Location: Munich (Germany), Babylon
Concert date: 19.01.2003
Attendance: 1000
Ticket price: 25,50€
At 20:00 Wolf hit the stage. Swedes. Worshippers of NWOBHM in the old Anglo-Saxon school of Iron Maiden. The image alone says it all: skin-tight faded jeans, high or mid-high white sneakers and leather. And an enviable sound. Extremely good sound for an opening act. The triple-voice harmonies and the solos were clearly audible. The band was tight and wildly playful on stage. The guys were flying from one end of the stage to the other and pulling off real acrobatics. A completely relaxed performance. And mind you, no double bass pedal on the drums, which is a real rarity these days. The two Gibson “Flyin’ V” guitars coaxed out a tone that (along with the compositions themselves) was truly the purest NWOBHM. Bravo, guys!
Next up were Evidence One. What can you say about such a trainwreck. The guitarist marched out first. Guitar strapped on all neat and “buttoned up”, hoisted up jazzer-style, the dude endlessly in love with himself in leather pointy boots and a brown fringed leather jacket. In short, “some kind of strapped-up dude”! I thought: “Whoa, look at him, this one’s gonna shred like Malmsteen!” The five of them delivered a below-average show of some kind of mid-tempo, glam-flavored riffing with a full dose of unbearable sappiness. The singer, with his cowboy hat and slicked-back hair, was utterly tasteless with all his posing and puffing himself up. A real “pussy”! In the lower registers his vocals visibly “struggled”. Still, he screeched in an enviable way, although his voice had no recognizable character. The aforementioned guitarist stayed in a terrible cramp the whole time. He played scared and insecure! During the set he kept swinging at the bassist (don’t know what he didn’t like), venting his personal frustrations on stage. In short, a forced and unconvincing performance all the way through. It would have been better if Evidence One hadn’t been there at all, or if they had opened the show instead of Wolf.
And then the third band, which stands out for its real professionalism. In their half-hour set Nocturnal Rites made it clear to me what a strong headliner they could be. The drummer put on headphones. He played to a click track. Of course, Nocturnal Rites are fast as the devil himself. The triple-voice harmonies and melodic transitions were picked out tight as lightning. And what that little black-haired guitarist was doing with his Ibanez! Into it and aggressive, truly energetic! The real Swedish school, micron-precise at all that hellish speed, where you can’t even see the fingers of the left hand. Completely tight, without a single mistake, relaxed. I was especially impressed by the backing vocals, which sounded on stage just like on the studio record and kept great company to Johnny’s excellent performance on vocals. The guys played mostly material from their angriest record, Afterlife.
While the roadies “hurried” with the stage setup, we got to enjoy Samson and songs from the legendary album Don’t Get Mad Get Even, which fit the whole venue extremely well.
At 21:45 fog filled the stage and out of it stomped the legendary dinosaurs. “Good Evening!” “Fill your heads with heavy metal thunder!” was how Peter Rodney (Biff) Byford explained the situation. Saxon! Legends. The sound phenomenal, as always. Biff revealed the purpose of the tour: they’d be playing truly legendary classics from their iron repertoire, which graces “Heavy Metal Thunder”, released last fall, where the classics are played in a new outfit. To warm up they started with early-period rock ‘n’ roll: “Here comes the motor fuckin’ cycle man!” (motor-fucking-cycle-man) came right after the opening rager “Heavy Metal Thunder”. Shussssss!!! After the third song, “Still Fit to Boogie”, they calmed the place down: “This song was written back in 1969 and is called The Court Of Crimson King!” (a cover of King Crimson). On stage the band came across as tight as an indestructible fortress and a well-oiled machine, a real “perpetuum mobile”. What especially fired me up, and where I completely lost it, was the surprise of the night. “This song we haven’t played for a long time, I even can’t remember it’s name!” “Will you help me?” The crowd tried a few times to guess what it could be, but never got it! “Ride Like A Wind!” It’s a cover of The Commodores, sure, but if you know Saxon’s version of this track from the album Destiny and then get to experience it live… man, dreams came true!
