd, Camel, Genesis, and the later wave of neo-prog bands, than to those looking for straight-up hard rock sharpness. And of those there were, of course, a decisive surplus at the festival, so the BJH feat. Les Holroyd show simply couldn’t deliver the final crescendo to the festival’s progression. It would have been better if BJH feat. Les Holroyd and Slade had swapped roles, that is, slots on the bill. Consequently it wasn’t hard to notice a real drop-off in the crowd, which steadily streamed out of the festival grounds during the BJH feat. Les Holroyd set. Whatever. Those who knew how to get into it were rewarded. BJH are incredibly melancholic in the shapes of their lead melodies, while effortlessly conjuring up a veil of mystique. Still, the Les Holroyd-led version of BJH is a bit more “rock-edged” than the version led by Holroyd’s former BJH buddy John Lees. The Les Holroyd version also plays mostly the band’s later material. So it was no surprise when the band picked the “notorious” and, to this day, probably best-known song of BJH’s entire career, Mockingbird, as its second number.
It was also interesting that the whole band was tuned quieter than the acts that had already been on the festival stage that day. The structure of the sound called for absolute balance, but the lead guitar drew the short straw, staying too quiet in the mix even in the middle instrumental passages that it filled with solos. Those solos followed an incredible filigree subtlety, in the vein of masters of guitar tone control like Andy Latimer (Camel) or David Gilmour (Pink Floyd). That made the guitar’s lack of audibility during the show all the more annoying. Given that Les Holroyd’s thin, quiet, even slightly shy (and shrill) voice has a touch of mature wear and tear, the vocal blending into harmonized melodies, formed by four of the five members of the quintet, was all the more welcome. In this BJH are absolute masters, and that element definitely delighted in full during the show.
The band opened with Who Do We Think We Are?, continued with the already mentioned Mockingbird, followed by: Time of Our Lives, Sip the Wine, Victims of Circumstance, Ring of Changes, Crazy City, the acoustic Poor Boy Blues, Fly Away, That Was Then… This Is Now, Love On the Line, Hymn,Tonight’s Gonna be the Night, Life is for Living.
A very nice show full of artistic hair-splitting, and yet tuned a bit too quiet. So the festival’s close was left without the final high point that all the festivalgoers more than deserved. Just as is customary at the sister Bang Your Head!!! festival, Horst came back out to close Rock Of Ages, this time with his little daughter, and with a few encouraging words of thanks he greeted the crowd one last time. The festival then wrapped up with a fantastic fireworks display, and “the curtain finally fell”. Rock of Ages, see you again next year! Let’s hope the 2017 edition passes without any acts canceling.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
