Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Roncade (Treviso) / New Age / Italy
Concert date: 23.05.2011
Attendance: 350
Ticket price: €30.00
Another year has rolled around and with it a new tour. Saxon, the legendary British heavy metal diehards, are always on the prowl. Year after year they stay true to the rock’n’roll tradition and hit the road on new tours, so even in the autumn of their career they still keep the fans happy on a regular basis. After a good two years they’ll be stopping in Ljubljana again, which we can count as a great honor. But before Šiška starts shaking, Rockline hit the road to Treviso, to the well-known local venue New Age, so the days until the heavy metal party at Kino Šiška wouldn’t drag on quite so long.
Opening the shows on the current Saxon tour are young Dutchmen Vanderbuyst. They kicked off in a half-empty club, which didn’t bother them much. The Dutch trio bets on the hard/heavy tradition of music from the turn of the seventies into the eighties, so we’re dealing with yet another reviver of the good old NWOBHM movement. They opened with the UFO classic Rock Bottom and, with a dose of free-flowing musical ideas, almost jamming, stretched it to twice the length of the original. Plain rocker talk doesn’t exactly lift these youngsters into the top tier of musical talent, but Vanderbuyst win people over with a wholehearted approach and sincere faith in heavy rock. They often work “Heep-style” backing vocals into the choruses, which give a slightly melodic touch to the band’s relatively raw and beefy sound. Vanderbuyst presented their self-titled debut, released last year (review here), and aced the thankless job of being the first band of the night.
Next up on stage were Crimson Of Passion, but most of our four-man Slovenian delegation to Treviso had slipped out to the car for a sip of water, and we got back just as the band was leaving the stage. Never mind, we’ve got a resit in Šiška. Slowly the time for the Saxon assault crept closer, and the club, surprisingly, never filled up completely, so only a few hundred heads watched the show. The madhouse from the W.A.S.P. gig a few months ago didn’t repeat itself. But note, there’s an important difference between the two shows. W.A.S.P. played the club at the end of October, when the weather was far friendlier because winter was approaching, compared to these conditions. It was already hot as hell in the club during the support acts, which later in the evening turned into a nuisance, mainly because it wore the Saxon guys out so quickly.
Saxon will release their nineteenth album “Call to Arms” on June 3, and they’re already working three or four new tracks into the shows of the current tour. Let me remind you that the album was originally supposed to come out the day before the Treviso gig, but it was pushed back, which meant that for most people there Saxon’s newest creations were still a mystery.
The stage was wrapped in fog, and with the whole crowd in a frenzy of anticipation the five of them took their places and opened the show with a sledgehammer, Hammer Of The Gods. It’s a new song that, on first listen, comes close to the “Dogs of War” era sound, moving away from the slight power metal influences typical of Saxon’s last few albums. “Do you want to hear something old”?, went Biff’s words, before they fired off Heavy Metal Thunder, the comeback anthem Never Surrender and Motorcyle Man one after another. Saxon are in top form on stage! Despite ever greyer shades in the hair, especially along the Byford / Quinn / Glockler axis, the live delivery remains brilliant and drilled down to the last detail in 2011 too. Not a single mistake. Within all that brilliance, only Biff Byford’s vocals show the years. He hasn’t been able to reach all the high notes for a few years now, and this time the suffocating temperature in the club stood in his way too, so the whole band on stage ran out of steam faster than usual. Band pillars Paul Quinn and Doug Scarratt took turns pulling solos out of their sleeves, and they shone especially in the moments when the spotlights hit them.
On tours promoting new albums, Saxon like to season the setlist with a good helping of new material. This time was no different. Back In ’79, the title half-ballad Call To Arms, Chasing The Bullets and the already mentioned Hammer Of The Gods blended confidently in among the old-school classics and sounded full. A sea of raised fists and cheers of approval from the crowd was clear proof that the band’s supporters keep following Saxon and accept them on their path even today. There are plenty of bands who just ride on their legendary status and steer clear, in a wide arc, of anything newer. Towards the end Saxon flirted more and more with their most recognizable classics, and the gem worth singling out is Rock N’Roll Gypsy (“Innocence Is No Excuse”, 1985), the tastiest treat of this meeting. They wrapped up the beefy heavy metal night with iron anthems, Crusader, Strong Arm Of The Law and Wheels Of Steel, before Saxon, soaked in sweat almost to the point of blood, disappeared from the stage into the night.
Despite the excellent performance and the good sound from the masters behind the mixing desk, we went looking for a needle in a haystack, and we found it. As a rule, they play two encores on the current tour, but this time we were shortchanged a few minutes of hanging out and the regular pick of their shows, 747 (Strangers In The Night). The reasons may lie in the hellish heat as well as in the surprisingly poor turnout, which gave Saxon a cold shower after the great attendance on the UK tour that just wrapped up. Apparently four shows on the Milan / Treviso / Ljubljana / Bologna stretch in a single week is just too much. There’d also be some grumbler who’d wish for a bigger shake-up of the setlist, but still, a few days after the gig I can describe the new Saxon experience in nothing but superlatives. Nothing stops Saxon. Like a tank they’ll obviously keep rolling into the new decade too and cement their position as immortal legends. And rightly so. Let me close the report with the words… “long live Saxon”!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
SAXON: 1. Hammer Of The Gods 2. Heavy Metal Thunder 3. Never Surrender 4. Motorcyle Man 5. Back In ’79 6. I Got To Rock (To stay alive) 7. Dallas 1 p.m. 8. Call To Arms 9. Rock N’ Roll Gypsy 10. Demon Sweneey Todd 11. And The Bands Played On 12. The Eagle Has Landed 13. Chasing The Bullets 14. Denim & Leather 15. Princess Of The Night —encore— 16. Crusader 17. Strong Arm Of The Law 18. Wheels Of Steel
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