Now, let’s look at the other side of the coin too. After “Ride Like A Wind” the vibe of Saxon’s stage show faded. Let’s be honest, the band came across as awfully bored on stage. This goes especially for both guitarists, who over a two-and-a-half-hour set took only a few steps left and right of their home positions. Biff also sang the verses in a “chopped-off” way, how to explain that? He didn’t shape the verse endings nicely into a melody, but often just cut the line off at the end instead of making the effort to hold onto the thread and the vocal melody through the verses, the way he does on the studio records. And so, partly thanks to Biff, Saxon lost a bit of dynamite on stage. So this wasn’t what I expected, given their show in Vienna on 13.11.2001. In “Song Of Evil” Biff showed all his greatness in fantastic screams (but only a flash), and there Saxon also showed a fine dose of anger and aggression, as well as in the rare live performance of “Cut Out The Disease”. Paul Quinn stared blankly into space, practically with his eyes shut through the whole concert. He played the necessary solos like a robot and hid behind the riffing again as soon as he could. Whenever Biff praised the audience in the pauses between songs, Paul cynically stretched out his arms and clapped for the crowd: “Fantastic!” That gesture was far too obviously acted. And then you get the feeling someone is taking you for a fool. Judging by the repertoire, this time Quinn played most of the solos (precisely and with routine), while on the previous (Killing Ground) tour Scarratt was way ahead on solos. This time they swapped roles. The only one showing a bit of life was Nibbs Carter on bass, and Fritz Randow on drums didn’t go all out either, and his solo spot was far behind the one from that November 2001 show in Vienna. In short, the performance wasn’t lived-in, it was pure routine. Or in other words: “Let’s go around a bit and earn some cash!” I’d rather have paid 10 euros more for the ticket and had them really “go for it” than get this formality and obligation from the band, which you could sense, especially as the concert tipped into its closing stretch.
Biff addresses the crowd: “Say hello to eagle!” During “Eagle Has Landed” the curtain dropped and the eagle appeared. But this wasn’t the eagle that Saxon used to fill stadiums with in the first half of the eighties, but a kind of mini pocket eaglet. Its head was flattened from the side, and the eyes and beak were impossible to make out in that heap of twisted sheet metal. So, well, the wings and little talons testified to some kind of birdy presence on stage. The whole thing looked more like a floodlight at a football stadium. Still, tremendously fun. The band closed a really long set with “Denim And Leather”, whose beat was accompanied by the lights on the eagle flicking on and off in tune.
The crowd chanted “Saxon, Saxon!” fervently the whole time. And the first encore consisted of no fewer than four songs. After a short Nibbs solo spot, whose message I can’t explain to you because it fell into complete disharmony, the get-together with the band continued. The second encore consisted of one song. First Doug came out on stage alone and juggled out a solo that smoothly turned into “Wheels Of Steel”. The band wrapped up the show at 00:15. Saxon included songs from almost all of their official studio albums in the set list (only Forever Free was overlooked). The set list was fantastic, but I still missed a bit more brain-rattling. Something faster, say “Baptism Of Fire”. Anyway, the tightness is unique, the band members know each other “inside out”. The concert was far from something I’d call bad, but a bitter aftertaste remained.
Setlist
Nocturnal Rites:
01. Afterlife
02. The Sinners Cross
03. The Iron Force
04. Shadowland
05. Wake Up Dead
06. The Sign
07. Eyes Of The Dead
08. When Fire Comes to Ice
—encore—
The King’s Command
Saxon:
01. Heavy Metal Thunder
02. Motorcycle Man
03. Still Fit To Boogie
04. The Court Of Crimson King
05. Ride Like A Wind
06. Dogs Of War
07. Requiem (We Will Remember)
08. Cut Out The Disease
09. Broken Heroes
10. Song Of Evil
11. Battle Cry
12. Drum Solo (transition into the motif from the song Warrior and closing with Battle Cry)
13. 20.000 Feet
14. The Eagle Has Landed
15. 747 (Strangers In The Night)
16. Crusader
17. Denim And Leather
—first encore—
18. Strong Arm Of The Law
19. Solid Ball Of Rock
20. Princess Of The Night
21. Dallas 1 PM
—second encore—
22. Wheels Of Steel
