Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Seebronn (Rottenburg am Neckar) / Festplatz / Germany
Concert date: July 31, 2016
Attendance: 6,000
Ticket price: €109.00 (three-day ticket, presale) / €135.00 (on the day of the festival)
The last day, day three of the 11th Rock of Ages festival, had arrived. It was Sunday, and it started out properly miserable. It poured in the morning hours. And poured. And poured. All around Seebronn too, in the villages of Hailfingen, Ergenzingen, Wolfenhausen, Bondorf and the bigger town of Rottenburg Am Neckar. These were serious downpours, lasting until one in the afternoon. Then the weather settled down, the cloud cover slowly but steadily thinned out, and sunbeams breaking through the scattered clouds took its place. Unbelievable luck with the weather, three days in a row now. Not too hot and not too cold.
The last day also started with the program in the afternoon, at 3:30 to be exact. Five acts were on the bill. And yet only four played. The show by the day-three headliner, eighties pop icon Kim Wilde, was canceled. Right after Fargo’s set, festival boss Horst walked on stage and announced that Stuttgart Airport was closed because of an accident. Even though they tried to rebook the flight for the plane that was supposed to bring Kim Wilde and her backing band to Rock Of Ages, luck wasn’t on their side and the show had to be called off. After UFO, that’s the second cancellation at this year’s Rock Of Ages festival!
Quite a bit of grumbling, griping and even whistling rained down. So that left Fargo, Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung (sort of an “Austrian version of, let’s say, the Slovenian Agropop, roughly speaking”), 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).
Even before the unfortunate announcement about Kim Wilde, day three had been 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 heavy metallers Victory. Fargo’s appearance was an exclusive for this year’s festival, as it was actually the band’s only show in a long time. Alongside Knorn, the current lineup has guitarist and singer Peter Ladwig, lead guitarist Arndt Shultz and drummer Nikolas Fritz. A band that in its golden age opened shows for AC/DC, Mother’s Finest and The Small Faces, they played their classic material from the albums released between 1979 and 1982. Just four albums in all. But that’s not the yardstick. The material is. Wonderfully tight compositions with just the right balance of rock punch and melodic catchiness, crowned with incredibly singable, memorable choruses. Energy kneaded out of true old-school hard rock dough that grabs you instantly. Lucifer’s Friend had brought a similarly phenomenal opening dose of rock’n’roll to the festival grounds the day before. An excellent show by a legendary band, in which even Matthias Jabs briefly played guitar before joining The Scorpions. Considering how rarely the band plays live, it was an extremely compact, polished and well-tuned performance!
Next up on stage were Austria’s Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung, or EAV for short. Jesters of rock’n’roll, a mix of incredibly intelligent satire and parody of modern life. Founded way back in 1977, the band is a sextet driven by the engine and creator of boundless ideas, with a bubbling, lush imagination, singer and actor Klaus Eberhartinger, along with guitarists Thomas Spitzer and Kurt Keinrath, keyboardist Franz Kreimer, black 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 of the repertoire are dedicated to. Not only the lucid lyrics but also the construction of the songs themselves, where EAV weave genre springboards of pop, funk, cabaret music and tango into the rock tradition, and where needed shoe the songs with Latin rhythms and alpine polka, and when they “make fun” of the Italians (Heissse Nacht in Palermo) they add a nice, easygoing whiff of Mediterranean melos. In short: comedy without brakes. Even between songs Klaus didn’t let the audience catch its breath, spinning his tongue like a tongue-twister doctor and firing off an unrestrained stream of humoresques that seemed to have no end. Surely no other act at the whole festival pulled this much hearty laughter out of the crowd. Laughing until you cry and cramp up. Until it hurts. The lyrics were, of course, entirely in German. The band played 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 watch an EAV show you absolutely need to understand German, otherwise you can get bored in no time.
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 in the ten-year history of the portal, the RockLine crew had never managed to catch them on a European stage until this day. So the interest in the show was all the greater. Of the original members, the quartet today still features the famous “pint-sized man” and guitarist Dave Hill and (these days) toothless drummer Don Powell, while the bassist (and violinist) and additional vocalist slot is filled by John Berry, and the lead vocals and rhythm guitar by Mal McNulty. The band has been running in this lineup since 2005. There’s been no original material since the second half of the eighties, since the main idea men, the retired members of the original Slade lineup Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, left the band long ago. Whatever. The band hit the nostalgia notes with an excellent show, skillfully 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, spent plenty of time at the front of the catwalk, where he tightly bonded with the crowd, who sang along with the band brilliantly all show long. And why wouldn’t they, when you’ve got songs like (the opening) Gudbuy T’Jane, 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 crazy concert roulette of Slade classics and hits. And the band plays great. Dave Hill, probably one of the smallest guitarists on the whole planet, if not the galaxy, uses a small platform he climbs onto. On it he shifts from his left foot to his right, his stage trademark. There are platforms set up in the middle and at the far left too. When you see Slade on stage today, it’s immediately clear why they’re considered a band that drastically shaped the development of later glam rock and glam metal. They still squeeze out heavy quanta of unsuspected rock’n’roll energy and performing power, adorned with the brilliance of a tight, well-oiled machine. Rock of Ages turned flint-hard and electrified, and the voltage of eruptive, debauchery-filled rock’n’roll fury never let up. The show turned on a dime. Hill and the crew show no sign of age or longevity wearing them down. You can still feel that youthful glow and genuine charm of untamed rock magic in today’s Slade!
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 five extra minutes of playing. The crew preferred to drag things out and stretch the breaks between acts. That made the waiting really painful. At the same time, Les Holroyd expressed the band’s sympathy to the audience over Kim Wilde’s cancellation right from the start, as he came on stage. Barclay James Harvest feat. Les Holroyd 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 progressive rock, like Pink Floyd, Camel, Genesis and the later wave of neo-prog bands, than to those looking for direct hard rock bite. And those were definitely in the overwhelming majority at the festival, so the BJH feat. Les Holroyd show couldn’t possibly deliver the final climax of the festival. It would have been better to swap the roles, or rather the slots, of BJH feat. Les Holroyd and Slade on the bill. Consequently, it was easy to notice a serious drop-off in the crowd, which steadily kept leaving the festival grounds during BJH feat. Les Holroyd. Anyway, whoever knew how to get into it was rewarded. BJH are incredibly melancholic in the shapes of their lead melodies, while effortlessly weaving a veil of mysticism. Still, the BJH version led by Les Holroyd is a bit more “rock-spiked” than the version led by Holroyd’s former BJH buddy John Lees. The Les Holroyd version of BJH also plays mostly the band’s later material. So it was hardly a surprise when the band picked the “notorious” and to this day probably best-known song of the whole BJH career, Mockingbird, as its second number.
It was also interesting that the whole band was tuned quietly compared to the acts that had already hit 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’s why the guitar being too low in the mix during the show was all the more annoying. Given that Les Holroyd’s thin, quiet, even slightly shy (and shrill) voice has a bit of worn-down maturity to it, the harmonized vocal lines formed by four of the quintet’s five members were all the more welcome. BJH are absolute masters at this, and that element was definitely a joy 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, but tuned a bit too quietly. So the festival’s closing stretch was left without the final peak that all the festivalgoers more than deserved. As is customary at the sister festival Bang Your Head!!!, Horst once again took the stage at the close of Rock Of Ages, this time too with his little daughter, and with a few encouraging words of thanks he greeted the audience 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 goes by without any canceled acts.
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